Backward Area Planning in India

• Backward area planning is the effort to raise regions that lag behind the rest of the country in income, infrastructure and human development, through special identification, special programmes and special incentives.
• Concern for regional inequality is universal. No country’s parts are equally endowed with natural and human resources; resource-rich areas pull ahead, the gap widens, and disadvantaged places and people demand redress.
• Free market forces polarise growth at a few favourable locations. Planning for backward areas is India’s main answer to the regional imbalance this produces: growth with justice, combining social justice for backward people with spatial justice for backward places.
• India built one of the largest sets of such programmes in the developing world: identification committees from 1960, area and target-group programmes from the Fourth Plan, fiscal incentives from 1971, the Backward Regions Grant Fund (2006–07 to 2014–15), and the Aspirational Districts and Blocks programmes since 2018.

The Concept of Backwardness

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Meaning

• Backwardness is relative, multi-dimensional and partly a matter of perception. It varies in time, space and kind, and there is no single accepted definition.
• Relative in time: what is backward today may not have been in the past, or may not be in the future.
  • Bengal led India’s industry before Partition.
  • Singrauli was remote and forested before coal mining and power plants arrived.
• Relative in space: backwardness is always measured against a reference area.
  • A district backward within Maharashtra may be advanced by Bihar’s standards. Mumbai and Gadchiroli sit in the same State.
• Multi-dimensional: it has economic (low income, unemployment, no industry), social (low literacy, high infant mortality, gender gaps) and physiographic (drought, desert, hill terrain) dimensions. No single indicator captures it.
• Place and people are bound together. A person born in a backward area inherits its constraints, and the collective deprivation of its people keeps the area backward. Both must be tackled together.

Backward Areas and Backward People

• All backward areas are rural, but not all rural areas are backward. Most people in a backward area are poor, but not all poor people live in backward areas.
  • Backward areas and backward people are therefore not the same in spatial coverage.
• Planning needs two instruments:
  • target area programmes for backward regions, whoever lives there;
  • target group programmes for backward people, wherever they live.
• The Fourth Plan (1969–74) first adopted this two-pronged approach.

Types of Backwardness

• In a country as diverse as India, physiographic (fundamental) backwardness is the most widespread. Most area programmes were therefore launched to restore ecological balance in drought-prone, desert and hill areas.
• Economic backwardness is almost as widespread. Social backwardness is concentrated in tribal pockets.
  • Economic: the BIMARU States (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh) show low income and subsistence farming without a physical handicap as the main cause.
  • Social: it is not the same as poverty. Many tribal communities live on rich resources yet stay backward through exploitation and historical exclusion. The response includes the Tribal Sub-Plan, the Forest Rights Act and PESA.
  • Physiographic: besides aridity, slope and drought, flooding holds back the Brahmaputra plains.
• Areal coverage varies widely: the largest programme, for industrial backwardness, covered about 70% of India on the older reckoning, and the smallest, for border areas, about 5%: about 14 times the area.

Characteristics of Backward Areas

• Economy:
  • subsistence agriculture with low yields, little irrigation and small holdings;
  • few factories and little non-farm work, so underemployment is high;
  • low incomes, low savings and low investment: a low-level equilibrium trap.
• Infrastructure: poor roads, unreliable power, few banks and markets; villages far from towns.
• Society:
  • low literacy, especially among women; high infant and maternal mortality; malnutrition;
  • large shares of Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes, often with land alienation and debt.
• Demography: high fertility and distress out-migration of working-age men.
• Settlement: low urbanisation and a missing tier of small towns, so services and innovations do not reach villages.
• Environment: degraded forests and soils, drought or flood proneness, or hill and desert terrain.

