Experience of Regional Planning: Five Year Plans

• Regional planning in India is the attempt, inside national planning, to plan for particular regions: to use each region’s resources, reduce the gaps between regions, and bring backward areas into the national economy.
• Its experience runs in phases: river valley projects and steel towns in the 1950s, area and target-group programmes in the 1970s, decentralised and multi-level planning from the 1980s and 1990s, and district-based targeting under NITI Aayog since 2015.
• The verdict is mixed. Planning built the infrastructure and institutions of a modern economy, but it stayed sectoral rather than spatial, and the gap between leading and lagging regions has widened.

Roots and Early Experiments

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Pre-Independence Roots

• The National Planning Committee (1938) of the Indian National Congress, set up under Subhas Chandra Bose as Congress President with Jawaharlal Nehru as chairman and Mahatma Gandhi’s blessing, laid the intellectual base of planned development.
  • Its sub-committees on agriculture, industry, transport and finance assumed that independent India would need planning to overcome the colonial legacy of underdevelopment and regional imbalance.
• The Bombay Plan (1944) of leading industrialists, among them J. R. D. Tata, G. D. Birla, Ardeshir Dalal and A. D. Shroff, proposed investment of about ₹10,000 crore over 15 years, with private enterprise working within state planning. It put industrialisation and infrastructure first. It showed that development thinking, including the need to industrialise lagging areas, predated Independence.
• These and the other pre-1947 plans are part of the story of economic planning in India. For regional planning, the first real step came only with the river valley authorities.

The Planning Commission as Regional Planner

• The Planning Commission (March 1950), set up by a Government of India resolution with Jawaharlal Nehru as chairman and P. C. Mahalanobis as statistical adviser, was to promote rapid growth, efficient use of resources, and more business and jobs. It was charged with the balanced use of the country’s resources, and launched the First Plan in 1951. It tried to bridge the functional and spatial gap between developed and underdeveloped regions, at macro and micro levels.
• With the National Development Council (1952), it gave every State a voice. The NDC was also the forum for inter-state issues: sharing of river waters, natural resources and disputes.
• Its regional work moved from multipurpose projects for macro regions to packages for specific problem regions, such as Bundelkhand and Kuttanad.
• State Planning Boards were a further step towards decentralisation. Some, as in Punjab, went on to draw up district and even block plans.
• Its role passed in 2015 to NITI Aayog and the Finance Commission, which now carry the regional dimension through advice, ranking and devolution.

River Valley Planning: The TVA Model

• The first regional planning agency of any country was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created by the United States Congress in 1933 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
  • It was the first large regional planning agency of the US federal government, and is still the largest.
  • It was both a power supplier and a regional development agency for one of the poorest regions of the country, devastated by the Great Depression, and it cut the region’s poverty sharply.
  • Today it runs 29 hydroelectric dams and about 34,000 MW of capacity. Older accounts give “7 major dams” and 40,000 MW; neither figure holds.
• Its functions:
  • flood control on the Tennessee and its tributaries;
  • soil conservation in the eroded Appalachian catchment;
  • cheap electricity for the least electrified region of the country;
  • industrial development on cheap power and flood-safe sites;
  • afforestation of degraded slopes and wildlife conservation;
  • planned towns for relocated communities;
  • roads and navigation for isolated valleys;
  • agricultural improvement through demonstration farms and fertiliser production.
• Its strength was unity of command over a whole basin: one authority planned water, land, power and settlement together, cutting across State boundaries.
• The model spread across the world: the Volta River Project in Ghana (1966), the Cauca Valley in Colombia, the Papaloapan Basin in Mexico and Khuzestan in Iran.
• Its later critics noted that the TVA narrowed to power generation, and regional development received less attention. The same happened in India.

The Damodar Valley Corporation (1948)

