Local Level Planning and Rural Development (An Analytical Study)

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"Local Level Planning is a discipline to which very little attention has been paid so far by development planners, administrators or policy makers. It still remains to a large extent an unexplored terrain". (Excerpt from the report of the UNAPDI Consultative Meeting on 'Alternative Strategies" Concept 1980).

The need for micro-level planning has been recognised by the Planning Commission and by the Government of India since the formulation of the Fourth Five Year Plan. The main reason for this is the recognition of the fact that while centralised planning based on micro-level indicators of growth has contributed to an increase in agricultural and industrial production and in the G.N.P. at the national level, such economic growth has not necessarily brought about distributive justice. It has been recorded that during the same period of industrial and agricultural growth the rate of unemployment and the percentage of population below the poverty line have also gone up considerably.

One of the reasons for this paradox is that planning has so far remained purely an arithmetical exercise at the national level with emphasis on heavy industries, major and medium irrigation and heavy machinery mostly feeding urban industrial complexes. In the rural areas. The main beneficiaries of this development have been the relatively more affluent farmers who have the resources to obtain modern agricultural inputs. Generally speaking, this type of development has almost completely bypassed the poorer sections of the people and even displaced many workers from their traditional occupations, as in the case of rural women from field labour, household industries and trading. For the first time concern on this state of affairs was expressed in the Fourth Five Year Plan which mentioned that micro-level plans should be formulated to correct such imbalances produced by centralised macro-level planning. The identification of an appropriate planning unit I was debated in the Fourth Plan and the district was finally selected as the optimum unit.

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