Causes of Backwardness

• Physical: aridity, erratic rainfall, rugged terrain, floods and poor soils limit farming and raise the cost of infrastructure.
  • Western Rajasthan, the Himalayan districts and the Kosi plains of north Bihar are examples.
• Historical:
  • Colonial policy built ports and their hinterlands but left the interior, especially the mineral-rich tribal plateau, as a supplier of raw materials.
  • The permanent settlement of the east left a legacy of absentee landlordism and weak investment in land.
• Locational and infrastructural: distance from ports, markets and metropolitan centres; thin rail and road networks.
• Socio-cultural: caste and tribal exclusion, low female literacy, and isolation of tribal communities.
• Policy:
  • Planned investment and private capital concentrated in already developed areas.
  • The freight equalisation policy (1952–93) removed the cost advantage of the mineral States.
  • Incentives were spread thin.
• Governance: weak administration, poor programme delivery, low Panchayat capacity, and in the central tribal belt, conflict linked to left-wing extremism.
• The relative weight of geographical and socio-economic causes is debated among theories of regional imbalance.

Where India’s Backward Areas Are

• Backwardness is concentrated in a contiguous belt of central and eastern India:
  • the middle and lower Ganga plain;
  • the Chota Nagpur and Bastar plateaus;
  • western Odisha and Bundelkhand;
  • with outliers in the North-East and the dry western districts.
• Multidimensional poverty (NITI Aayog National MPI 2023, NFHS-5, 2019–21):
  • India’s headcount ratio fell from 24.85% in 2015–16 to 14.96% in 2019–21.
  • The highest ratios were in Bihar (33.8%), Jharkhand (28.8%), Meghalaya (27.8%), Uttar Pradesh (22.9%) and Madhya Pradesh (20.6%).
  • Bihar fell fastest, from 51.9%.
• Backward districts also lie inside prosperous States: Gadchiroli and Nandurbar in Maharashtra, Nuh in Haryana, Dahod in Gujarat, Raichur and Yadgir in Karnataka, Wayanad in Keralam (Kerala).
• The same districts recur across lists. Most of the 1997 hundred, the 2003 task-force districts, the BRGF districts and the aspirational districts fall in this belt.

Identification of Backward Areas

Two Approaches

• Low per capita income alone is an unreliable test. Other measures include the SC/ST share, population per unit of cultivated land, the share of workers in agriculture, the ratio of urban to rural population, transport and communications, water and electricity, and literacy.
• Index-based approach:
  • A composite index ranks all areas, and those below a cut-off are treated as backward.
  • It is transparent, replicable and comparable across regions. But the choice of indicators and weights is subjective, and a composite score can hide the specific problem.
  • India used it for industrially backward areas and, later, for backward districts.
• Problem-area approach:
  • It identifies areas by a specific constraint that only special measures can remove: drought, desert, hill terrain, floods, salinity.
  • It permits tailored programmes, but does not rank areas against each other.
  • India used it for drought-prone, desert and hill areas.
• India has used both: the index for economic backwardness, the problem area for ecological backwardness. The methods of regionalisation, from weighted indices to cluster analysis, supply the techniques.

Three Conditions

• An area identified as backward for planning must have:
  • potential for development, an unused resource base;
  • inhibiting factors that prevent that potential being realised;
  • a need for special programmes to remove the bottlenecks, because market forces alone will not.

