Local Level Planning and Rural Development

A lot has been written and is also being written on rural development, people’s participation, basic minimum needs and target-group oriented approaches to develop and other related topics. All of them suggest that a broad consensus has been emerging on what went wrong in the past in the matter of planning and what new approaches should be adopted in the future to bring about distributive justice. The present book aims to address in a very direct way the issues involved in people-oriented development planning and attempts to explore the conceptual and operational problems of an alternative development strategy with particular focus on people’s participation and local level planning. The basic purpose of this volume is to attempt to provide a new strategy for rural development in the framework of integrated rural development. It covers the problem of local level planning and rural development in five chapters. The last chapter, besides devoting itself to summary and conclusion, also tries to provide some effective suggestions with regard to local level planning and successful implementation of different rural development programmes in order to provide opportunities for full and gainful employment to every person in the community starting from the poorest.

Dr. Ashok Kumar Pandey (b. 1940), basically a keen student of literature having a brilliant academic career with first class first position both at B.A. Hons. & M.A. levels and securing gold medals, is a I.A.S., officer of 1965 batch. Dr. Pandey was sponsored during his tenure with the Ministry of Defence for a post-graduate course to the University of Manchester, U.K. where he completed his course with distinction and was awarded Post-Graduate degree in Development Administration (1975). The administrative skill and prudence of Dr. Pandey are reflected also in the fact that he served with different Central ministers, viz., Minister of Energy, Minister of Tourism, Civil Aviation & Labour Minister of State for Defence and Minister for Commerce and Special Assistant very successfully and competently. Dr. Pandey was shifted to the State of Bihar and served the Government of Bihar as Commissioner & Secretary, Food, Supply & Commerce during 1983-84. Dr. Pandey is presently heading the personnel, industrial relations & training divisions in the Food Corporation of India, New Delhi. A widely travelled person, Dr. Pandey has visited U.S.A., U.K., F.R.G., Finland, Netherlands, Switizerland, Austria, Belgium, Iran, Ethopia, etc., in various capacities and mainly as a member of several delegations while working in the Ministry of Commerce. A member of different academic organisations, Dr. Pandey is a very keen student of development administration and has contributed to the area of knowledge by way of imparting training and writing scholarly papers.