• Setting:
  • the Damodar, about 541 km long and called the Deonadi in its upper course, rises at about 510 m in the Chotanagpur plateau and runs east to the Hugli, roughly half its length in each of Jharkhand and West Bengal;
  • its tributaries are the Barakar, Konar and Bokaro;
  • the valley is a rift trough between the Hazaribagh and Ranchi plateaus. Breaks of slope gave sites for power houses, and the faulted strata made coal easier to reach;
  • about 125 cm of monsoon rain, with cyclonic bursts from the Bay of Bengal, falls on deforested upper slopes. Silt chokes the channel where it leaves the plateau near Asansol and Bardhaman;
  • the plains below Bardhaman could lie under 2 to 2.5 m of water, and the silt also threatened the Hugli and Kolkata port.
• The Damodar, once called the “Sorrow of Bengal”, flooded Bengal and Bihar repeatedly, with major floods recorded from 1823 to 1943. The flood of 1943 led the Government of Bengal to set up the Damodar Flood Enquiry Committee, with the physicist Meghnad Saha among its members.
  • The committee recommended an authority like the TVA.
• W. L. Voorduin, a senior TVA engineer, submitted a Preliminary Memorandum on the Unified Development of the Damodar River in August 1944. It proposed multipurpose development for flood control, irrigation, power and navigation.
• The DVC Act was passed in March 1948. The Damodar Valley Corporation came into being on 7 July 1948 as the first multipurpose river valley project of independent India, jointly with the governments of West Bengal and Bihar (now Jharkhand).
• Its area covers 24,235 sq km of the Damodar valley in Jharkhand and West Bengal.
• Works: Voorduin had proposed eight dams. The scheme is also reckoned as seven major dams: Aiyar and Panchet Hill on the Damodar; Maithon, Balpahari and Tilaiya on the Barakar; Konar on the Konar; and Bokaro on the Bokaro. Only four were built:
  • Tilaiya on the Barakar (1953);
  • Konar on the Konar (1955);
  • Maithon on the Barakar (1957);
  • Panchet on the Damodar (1959);
  • with the Durgapur Barrage (1955) and a canal system for irrigation. Its left-bank canal, about 137 km long, also carried coalfield goods to Kolkata, once some 20 lakh tonnes a year.
• Irrigation: about 5.15 lakh hectares in older accounts, mainly on the left bank in Bardhaman and Hugli. DVC now reports about 3.64 lakh hectares of potential. Hilly terrain limits it in Jharkhand.
• Outcome:
  • the valley became the Damodar industrial belt: coal, steel at Bokaro and Durgapur, thermal power and engineering;
  • flood protection and irrigation improved in the lower valley;
  • the corporation narrowed to power. Its installed capacity of about 6,700 MW is almost all thermal (6,540 MW), against only 147 MW of hydel power;
  • thousands, many of them tribal, were displaced with inadequate rehabilitation;
  • floods were moderated but not ended, because the planned storage was never built: heavy floods came in 1959, 1970–71 and 1978. Forest loss on the slopes also silted the reservoirs;
  • other gains: less soil erosion, some land reclaimed, control of malaria through better drainage, reservoir fisheries and tourism;
  • soil conservation and afforestation in the catchment were worked by watershed, to keep silt out of the reservoirs;
  • farming stayed largely one-crop, with rice on the lowlands and maize and pulses on the uplands, on as little as 0.1 to 0.4 hectares a head;
  • the Durgapur Barrage and canals passed to West Bengal in 1964, splitting the unified basin management the plan had sought.
• Regional base: the Chotanagpur plateau is India’s mineral heartland. The valley’s Gondwana coalfields (Raniganj, Jharia, Bokaro, Ramgarh, Karanpura) hold rich reserves and long produced about half of India’s coal.
  • Six industrial complexes grew on it: Durgapur; Asansol–Kulti–Burnpur; Dhanbad–Sindri–Jharia; Bokaro; Ramgarh–Patratu; and Ranchi.
  • Its coal and heavy industry, with dense rail, road and water links, earned it the name “Ruhr of India”, after the German coal valley.
• The upper valley stayed hilly, forested and thinly settled, while the lower valley became densely peopled and urban.
• The DVC plan met with partial success. It shows both the promise of basin planning and its two weaknesses in India: authorities designed as regional development bodies became engineering and power utilities, and the States guarded their control of land and water.
• The DVC became the template for Bhakra–Nangal (Punjab), Hirakud (Odisha) and Rihand (Uttar Pradesh). Each was national in purpose and regional in effect.

Community Development (1952): The Block as a Unit

• The Community Development Programme began on 2 October 1952 in 55 projects, followed by the National Extension Service (1953). It made the development block the unit of rural planning across India.
• It aimed at all-round village development through people’s participation, but it remained official-led. The Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) therefore recommended Panchayati Raj to carry it.
  • That line of reform leads to multi-level planning in India.