Committees and Criteria

• Committee on Dispersal of Industries (1960): the first attempt.
  • It looked at industrialising rural and lagging areas through small and medium industries. Dispersal of industry as a tool for backward areas was a forerunner of the growth pole approach.
  • Its tests of backwardness:
    • poverty: low per capita income and consumption;
    • pressure of population: population per unit of cultivable land 50% above the national average; low non-farm and factory employment; a low urban share; under-used natural resources;
    • poor communications: rail and road length below half the national average;
    • high unemployment or underemployment, and low power consumption.
• Pande and Wanchoo Working Groups (1968–69): after the National Development Council took up industrial backwardness in 1968, the Planning Commission set up two groups.
  • The Pande Working Group set criteria to identify industrially backward areas. At the State level these were:
    • per capita income, with the share of industry and mining;
    • workers in registered factories per lakh of population;
    • per capita consumption of electricity;
    • length of surfaced roads and railway route length, relative to population and area.
  • At the district level it picked districts outside a 50-mile radius of large cities and big industrial projects, with per capita income 25% below the State average, high population density relative to resource use, and little industry or non-farm employment.
  • Studying 15 parameters, it marked 238 districts, holding about 60% of the country’s area and population, as industrially backward.
  • It named ten backward States: Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Nagaland, Odisha, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. All Union Territories except Chandigarh, Delhi and Puducherry were also classed as backward.
  • The Wanchoo Working Group recommended fiscal and financial incentives. It wanted them concentrated in a few selected areas to build growth poles. This package became the base of later concessions:
    • a higher development rebate;
    • five-year exemptions from income tax (including corporate tax), excise duty, and sales tax on raw materials and finished goods;
    • exemption from import duty on plant, machinery and components;
    • a transport subsidy on finished goods beyond 400 miles (650 km) for Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura, NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh) and the Andamans, and 50% of the cost for backward areas of Jammu and Kashmir.
  • The NDC (September 1969) diluted both reports, spreading incentives to backward districts in every State.
  • For concessional finance the Planning Commission judged districts on: foodgrain or commercial crop output per head; agricultural workers to population; gross industrial output per head; factory employees or secondary and tertiary workers per lakh; and surfaced road or railway length to population. 241 districts, later 247, qualified.
  • The Planning Commission then rationalised the list into three categories of backward districts.
• Draft Fourth Plan study group: classified backward areas into five categories:
  • desert areas;
  • chronically drought-affected areas;
  • hill areas, including border areas;
  • areas of high tribal concentration;
  • densely populated areas with low income and employment.
  • The group’s 17 indicators covered: population and density; agricultural workers and the area per worker (total, cultivable, net sown); irrigation and double cropping; farm output per head; electrified workshops and factory workers; surfaced roads and commercial vehicles; male and female literacy; school attendance; technical training seats; hospital beds; and per capita income.
• Sukhamoy Chakravarty Committee on Backward Areas (1972): stressed agricultural criteria:
  • the share of population in agriculture;
  • irrigated area and net sown area;
  • literacy.
• National Committee on the Development of Backward Areas (NCDBA), chaired by B. Sivaraman (appointed November 1978; reports 1980–81):
  • It defined fundamental backwardness in six types of area: chronically drought-prone, desert, tribal, hill, chronically flood-affected, and coastal areas affected by salinity.
  • It made the block the primary unit of identification.
  • All hill areas above 600 metres, outside the Tribal Sub-Plan, were to be treated as backward hill areas. This gave hill programmes a clear physical test.
  • It made the watershed the planning unit in hill areas.
• Planning Commission exercise (1993): identified 120 backward districts for an intensified Jawahar Rozgar Yojana.
  • It gave equal weight to the rural SC/ST share and to the inverse of agricultural labour productivity.
• E. A. S. Sarma Committee (report November 1997): identified the 100 most backward and poorest districts.
  • It used poverty, female literacy, infant mortality and infrastructure indicators.
  • The districts were concentrated in Bihar (38), Madhya Pradesh (19) and Uttar Pradesh (17). The plan was never operationalised.
• Task Force on backward districts (May 2003): ranked 447 districts on three equally weighted indicators:
  • value of output per agricultural worker;
  • agricultural wage rate;
  • share of SC/ST population.
  • It recommended concentrating wage employment in 150 districts, largely in eastern and central India. Its list fed the Rashtriya Sam Vikas Yojana.
• Raghuram Rajan Committee (September 2013): built a Composite Development Index of States from ten equally weighted indicators:
  • monthly per capita consumption, education, health, household amenities and the poverty rate;
  • female literacy, the share of SC/ST population and the urbanisation rate;
  • financial inclusion and connectivity.
  • It classed ten States as least developed, led by Odisha and Bihar, and proposed a need-based formula for central funds. It was a State-level exercise, not a district list.
• Aspirational Districts (2018): a composite index of SECC deprivation, health, education and basic infrastructure identified the districts.

