CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 68 of 120

Correct — B, All returning migrants. The Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan was launched on 20 June 2020, in the months after the first national lockdown, for one clearly identified group: workers who had left the cities and gone back to their home villages. It ran as a 125-day campaign with an outlay of about fifty thousand crore rupees across 116 districts in six States — Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha and Jharkhand — chosen because they had received the largest numbers of returning workers. Twelve ministries and departments pooled twenty-five categories of public works so that the work available would match the skills the returnees actually had. The eligibility test was therefore having come back, not being female, not being below the poverty line, and not being a new arrival in a town.

• (a)All rural women — The campaign was not addressed to rural women as a category. Women could and did work under it, but the target group was defined by return migration, not by gender.
• (c)All below poverty line households — Being below the poverty line was not the qualification. That is the design of several other welfare schemes, and reading the word 'Garib' in the title as a means test is the trap here.
• (d)All new migrants to town — The direction is reversed. The abhiyaan was for people moving out of towns and back to villages, not for new migrants arriving in towns.

The abhiyaan was a convergence campaign rather than a new entitlement. Instead of creating a fresh scheme, the government pooled the works already available under existing programmes — rural roads, housing, water supply, anganwadi and panchayat buildings, horticulture, laying of optical fibre — and ran them at speed in the districts where returning workers were concentrated, so that wage work would be available immediately and durable rural assets would be left behind.

The name is the trap. 'Garib Kalyan' sounds like a poverty-targeted scheme, and a candidate who reads only the title will pick the below-poverty-line option. What identifies the group is the second half of the title in practice, not the first: this was a response to the return migration of 2020. Anchoring to the exam matters here — the paper was written for the November 2021 examination, by which time the campaign had already finished its 125 days and closed in October 2020; it was a one-off emergency measure, not a standing programme. Two other schemes carry confusingly similar names and should be kept apart: the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana of 2016, a window for declaring undisclosed income, and the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Ann Yojana, the free-foodgrain scheme of 2020.

• The Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan was launched on 20 June 2020 for workers who had returned to rural areas.
• It ran for 125 days with an outlay of about fifty thousand crore rupees.
• It covered 116 districts across Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha and Jharkhand.
• Twelve ministries and departments contributed twenty-five categories of work to the campaign.
• It was a time-bound convergence campaign, not a permanent legal entitlement of the kind created by the rural employment guarantee law.

• Reading 'Garib' in the title as a below-poverty-line eligibility test.
• Confusing the abhiyaan of 2020 with the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana of 2016, which dealt with undisclosed income.
• Presenting a 125-day campaign that closed in October 2020 as an ongoing scheme.

As a scheme-to-beneficiary identification, or as a statements item on the districts, duration and ministries involved.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan launched in June 2020 was designed to run for how many days?

  • (a)60 days
  • (b)100 days
  • (c)125 days
  • (d)180 days

  Answer(c) 125 days — the campaign was time-bound and concluded in October 2020.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan was taken up in districts of how many States?

  • (a)Four
  • (b)Six
  • (c)Nine
  • (d)Twelve

  Answer(b) Six — Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha and Jharkhand, together accounting for 116 districts.