Phases of Regional Planning under the Plans

• All plans, whatever their theme, carried common regional objectives:
  • raise national income and living standards, and narrow the gaps between regions in income and consumption;
  • industrialise beyond the old coastal and metropolitan centres;
  • create employment, especially where disguised unemployment in agriculture was high;
  • reduce horizontal and vertical inequality;
  • build self-reliance, at national and regional level, and cut dependence on foreign aid.
• Horizontal inequality is the gap between regions: between Maharashtra or Karnataka and Bihar or Jharkhand, or the BIMARU States of older writing.
• Vertical inequality lies in the hierarchy of government. It appears when the Centre keeps resources and the States receive less, or when States keep the 3 Fs (functions, functionaries and finance) from the Panchayats. Regional development needs both addressed together.
• The plan-by-plan record is set out with the Five Year Plans. For regional planning, the plans group into five phases.

Phase 1: Sectoral Planning with Regional Projects (1951–66)

• First Plan (1951–56): Partition refugees, food shortage, food imports and inflation made agriculture the prime goal. The plan was more reactive than spatial.
  • The multipurpose projects (Bhakra–Nangal, Hirakud, Rihand, the DVC) were its regional element, along with the Community Development Programme.
  • All States were grouped into five broad divisions, counted as the first step towards regional planning. Problem areas such as the Damodar Valley were recognised.
  • New towns were planned and old ones enlarged to resettle migrants from Pakistan. The multipurpose projects also supported fishing and aquaculture.
  • It is often called the balanced development plan, after the balanced-growth and “big push” ideas of Ragnar Nurkse and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan: weight to all sectors, including social overhead capital such as health and education. Its growth model, however, was Harrod–Domar, and scarce resources kept balanced growth out of reach.
  • Research committees studied regional problems, and resource planning at the regional level was recognised. Spatial equity, however, did not shape investment.
• Second Plan (1956–61): the Nehru–Mahalanobis strategy of capital-intensive heavy industry.
  • Its regional instrument was the growth pole: integrated steel plants at Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur, sited by least-cost location near ore and coal in backward regions.
  • They were expected to raise investment and spread development through forward and backward linkages, on the line of French industrial clusters.
  • Objectives: a 25% rise in national income, rapid industrialisation, more jobs and less inequality, under the socialist pattern of society of the Industrial Policy of 1956, which reserved key industries for the public sector and licensed private firms.
  • The Mahalanobis model allocated investment between sectors to maximise long-run growth, assuming a closed economy and favouring capital goods.
  • Results: iron and steel, chemical fertilisers, heavy engineering and machine building grew. Inflation eased somewhat, and investment rose from about 7% to 11% of national income. But agriculture was neglected and regional disparities rose.
• Third Plan (1961–66): the first plan with a separate chapter on balanced regional development, both between States and within them.
  • It stressed spreading the benefits of development to less developed regions, and diffusing industry widely.
  • Growth centres and growth points were proposed to reduce disparities within States.
  • Objectives: national income growth above 5%, self-sufficiency in foodgrains, a wider industrial base, full use of manpower and less disparity. The first two plans had brought the economy to the “take-off” stage, and the aim was self-reliant, self-generating growth.
  • Basic industries were identified for backward regions: cement at Satna and Katni (Madhya Pradesh), fertiliser at Sindri (Jharkhand, running since 1951; older lists also name Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh), paper at Ballarpur (Maharashtra), with refineries, petrochemicals and synthetic fibres.
  • The wars of 1962 and 1965 and the drought of 1965–66 derailed it.
• Annual Plans (1966–69), the Plan Holiday: crisis management. Food imports under PL-480 and the new agricultural strategy concentrated effort in irrigated wheat regions (Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh). That began the regional imbalance of the Green Revolution.
  • Causes: the conflict with Pakistan (1965); severe drought in 1965–66 and 1966–67; devaluation; a general rise in prices; erosion of plan resources; and food shortage.
  • PL-480, the US Food for Peace programme, left India living “ship to mouth”. The humiliation built the political will for self-sufficiency.
  • The new strategy spread high-yielding seeds, fertilisers, irrigation and soil conservation.
  • The rupee was devalued in June 1966 from ₹4.76 to ₹7.50 a dollar: a 36.5% fall in its value, often quoted as 57.5%, the rise in the dollar’s price. Inflation and instability cut plan resources further.

Why the Early Plans Neglected Regions

• No regional scheme or set of planning regions was identified to serve as the base of planning.
• The leaders were in a hurry to begin planned development, and would not wait to work out the country’s regional system.
• The value of planning based on a regional system was not widely appreciated.
• Planners expected that a new regional pattern would emerge as development proceeded, and could then guide planning.
• Even after the Third Plan, plans remained five-year and annual plans for the nation, not plans for regions.

