The government's 11th Five-Year Plan initiative to spread micro-land ownership across the country has the potential to help 50 lakh people (or 1 lakh families) to secure land over the next five years, according to the Rural Development Institute (RDI). The RDI is an international non-profit organisation working closely with four Indian States to implement micro-land ownership programmes for the rural poor. The RDI has field offices in Bangalore, Beijing and Jakarta, and is headquartered at Seattle, Washington. "Our ongoing work in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal and, most recently Orissa, all confirm that plots of land as little as 1/10 of an acre can provide a foundation for extremely poor people, especially women, to build a sustainable livelihood and a better economic future,' according to Tim Hanstad, RDI president. With landlessness being the best predictor of poverty in India, the 11th Plan aims at reducing poverty by 10 per cent. Land and agriculture are key components of the Plan, with micro-plots adopted as a core strategy. The Plan aims to allot micro-plots to the size of 1/10th or 1/15th of an acre to at least 10 lakh families. It calls for tactics to improve women's rights to the land, including putting the property in the name of the wife and giving priority to female-headed households. The Union government plans to spend $25 million over the next fiscal year to purchase micro-plots for rural landless families. According to the Plan, Kerala has a scheme of providing micro-plots of land to each landless family and this has had a notable impact on poverty reduction. Similarly, in 2005, the governments of Karnataka and West Bengal initiated schemes to give homestead-cum-garden plots to the landless families. The Plan also emphasises on these experiments to be generalised across all States. Recently, the RDI worked with Andhra Pradesh on a programme to provide landless women up to one acre of irrigated land. Through this, the government has helped over 5,000 women secure more than 4,000 acres of land. The RDI began working in India in 2000. Since then, its research has shown that micro-land ownership yields significant benefits to families, including improved shelter, better nutrition, increased income and much more.