“MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES IN INTEGRATED RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES”                  By -Dr. J. K Nanda

Over the previous few years there had developed an increased interest in integrating various rural development programmes. It had been common to define integration only with reference to its structural properties, as the fusion of two organizational units into one. This definition distinguished integration from cooperation and co-ordination, which left separate specialized units structurally distinct. It was fully recognized, however, that merely creating such a fused structure did not produce the desired fusion of activity. The structure of integration was achieved, but the process did not follow automatically. So it was first required that a distinction be made between the structure and the process of integration. Integration is a process in which different specialized activities were linked in actual interaction. Further, specialized activities might be linked through formal instruction in specifically designed organizational structures, as they might arise informally through the personal initiative of individual specialized agents.

( II )At a general level, must countries of the world we attempting to provide for the basic human needs of their citizens. In addition to food, clothing and shelter, those needs included health, education and the opportunity for self-fulfilling work and family life. Most Governments in the regions had created development programmes to be implemented by specialized agencies designed to serve those basic needs. As in India, the decision taken in the early seventies by the Government to sue systematically science and technology for promoting “Integrated rural development” was not a new one, marking a radical break from the past, but, on the contrary, was in line with the development strategy followed since the 1950s. The recent interest in integrated development approaches was based on the recognition that those needs were interdependent and that organized efforts to meet them required more effective linkages between the existing specialized services directed at any or those needs.

Management of the modern human organization has been based upon specialisation in activities. Here, management most be defined and it goes like this “the act of organizing and operating a series of activities and resources as a coordinated, productive whole to achieve certain goals”. Specialized organizations for health care, education, agriculture and a wide variety of other activities had become a common aspect of the scene. As such organizations were built around specialization in activities, they were also designed in part to produce some interactive linkages between those activities.

( III )The management had to address six different sets of problems in the organization, for, effective interactive linkages of specialized activities.

The first set of problems lay in the decision as to which specific specialized activities ought to be linked to meet human needs. There was wide recognition that no one integrative strategy could be most effective for all problems. Human needs varied, and the specific clusters of human needs of different populations or groups also varied. An effective programmed to meet human needs had to link those specialized activities that served the distinct set of human needs.

A second set of problems concerned the creation of appropriate structures to provide the desired type of integrated service.

A third organizational problem in integration concerned the amount and application of authority by which specialized activities were directed to be performed.

Financial resources were currently mobilized for and allocated to specialized units with distinct technical capacities. If they were to be linked effectively for more integrated development approaches, new forms of mobilization and allocation had to be designed.

Another, the problem of most complexity by nature, is the management of human resources. This problem concerned the provision of human resources that were specifically developed to bring together different specialized activities. New forms of recruitment, training and personal control were required to bring together in one concerted action the individuals with specialized skills. 

And finally, the management of any organized programmed would require some form of evaluation to ensure that its resources and structure were appropriately designed to achieve its goals.

( IV )Human resources represented a programme’s  most flexible and powerful resources. For most development programmes shortages of qualified personnel raised persistent problems for almost all countries. Presently, some powerful innovations in recruitment, training, and supervision and control in attempts to promote programmes in the face of those shortages. The thrust to build new linkages between various development activities raised new problems, compounding those of staff shortage. Again, special considerations for recruitment, training and control were required in those new attempts at integration. And that is how, the management successfully organize the human resources.

(1)Recruitment :

 One of the most useful innovations in recruitment observed recently was the move away from the use of formal academic criteria to the use of criteria more suited to the programmes. It was widely observed that over qualified motivators, for example, urban secondary school graduated must not be very useful in rural programmes in countries with very low levels of education. The recruitment of younger, primary school graduates, and of more women, offered much scope for solving human resource problems, especially in rural-oriented programmes. The recruitment programme was coupled with a long-term training programme and closely related areas after periods of field works will call for subsequent training courses.             

(2)Training :

It was recognized that training in any development programmed should be a continuous process, that there was reasonable preference for in country training and that training should include human relations, group dynamics and attempts to induce the commitment of the trainee, and should work towards ensuring the job satisfaction of the trainee.

For recruits entering a new integrated programmed, the training offered no serious problem, but problems arose in the retraining of existing staff. One result of staff shortage was that existing staff night be considerably over loaded and not be available for retraining courses.

(3)Control :

A persistent problem faced by management was to provide sufficient motivation for workers to perform their tasks with all of the talent and energy at their command. It might be assumed that all workers wanted security and rewards, and all organizations wanted performance towards goal achievement. The problem then was to make activities towards gaining security identical with those towards goal performance.

By the addition of multiple goals to a job, it become more difficult to evaluate performance in goal achievement and provide rewards commensurate with the desired performance. This problem was solved to some extent by a few countries, by developing multitask composite index of performance. The problem of ensuring an appropriate balance between the various tasks in the index was achieved by setting specific target ranges for each of the major sets of tasks to be performed.

One of the persistent problems faced by management is of providing effective control lay in the shortage of middle level supervisors who could visit workers in the field and provide guidance and evaluation. The shortage of supervisors also indicated the need for specialized training courses to turn good field workers into good supervisors.

And against under utilization of labour in various  integrated development programmes, the management can use various forms of utilization studies to determine whether or not workers were fully utilized.

( V )If integration was to be pursued in rational manner, it had to be evaluated clearly and effectively. Further, it had to be seen as an element of the organizational process, as the integrative linkage between specialized activities, over which programmed managers had some direct control. No programme evaluation was, not ought to be, designed primarily to assess integration. But a more organizational oriented evaluation technique would assess integration,  or interactive linkages between specialized activities, as one of the organizational characteristics that affected programmed performance. It would assess programme inputs  and outputs for those units. Inputs would include such things as human factors- the staff characteristics and the recruitment, training and control processes that determined personnel performance.