The Steel Towns: Linkages that Did Not Spread

• Intended linkages:
  • Backward: iron ore mines, coal, limestone, power, water supply, ancillary units making tools and spares, and training institutions.
  • Forward: steel for railways, machinery, construction, automobiles and consumer durables, to be made in the region. In the general form of a growth pole, the forward list also runs to further iron and steel industry and aluminium.
  • The plan assumed these links would generate a regional multiplier.
• What happened:
  • managers and skilled workers came from distant regions;
  • local tribal people received mostly unskilled construction and maintenance work;
  • the steel-using industries grew near distant markets, not around the plants;
  • the clash between an alien industrial culture and forest-based communities brought displacement and social breakdown.
• The townships prospered as enclaves, while their hinterlands, such as Bastar and the Kalahandi–Bolangir–Koraput region, stayed among the poorest in India. The theory behind them is the growth pole and growth centre theory.

Phase 2: The Target-Area and Target-Group Approach (1969–79)

• Fourth Plan (1969–74): a watershed. Backward areas were for the first time identified systematically, and area-specific programmes began.
  • The Pande and Wanchoo working groups (1968–69) gave criteria for industrially backward areas and recommended incentives. The NDC (1969) extended them to backward districts in all States.
  • Concessional finance, investment subsidy and transport subsidy (1970–71) followed. These instruments against regional imbalance were the first of their kind.
  • Target groups: the Small Farmers’ Development Agency and the Marginal Farmers and Agricultural Labourers agency (1971), for those the Green Revolution had bypassed.
  • Problem areas: the Drought Prone Areas Programme (1973–74), which grew out of the Rural Works Programme, for more than 70 chronically drought-prone districts. It funded watershed treatment, soil conservation, water harvesting and other livelihoods.
  • Bundelkhand and Dandakaranya received particular attention, and a pilot rural employment programme began.
  • Bank nationalisation (1969), the Rural Electrification Corporation (1969), the MRTP Act and FERA were aimed at the concentration of wealth or at carrying power to backward areas.
• The two approaches complement each other:
  • the target-area approach picks a region with a physical or economic handicap, such as drought, hill terrain or desert, and treats the whole area;
  • the target-group approach picks households, such as small farmers, landless labourers or tribal families, wherever they live.
  • The first can miss the poorest within a region; the second can miss the regional causes of their poverty.
• Fifth Plan (1974–79): the high point of spatial planning, with self-reliance and the removal of poverty as its themes.
  • Backward areas were divided into those with physical handicaps and those that were economically backward, with separate plans for each.
  • Three kinds of programmes:
    • resource- and problem-based: Command Area Development (1974–75), Hill Area Development, the Western Ghats Development Programme;
    • target-group-based: the Tribal Sub-Plan (1974–75) with Integrated Tribal Development Projects;
    • incentive-based: subsidies to farmers and tax concessions for industry in backward districts.
  • Command Area Development was to narrow the gap between irrigation potential created and used, through a Command Area Development Authority: field channels and drains, land levelling, warabandi (rotational water supply), and plans for afforestation, orchards, dairying, roads and drinking water. Medium and minor irrigation went to drought-affected areas.
  • Hill Area Development covered 15 hill districts: horticulture, animal husbandry, forest industries and erosion control.
  • The Tribal Sub-Plan ring-fenced funds in proportion to the Scheduled Tribe population.
  • The Minimum Needs Programme promised basic services across all regions: primary education, health, drinking water, roads and housing.
  • The Desert Development Programme (1977–78) followed under the Janata government, for the Thar districts and others: sand-dune fixing, shelter belts and water harvesting.
• This plan recognised that general sectoral growth would not reach chronically backward areas without targeted spatial programmes, and backward area planning became a permanent strand of Indian planning.

Phase 3: The Transition to Integrated and Decentralised Planning (1980–90)

