Panchayat Level Planning - Abstract

Collaborative Strategic Planning at Panchayat Level is Essential to get to a Developed India

Abstract

     There is strong optimism that India will become a developed country in the next thirty to fifty years. Most of the descriptions about the developed country have been qualitative. In this article, I am making an attempt to project a potential goal state in quantitative terms when we can say that India has arrived as a developed country. It is necessary to set a target Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and project when that goal might be reached under a certain set of assumptions. This target will also allow us to measure how closer we are to the goal and how well we are doing in terms of schedule. But, there are more important features for a developed country beyond the GDP figure. Social development should be a simultaneous goal of leaders. People at the bottom of the pyramid have to be moved to the middle. Advanced technological developments of the twentieth century give rise to the hope that with enlightened leadership, development can reach the masses. The smart approach may lie in planning large scale knowledge-intensive businesses that create goods and services while generating employment opportunity for millions of people in India. Common citizens have the democratic power to choose wise leadership and give the latter a mandate to develop knowledge based strategic development goals. This leadership consists of the Members of the Parliament, Members of the State Assemblies, and other elected leaders of local constituencies, such as the Panchayats.

     Strategic planning is the key to assuring citizens that their elected leaders are working on a defined path. This calls for the development of a series of congruent strategic plans from the national to state to local level. These plans should dovetail at various levels and complement one another. Local planning gives ownership of the plan to local people, takes local inputs, tunes to the environment, allows close monitoring, responds to feedback, facilitates support, ensures sharing of sacrifices and results, and leads to success in plan execution. When several thousand panchayats  undertake planning, there is need for an information technology tool that guides local planners by providing templates/formats and guidance on how to generate information and data for the plan. In the next stage, a format processor integrates the information and data in appropriate ways to create plans for the district, state, and national levels. For a successful national effort, such a plan development project should be web based. An initial level format for the plan development tool is described in this paper.