Unit of Identification and Data

• Two conditions are essential:
  • the geographical unit must be fixed: State, district, block or village cluster;
  • data on the chosen indicators must be available for that unit.
• The finer the unit, the better the targeting, but the poorer the data.

Backward Area Programmes

Evolution Plan by Plan

• Backward areas received attention from the earliest Plans.
  • Most area development programmes were identified in the Third and Fourth Plans and became operative in the Fifth Plan.
  • No new classic area programme began after the Seventh Plan. Later effort went into district-based funds and convergence.
  • Industrially backward area development was the first to come into operation, drawing on the Second Plan’s placing of industry in backward regions.

• The plan-by-plan detail is part of the Five Year Plans and the wider experience of regional planning.

Target Group Programmes: Backward People

• Conceived in the Fourth Plan, they reached groups that area programmes missed:
  • Small Farmers Development Agency (SFDA) and Marginal Farmers and Agricultural Labourers Agency (MFAL) (early 1970s):
    • credit, inputs and subsidiary occupations for small and marginal holders and the landless;
    • SFDA served households with 2 hectares or less, then about 52% of rural households, who lacked the irrigation, credit and market access the Green Revolution needed. It was the first programme to accept that area programmes miss the poorest inside a favoured region;
    • MFAL served holders below the small-farmer line and landless labourers on seasonal wages, with credit, training, and diversification into animal husbandry, fishery and sericulture;
    • merged into the Integrated Rural Development Programme in 1980.
  • Tribal Sub-Plan (1974–75): earmarked plan funds for Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population, through Integrated Tribal Development Projects.
    • Delivery ran also through Integrated Tribal Development Agencies. Smaller tribal concentrations were reached through MADA pockets and clusters; the 75 particularly vulnerable tribal groups had their own schemes.
    • It is now the Development Action Plan for STs, part of tribal area development.
  • IRDP (1978–79, nationwide from 1980) with TRYSEM (1979) and DWCRA (1982–83):
    • asset transfers and self-employment for rural poor households;
    • DWCRA’s women’s groups were the precursor of the SHG-bank linkage model, which reached 7 crore women under NRLM on an older count and 10.08 crore households by July 2026;
    • merged into SGSY in 1999, now DAY-NRLM. This is the integrated rural development line of programmes.

Target Area Programmes: Backward Regions

• Programme detail:
  • DPAP: about 72 chronically drought-prone districts at first, with the watershed as the unit. It aimed at employment, productive assets and ecological balance through soil and water conservation, afforestation, pasture, groundwater recharge, other livelihoods and water harvesting (johad, kund, talao). It was the longest-running, at about 37 years, and passed through Hariyali (2003) to IWMP (2009), which set a norm of ₹12,000 a hectare with community participation.
  • DDP: it aims to control desertification, restore ecological balance, create jobs and raise incomes. Tools: dune stabilisation, shelter belts (Prosopis juliflora, Acacia tortilis), oasis development, water harvesting (kund, bawdi, naadi), solar and wind energy, afforestation and horticulture. The Centre paid in full at first; later hot deserts were shared 75:25 and cold deserts stayed fully central.
  • HADP: at first counted as 15 districts: all hill districts of Uttarakhand (then Uttar Pradesh), the Mikir Hills and North Cachar Hills of Assam, Darjeeling and Nilgiri. Tools: horticulture and plantations (apple, kiwi, temperate fruit), animal husbandry, dairy and poultry, forest-based and village industries, roads, erosion control and watersheds.
  • Command Area Development: bridges the gap between irrigation potential created and used. An authority for each command builds field channels and drains, levels land and brings in rotational supply (warabandi).
  • BADP: for strategic isolation, sparse population and thin services along the border, with border communities kept from moving to the interior. It was the only programme of these fully central from the start besides desert areas, and covered about 5% of India.
• The physiographic programmes, the first to be identified (hill areas) and the last (border areas), mostly ran over two decades before being merged into watershed and convergence schemes.
• Funding took three forms: fully central (border and, at first, desert areas); centrally assisted (DPAP 50:50, 90:10 in Special Category States); and State-funded with central guidance. Most were centrally assisted.
• Responsibility: the Planning Commission once carried area programmes; since 2015 they lie with NITI Aayog and the ministries. Tribal and industrial programmes stay with their own central ministries.
• Their main weakness, found by the Hanumantha Rao Committee (1994), was that DPAP and DDP had largely failed because of ad hoc planning, little people’s participation and poor coordination. The committee moved them to a watershed approach.

