If someone speaks to you about rural areas the first that strikes are mind is it is a small village where most people are uneducated, unemployed, under poverty, undeveloped etc. What is this word called-UNit mean that it is “deprived”. So in understanding better about what is rural area? Rural areas which are not like towns. They are basically agricultural areas. These areas are sometimes called as “the country “. In short we can tell it is just opposite of urban areas. Rural community is an area which is underdeveloped and not civilized. We every time tells on the negative side of the rural but there are also many beneficial facts how the rural area was before and present differences. The greatest health advantage for rural living is environmental. Rural areas are usually far from the smog and pollution of urban areas, offering clean, fresh air and plenty of open green spaces. Being in the fresh air outdoors is not only of advantage for physical health but also mental health. What are the environmental problems faced by rural areas?
The first tragedy is faced by poor is mainly
1.Poor sanitation: because of the illiteracy and poverty of the people in rural area, they don’t know the importance of sanitation and hygiene. Due to this difficulty women aremostly affected. They are now considered the poorest of the poor.
- Conversion of farm land into housing land: we people started clearing the agricultural land without realizing its importance for building the special buildings for themselves.
- Lack of drainage facilities: we mostly see many drainage tanks left unclosed both in urban as well as rural areas but it is most common in rural areas. Due to this many diseases spread among the rural area.
- Indiscriminate use of pesticides and fertilizers.
- Salination, desertification, degradation of lands. There are also many social problems in rural areas like rural areas are sometimes associated with high levels or pockets of deprivation and social exclusion. The major disadvantages. Or difficulties with access, low levels of service provision, isolation, higher costs and lack of choice or quality all contribute to health and social care problems. Industrialization in rural areas is pollution, displacement of residents, loss of natural spaces. Even water shortage may be the life threating to rural areas.We mostly came across the word called “poverty”. Poverty is defined as “ the deprivation of common necessities that determine the quality of life, including food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water and may be deprivation of opportunities to learn, human poverty is when people live under low standards they don’t have adequate access to basic human needs. This poverty is turned into life for most of the rural areas especially tribes and backward caste people. So in to make a rural area a developed area. First we have to know what rural development is. Rural development generally refers to the process of improving the quality of life and economic well-being of people living in relatively isolated and sparsely populated area. Rural development has now stopped exploiting of land intensive natural resources such as agriculture and forestry. The basic objectives of rural development programmes have been alleviation of poverty and unemployment through creating basic social and economic infrastructure, training to rural unemployed youth and to provide employment to marginal labourers. Rural development has now brought changes in global production networks and increased urbanization has changed the character of rural areas. Increasingly tourism and recreation have replaced resource extraction and agriculture as dominant economic drivers. The need for rural communities to approach development from lower to greater change. It has started changing agricultural or resource based business. Education, entrepreneurship, physical infrastructure and social infrastructure play a vital role in developing rural regions. Rural development is a comprehensive term. It essentially focuses on action for the development of areas outside the mainstream urban economic system. We should think of what type of rural development is needed because modernization of village leads to urbanization and village environment disappears. Rural development programs have historically been top down from local or regional authorities, regional development agencies, NGO’S. Now government has came up with many schemes like:
- Water conservation stories.
- Sabki yojana sabka vikas.
- Gram swaraj abhiyan
- NGO darpan portal
- Mission antyodaya
- MGNREGA
- PMAY,-G
- RURBAN ( NRUM)
- DIKSHA
- SWACHHGRAM .
Apart from this we people have to understand our responsibilities and be an active worker to save our earth. Rural development is not one’s issueit is the country’s issue. The village is the cell if the national body and the cell life must be healthy and developed for the national body to be healthy and developed. Almost half of thepopulation of the world lives in rural regions which is mostly in state of poverty. The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways. Now mostly in rural areas, we can see many farmers do kill themselves because they bought loan for our stomach to get filled but not even we have fed their stomach for a meal. Live green since there is no planet to live on. If you ate today, thank a farmer because of his hard work during day and night standing in rain, sun all sought of deadly climates. In order to fill our stomach they either die out of starving or eat the rats which is poisonous. We people only think what are disadvantages present in rural areas but not even single time think there is a living organism living in this undeveloped rural area where there is no any source for livelihood for feeding the whole world. We are living in this world where each citizen don’t know what’s the reality around him or the problems in this world. Remember rural areas can provide you the heaven and they can change this whole universe into hell. Our life begun from this plant field still our life is there in this field. We people can save these farmers and our past life when we unite together and make this universe a green planet. We bring change around this universe and if we change ourselves.Don’t be selfish to save your country.So try to keep your surroundings clean. Apart from the government programs we can bring change in rural areas by creating awareness among public, try to plant a single tree. Take part in government schemes and be an activist worker for your country.
Writer: Fateena Kawthar, Chennai