• Two Sixth Plans: the Janata government’s plan (1978–83) stressed employment, agriculture, small and cottage industries and low-income groups. The Congress government replaced it after the 1980 election.
• Sixth Plan (1980–85): poverty alleviation through integrated rural development. A Comprehensive Crop Insurance Scheme in its last year reduced risk in rainfed regions.
  • The IRDP (1980) gave assets and subsidised credit to poor households through District Rural Development Agencies.
  • The NREP (1980) and RLEGP (1983) offered wage employment in backward areas.
  • It stressed a systematic approach to inter-related problems, and people’s involvement at the local level.
  • Working groups on block-level planning (M. L. Dantwala, 1978) and district planning (C. H. Hanumantha Rao, 1984) laid out multi-level planning.
• Seventh Plan (1985–90): modernisation and local technology.
  • NREP and RLEGP were merged into the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (1989).
  • Settlements became a planning goal. The Growth Centre Scheme (1988) and the National Commission on Urbanisation (1988) sought a hierarchy of centres to carry development, in the spirit of Christaller’s central places.
  • The G. V. K. Rao Committee (1985) recommended making the district the basic unit of planning and development.
  • Its goals were rapid growth in foodgrains, more jobs, modernisation and self-reliance.
• Annual Plans (1990–92): political change delayed the Eighth Plan. They focused on employment and social transformation, and saw liberalisation begin.
• The lesson of the decade was that household programmes reduced poverty where administration worked, as in Keralam (Kerala), Tamil Nadu and Punjab. In the poorest States they suffered from leakages, weak banks and captured local bodies. A programme designed nationally could not fix a regional failure of institutions.

Phase 4: Indicative Planning, Decentralisation and Inclusive Growth (1992–2017)

• Eighth Plan (1992–97): growth was to be achieved in such a way that regional disparity would fall and its benefits would be widely distributed.
  • The 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992) made Panchayats and municipalities constitutional bodies, listed 29 subjects for Panchayats in the Eleventh Schedule, and mandated District Planning Committees.
  • The Kerala People’s Plan Campaign (1996) showed what devolution of funds could do: about a third of the State’s plan funds went to local bodies, which drew up their own plans.
  • The Mega City Scheme (1993–94) for Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad treated metropolitan regions and conurbations, not just city limits, as planning units.
  • Water was treated as a regional resource under the National Water Policy. The National Water Mission, which older accounts place here, came only with the climate missions of 2008–09.
  • The Mahila Samridhi Yojana (1993) for rural women’s savings, and the national mid-day meal programme (1995), carried welfare to every district.
• Liberalisation (1991): delicensing ended the old licensing distortions. These had let backward districts of advanced States take most “backward area” licences.
  • But private investment, free to choose, went to States with better infrastructure and skills, so inter-state divergence accelerated.
• Ninth Plan (1997–2002): Seven Basic Minimum Services and rural connectivity through the PMGSY (2000), and a stress on Panchayati Raj institutions.
  • The seven services: safe drinking water; primary health care; universal primary education; housing for the shelterless; nutrition for children; village connectivity; and a streamlined public distribution system.
  • It gave the first indication of overall regional planning, reaching sanitation, education, food security, rural connectivity and agro and cottage industries.
  • Priorities: agriculture and rural development, population control, environmental stability, women and backward classes, cooperatives and foreign exchange.
• Tenth Plan (2002–07): State-wise monitorable targets for the first time.
  • The targets: poverty down from 26% to 21%; literacy from 65% to 75%; infant mortality from 72 to 45; forest and tree cover from 19% to 25%; gender gaps in literacy and wages halved; major rivers cleaned; gainful jobs for new workers.
  • Bharat Nirman (2005) took six rural infrastructure components to villages: irrigation, drinking water, housing, roads, telephony and electrification.
• Its regional instruments:
  • the Rashtriya Sam Vikas Yojana (2003) and the Backward Regions Grant Fund (2006–07), with untied funds planned from below;
  • the National Rural Health Mission (2005) for health infrastructure in lagging States;
  • JNNURM (2005) for 65 mission cities, with UIDSSMT for smaller towns;
  • the rural employment law (2005), introduced first in the 200 most backward districts.
• Eleventh Plan (2007–12): inclusive growth, monitored through 27 national targets, 13 of them broken down by State. Its regional instruments:
  • the Integrated Action Plan (2010) for districts affected by Left Wing Extremism;
  • the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (2011) for self-help groups;
  • the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (2008) for health insurance of poor families.
  • Watershed programmes became platforms joining ecology, equity and livelihoods at the grassroots, beside the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme in rainfed backward regions.
  • It also pushed the smart grid, faster power generation and renewable energy. Its monitoring is often quoted as 26 major indices of performance; the plan’s own list ran to 27 targets.
• Twelfth Plan (2012–17): an explicit aim of regional equality across and within States, and better conditions for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and minorities.
  • Three scenarios: strong inclusive growth (8%), insufficient action (6–6.5%) and policy logjam (5–5.5%).
  • Targets: poverty down by 10 points; 50 million non-farm jobs; infrastructure investment at 9% of GDP; universal road and power connectivity; 90% banking access; secondary education for all; infant mortality to 25 and maternal mortality to 100.
  • Energy and climate: about 88,000 MW of new generation, about 30,000 MW of renewable capacity added, taking it to about 55,000 MW by 2017, a 20–25% cut in emission intensity by 2020, and green cover up by 1 million hectares a year.
  • Its outlay of ₹47.7 lakh crore was 135% above the Eleventh Plan’s. Most targets were only partly met.
• Special packages continued:
  • the Revised Long Term Action Plan (1998–99) for the Kalahandi–Bolangir–Koraput districts of Odisha;
  • the Bundelkhand drought-mitigation package (2009) for the districts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh;
  • the Kuttanad package (2008) for Kerala’s below-sea-level wetlands, drawn up by the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation.
• The North-East became a planning region of its own:
  • the statutory North Eastern Council (1971);
  • the rule that Union ministries spend at least 10% of their budgets in the region (1998), with the unspent balance pooled for projects;
  • the Department of DoNER (2001), a full Ministry from 2004.