Fiscal and Other Incentives

• From 1971 the government used fiscal policy to make backward areas attractive to private investment:
  • Central Investment Subsidy Scheme (1971): at first a 10% outright grant on fixed capital for units in selected backward districts; rates were raised later.
  • Concessional finance from the all-India financial institutions at lower interest and longer repayment.
  • Income-tax relief on profits of new units in backward areas (Section 80HH of the Income-tax Act).
  • Transport Subsidy Scheme (July 1971): 50–90% of transport costs for hill, remote and island areas. It became the Freight Subsidy Scheme (2013) and was discontinued in November 2016.
  • Growth Centre Scheme (1988): 71 centres with ready infrastructure, which replaced the investment subsidy.
  • State incentives: sales-tax holidays, power-tariff concessions, cheap land, and industrial area packages for the North-East, the hill States and Jammu and Kashmir, among them the North East Industrial and Investment Promotion Policy (2007) and the Special Package Scheme for Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir.
  • Grants: for minor irrigation and for cottage and small industries, with stress on roads and electricity. Special Category States got central funding on 90:10, against 60:40 for general States.
• Large public sector projects were sited in backward areas to develop them: steel, fertiliser and heavy electrical plants in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh. The Third Plan held that the handicaps of such areas often reflected only a lack of basic facilities and services, not anything permanent.
• Industrial estates (from 1955) gave small industries shared sheds and services.
  • Twelve were sanctioned in 1955. States ran ten; the National Small Industries Corporation developed Okhla and Naini.
  • Aims: encourage small industry, move it out of congested areas, decentralise industry to small towns and large villages, and foster ancillaries around big plants.
  • They were later used to carry industry to small towns and lagging districts.

• These incentives are one of the planning instruments against regional imbalance.
• Assessment:
  • Incentives help only those with capital and enterprise, which genuinely backward areas lack. Gains went mostly to backward districts of advanced States: Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat, West Bengal.
  • The backward districts of Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and the North-East stayed industrially backward.
  • Firms from developed areas opened branch units to claim benefits. Tax holidays mean little to firms making no profit. Transport subsidies help large manufacturers, not subsistence farmers.
  • Industry follows infrastructure, skills and markets. Without these, subsidies do not create industrial growth. The steel towns became enclaves, as growth pole theory’s critics predicted.

Special Plans for Backward Regions

• Rashtriya Sam Vikas Yojana (2003–04): the first programme aimed squarely at backward districts.
  • It had three parts: a backward districts initiative for 100 districts from the 2003 Task Force list, a special plan for Bihar, and a special plan for the KBK districts of Odisha.
  • Each district received ₹15 crore a year for three years to fill critical gaps. It reached 147 districts before being subsumed into the BRGF.
• KBK region: the undivided Kalahandi, Bolangir and Koraput districts (eight districts since 1992–93) became a by-word for starvation and distress migration in the 1980s.
  • Successive plans followed: an area development project (1988), a Long-Term Action Plan (1995), its revised version (1998–99), and then a special plan under the RSVY and the BRGF.
  • Odisha has continued KBK funding through its own schemes.
• Bundelkhand package (2009): ₹7,266 crore for drought mitigation in 13 districts, seven in Uttar Pradesh and six in Madhya Pradesh, later extended.
• Integrated Action Plan (2010): block grants for 60 tribal and backward districts affected by left-wing extremism, later extended to more districts.

Backward Regions Grant Fund (BRGF)

• Launched: approved in August 2006; formally launched by the Prime Minister at Barpeta, Assam, on 19 February 2007.
• Ministry: Panchayati Raj for the district component; Planning Commission for the State component.
• Coverage:
  • 250 districts at first, 272 from 2012–13, in all States except Goa;
  • it subsumed the RSVY, whose districts first received their full ₹45 crore.
• Design:
  • an untied development grant for local infrastructure gaps;
  • a capacity-building grant of ₹1 crore per district a year;
  • participatory plans prepared by Panchayats and municipalities and consolidated by the District Planning Committee.
  • The State component carried special plans for Bihar, the KBK districts and, from 2011–12, West Bengal.
• Achievements:
  • It made district planning real. When it began, only 13 of 24 eligible States had constituted District Planning Committees; by its end all had.
  • It funded Anganwadi centres, school rooms, roads and culverts, Panchayat buildings and markets.
  • On average about 85% of the funds released in 2009–14 were spent. An older review put average utilisation across the 272 districts at only 23%, so the figure depends on the base taken.
• Weaknesses:
  • Thin funding: eligible districts received more than five times as much through MGNREGS.
  • Erratic releases: in 2014–15 only about half of entitlements were released, and a third of districts got no development grant.
  • Weak Panchayat capacity, duplication with other schemes, assets of small size and uneven quality, little investment in productive assets, non-uniform progress and poor monitoring.
• Evaluation:
  • The BRGF was the first fund to tie backward-area money to local self-government, and it built the habit of bottom-up district plans.
  • But it was too small and too scattered to change the trajectory of 272 districts. It financed small works rather than the irrigation, roads and skills that remove the causes of backwardness.
  • Its lessons shaped what came next: the aspirational programmes kept the district focus but swapped untied grants for outcome indicators and convergence.
• End: delinked from central support from 2015–16. The 14th Finance Commission raised the States’ share of central taxes from 32% to 42%, leaving backward-area funding to the States.

Aspirational Districts and Blocks

• In January 2018 NITI Aayog replaced the language of backwardness with that of aspiration. The Aspirational Districts and Aspirational Blocks Programmes target 112 districts (117 with West Bengal’s five, which joined in June 2026) and 513 blocks.
• Unlike the BRGF, they add no large new fund. They rely on convergence of existing schemes, real-time indicators and competitive ranking. They localise the Sustainable Development Goals at district level. The blocks programme began in 2023 with 500 blocks.
• The three Cs:
  • Convergence of 42 and more central and State schemes, with the District Collector as the point of integration;
  • Collaboration among central Prabhari officers, State nodal officers, District Collectors and knowledge partners;
  • Competition through monthly delta-ranking of districts on 49 indicators, on the Champions of Change dashboard, with awards of up to ₹10 crore.
• Five themes and weights: health and nutrition 30%, education 30%, agriculture and water resources 20%, financial inclusion and skill development 10%, basic infrastructure 10%.
• Compared with older area programmes, which were sector-specific, ran through separate ministries and counted funds spent, these are multi-sectoral, outcome-focused, competitive, updated monthly and aligned with the Goals. Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam praised the district programme as a globally relevant model.
• PM Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana (2025): applies the same district convergence to farming in 100 low-productivity districts over six years.