Phase 5: The NITI Aayog Years (2015– )

• With the Planning Commission gone, regional policy runs through three channels:
  • Finance Commission devolution that weights low income, area and forest;
  • the design of Centrally Sponsored Schemes, with 90:10 sharing for the North-Eastern and Himalayan States;
  • NITI’s targeting and ranking.
• The Aspirational Districts and Blocks Programmes, for 112 districts (2018) and 500 blocks (2023), replaced the old backward-area grants with convergence and real-time ranking on outcome indicators.
• Area programmes continue in new forms:
  • the Vibrant Villages Programme (2023) for villages on the northern border;
  • PM-JANMAN (2023) for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups;
  • watershed development under the PMKSY.
• Infrastructure-led regional development has returned: PM Gati Shakti (2021), the industrial corridors and the PM-DevINE (2022) scheme for the North-East.

The Regional Record in Numbers

• Income: among the 20 major States, the ratio of the highest to the lowest per capita NSDP rose from 4.9 (2011–12) to 5.6 (2023–24). The coefficient of variation rose from 0.38 to 0.40.
  • Bihar’s per capita income in 2023–24 was about ₹62,000, against about ₹3.4 lakh in Telangana and Karnataka (RBI, Handbook of Statistics on Indian States).
• Poverty and human development: multidimensional poverty fell fastest in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha, so the social gap is narrowing even as the income gap widens.
• Industry: manufacturing remains concentrated in the west and south. The mineral-rich east, the base of the steel-town strategy, has the lowest per capita incomes outside the North-East.
• The record supports both readings of regional planning: social convergence through programmes and transfers, and economic divergence through markets.

Macro, Meso and Micro Levels

• Macro-level regional planning covered large, multi-district or multi-State regions:
  • multipurpose river valley projects (DVC, Bhakra–Nangal, Hirakud, Rihand);
  • regional infrastructure, industrial clusters, national highways and inter-state power grids;
  • the National Capital Region;
  • today’s industrial corridors and coastal and port regions (Bharatmala, Sagarmala).
• Meso and micro-level planning targeted particular problem areas:
  • the Indira Gandhi Canal command in the Thar;
  • the Bundelkhand and Kalahandi–Bolangir–Koraput packages;
  • Vidarbha and Telangana regional plans;
  • desert development in Rajasthan;
  • the Kuttanad package for Kerala’s below-sea-level rice bowl;
  • the Jhabua watershed programme in Madhya Pradesh;
  • Special Category State status, which gave backward hill and border States a separate footing.
• India never adopted one national scheme of such regions. The planning regions of India proposed by geographers and the Planning Commission, from macro regions down to blocks, remained largely academic.

The National Capital Region

• Why: Delhi’s urban area grew from about 14 lakh (1951) to about 1.6 crore (2011). Migrants strained housing, water, power, transport and sewerage.
• Origin: the Delhi Master Plan (1959, approved 1962) recommended a regional body. An advisory board was reconstituted in 1973.
• The NCR Planning Board Act (1985) created India’s first inter-state metropolitan planning region, to plan Delhi’s growth with parts of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. The Board approved its first plan on 3 November 1988.
• Aims: hold Delhi’s population within manageable limits; divert people to ring towns such as Faridabad, Ballabhgarh, Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Sonipat, Bahadurgarh, Narela, Loni and Modinagar; disperse industries and public offices; build cheap, efficient transport; and balance urban and rural growth.
• Problems named: about 2 lakh in-migrants a year, a widening gap between demand and supply of services, congestion and slums, the pull of Delhi’s jobs, overloaded infrastructure, declining quality of life and rising crime.
• Strategy: slow the growth of Delhi and its metropolitan area; bring NCR growth down from 3–4% to 1.2% a year and in-migration down to 84,000 a year; develop regional centres such as Meerut, Hapur, Bulandshahr, Khurja, Palwal, Panipat, Rohtak, Rewari, the Bhiwadi and Dharuhera complex, Alwar, Karnal and Jind; and move offices and wholesale trade out.
  • Urban growth was to go to less fertile land, with a green buffer around Delhi, conservation of the Aravalli forest, and highway corridor zones along the radial highways.
• Plans so far:
  • Regional Plan 2001, notified in 1989;
  • Regional Plan 2021, notified in 2005 and still in force;
  • Regional Plan 2041, approved by the Board on 16 June 2026 and awaiting notification. It proposes four “Namo cities” on the regional rapid transit lines.
• The region has grown from about 30,242 sq km (1989) to 55,083 sq km: the NCT of Delhi and 27 districts. About 7.9 crore people live in it.
• Counter-magnet areas are meant to intercept migrants bound for Delhi: Hisar, Ambala, Kota, Jaipur, Patiala–Rajpura, Kanpur–Lucknow, Bareilly, Gwalior and Dehradun.
  • A wider list adds Yamuna Nagar and Karnal (Karnal is now inside the NCR); Moradabad, Saharanpur and Prayagraj; Ludhiana and Bathinda; and Sikar and Ajmer.
  • Criteria: beyond about 250 km of Delhi, with established roots and growth potential, and not chiefly religious, strategic or environmental centres.
• Assessment:
  • transport links (expressways, metro, rapid rail) have integrated the region;
  • but Delhi and its immediate ring (Gurugram, Noida, Ghaziabad, Faridabad) absorbed most of the growth;
  • many priority towns missed their planned populations;
  • the counter-magnets stayed weak, because States did little to build their economies.

Problem-Region Planning: Indira Gandhi Canal and Bundelkhand

• The Indira Gandhi Canal (Rajasthan Canal), begun in 1958, carries water from the Harike barrage on the Sutlej–Beas into the Thar. Its command area development from 1974 combined field channels, afforestation, sand-dune fixing, roads and new settlements.
  • Achievement: wheat, cotton, groundnut and mustard replaced bajra and guar, and settled farming spread into the desert.
  • Failure: waterlogging and salinity in Stage I, and the loss of pastoral livelihoods. Planning the land and the water together was harder than planning the canal.
• Bundelkhand, a drought-prone, rocky upland split between Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, shows the limits of packages.
  • Repeated special packages built check dams, canals and roads, but migration and farm distress continued. Implementation was split between two States, with no single regional authority.
• The DVC and the NCR both crossed State boundaries. That is rare in Indian planning, where regions usually follow State and district lines because data are collected that way.

Assessment

Achievements

• Most plans missed some targets, but their constructive role in development cannot be denied. They built the infrastructure, institutions and human capital on which later growth rests.
• Food: from dependence on PL-480 imports to self-sufficiency and exports, through the Green, White and Blue Revolutions.
• Infrastructure: energy, irrigation, transport and communications, the physical base of regional development.
• Human development:
  • literacy rose from 18.3% (1951) to 74.0% (2011), though gaps remain (Keralam 94.0%, Bihar 61.8% in 2011);
  • life expectancy rose from about 32 years to about 70 (2016–20). Older reckonings give 37 years in 1951, and 66–68 by 2010–14;
  • India’s rank on the Human Development Index rose over the planning decades.
• Income: national income rose over 7 times and GDP over 8 times since 1951. Net national product grew 8.7 times from 1950–51 to 2002–03 (4.2% a year), and per capita income about 3 times (2.1% a year).
• Food consumption: per capita cereal consumption rose from about 418 grams a day (1971) to about 469 (2013).
• Trade: exports diversified from jute and cotton to manufactures and services.
• Science and technology: space, nuclear and scientific capacity gave India strategic autonomy.
• Migration: rural programmes eased distress movement in some regions, though rural-to-urban migration continued.
• Industry: the Second Plan’s steel towns and public enterprises gave later private industry a base.
• Rural employment: from JRY to MGNREGA (replaced in July 2026 by VB-G RAM G), wage programmes reached every backward district.
• Multidimensional poverty fell from 24.85% (2015–16) to 14.96% (2019–21) by NITI Aayog’s index, fastest in the poorest States.
• Decentralisation: constitutional local government, over 24 lakh elected representatives (2026; older counts gave over 30 lakh), and women’s reservation in Panchayats.

Limitations and Failures

• Regional gaps widened:
  • per capita income in the richest major State is over five times that of Bihar;
  • in 2019–21, 33.8% of Bihar’s people were multidimensionally poor, against 0.6% in Keralam.
• Land reforms did not change agrarian structure much; new rural elites replaced the old.
• Social inequality persists: caste discrimination, the alienation of the North-East, and the low representation of women.
• Sex ratio fell from 946 (1951) to 940 (2011).
• Leakages and corruption in programmes; benefits often went to the better-off. Black money, a parallel economy and red tape grew. Plans did not create a society free of exploitation.
• Poverty persisted: a quarter of the people by older reckonings; 21.9% in 2011–12, and 25.7% in rural areas.
• Illiteracy: about a quarter of the people were still illiterate in 2011.
• Inequality: income inequality rose, and health gaps between regions widened.
• Population growth was not brought under control through the plans.
• Unemployment remained high; skill development came into the plans only in the Eleventh.
• The public sector often became inefficient and loss-making.
• Failure of balanced development fed Left Wing Extremism in the mineral-rich tribal belt, demands for new States (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand in 2000; Telangana in 2014), and unrest in the North-East.
• Hunger and malnutrition, child labour and social injustice were not ended.

Why Regional Planning Fell Short

• No spatial dimension: Indian planning was sectoral. Investment was decided sector by sector, with little spatial content. Hence:
  • the Green Revolution widened disparities, because it worked only where irrigation and seeds came together, in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh;
  • industry stayed concentrated in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and a few metros, while the truly backward States were bypassed.
• Growth poles without spread: the steel towns and industrial clusters lacked functional linkages and channels of spread, so they became islands, not engines.
• Regional planning as an add-on: agriculture, industry and infrastructure each had their own chapter and target. Regions were never the planning unit, and no national scheme of planning regions was adopted.
• Little financial planning: programmes were announced without a strategy for funds or for efficient use, so leakages followed.
• Neglect of productive sectors: later plans leaned on services, while agriculture and manufacturing, which create mass employment, were neglected. Wage schemes often created assets of low productivity.
• Political economy:
  • advanced States were better organised in the Planning Commission and the NDC;
  • industrial licences for “backward areas” went largely to backward districts of advanced States, not to backward States;
  • from Pande (1968) onwards, the identification of backward areas was diluted by the demand that every State have some.
• Weak local institutions: States were reluctant to devolve funds, functions and functionaries to Panchayats, so planning from below remained mostly on paper.

Approaches Tried, in Sequence

• River basin planning (DVC, 1948): unified development of a natural region; weakened by State control and the pull of power generation.
• Growth poles and growth centres (1956 onward, Growth Centre Scheme 1988): concentrated investment; few spread effects.
• Target-area programmes (DPAP, DDP, HADP, CADP): treat the region’s handicap; thin funds over large areas.
• Target-group programmes (SFDA, IRDP, TSP): reach poor households; leakages and missed regional causes.
• Multi-level and decentralised planning (1978 onward, 73rd Amendment): plans from below; weak devolution of funds.
• Outcome targeting (State-wise targets 2002, Aspirational Districts 2018): measure and rank results; limited by the money behind them.
• Each approach answered the failure of the one before. Together they form the strategies of regional development that India still uses.

Lessons

• Plan with a map: region-specific plans built on resource endowment, and a hierarchy of centres to carry growth to villages.
• Build the conditions: regional planning rests on good planning education, public awareness of why planning matters, efficient planning institutions, and a society that understands the issues.
• Combine growth centres with area programmes and target-group schemes, rather than relying on any one.
• Devolve genuinely, so that district and block plans set priorities.
• Measure and rank outcomes by region, as the Aspirational Districts method now does. That is still no substitute for the productive investment lagging regions need.
• Build regional authorities where problems cross boundaries, as in river basins, metropolitan regions and drought belts, with real powers over land and water.
• Link the lagging east and centre to growing markets through corridors, logistics and small-town development, so that growth is not left to the existing poles alone.
• Protect the people and ecosystems of resource regions: mining, dams and industry must leave the host region better off, through rehabilitation, district mineral funds and local jobs.