Planning for a Cluster of Villages

Concept

• A cluster of villages is a group of contiguous villages planned as one unit around a central village or growth point. It shares services that no single village can support.
• It rests on threshold and central-place logic:
  • a school, health centre, market, bank or processing unit needs a minimum population;
  • a cluster supplies it while keeping services within reach.
• Planners have proposed it repeatedly:
  • R. P. Misra’s hierarchy put a central village at the base, serving about six villages and 6,000 people, below service centres and growth points.
  • The NCDBA (1981) saw a focal point serving a cluster of 5,000–6,000 people, coinciding with a mini-watershed in hill areas.
  • The Community Development Programme (1952) organised villages into development blocks.

Indian Experience

• Tribal planning:
  • MADA pockets (population of 10,000 or more, at least half tribal) and tribal clusters (about 5,000, at least half tribal) bring scattered tribal villages under one plan.
• PURA (Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Areas):
  • championed by A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, built on physical, electronic, knowledge and economic connectivity;
  • piloted in seven clusters (2004–05 to 2006–07), then restructured as public–private partnerships for clusters of about 25,000–40,000 people.
• Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (2016):
  • 300 clusters of contiguous Gram Panchayats, of about 25,000–50,000 people in the plains and 5,000–15,000 in desert, hilly and tribal areas;
  • funded through convergence plus a 30% critical-gap grant;
  • central funding ended in March 2023 with many clusters unfinished.
• Vibrant Villages Programme-II (2025): funds infrastructure for a village or a cluster of villages in border blocks.
• Vision 2020 and the viable village complex: PURA grew out of A. P. J. Abdul Kalam’s vision of a developed India by 2020.
  • A viable village complex is a ring of villages around a growth centre, linked by a road and an electronic and knowledge network.
  • It is to be served by a college, a hospital, markets and processing units, so that rural people can earn urban incomes without migrating.
• Voluntary clusters:
  • the Warana cooperative complex in Kolhapur, where sugar, dairy and credit cooperatives serve a group of villages;
  • Nanaji Deshmukh’s Chitrakoot programme of self-reliant villages.

Is It Viable for Backward Areas?

• Arguments for:
  • Economies of scale: shared schools, health centres, markets, storage and agro-processing become viable.
  • Fits dispersed settlement: tribal, hill and desert hamlets are too small to serve one by one.
  • Links village to town: the cluster centre becomes the missing lower tier of the urban hierarchy and a channel for spread effects.
  • Matches natural units: a cluster can coincide with a watershed or a Panchayat group, joining resource and administrative planning.
  • Convergence: many schemes can be delivered together in one spatial plan.
• Arguments against:
  • Concentration within the cluster: the central village gains and peripheral hamlets may lose services, a local backwash effect.
  • Distance and terrain: in hills and forests, a cluster centre may still be hours away.
  • Social barriers: caste and tribal divisions can block shared use of facilities.
  • Funding and capacity: PURA and the Rurban Mission ran short of money, private partners and local planning skill.
  • Administrative mismatch: clusters do not coincide with blocks or constituencies, so ownership is weak.
• Conditions for success: a real growth point with economic potential; all-weather roads; Panchayat ownership and community participation; convergence of departments; and an economic base (farm processing, crafts, tourism), not just amenities.
• On balance, cluster planning is viable and often necessary in backward areas, provided it builds livelihoods and linkages, not only buildings.

Alternative Strategies for Backward Regions

• No single strategy works alone. The lesson of seven decades is to combine:
  • infrastructure and human capital first, then incentives;
  • growth centres linked to village clusters;
  • participatory, decentralised plans with real funds;
  • outcome monitoring.
• These strategies are compared more widely among the strategies of regional development.

Achievements and Limitations

• Achievements:
  • The two-pronged framework of area and group programmes put both backward places and backward people on the planning agenda.
  • Watershed development under DPAP, DDP and their successors improved water security in many drought-prone and desert districts.
  • Horticulture and plantation development transformed parts of the hills: apples and temperate fruit in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, tea in Darjeeling and the Nilgiris, grown commercially in once subsistence areas.
  • Industrial estates seeded small-industry clusters, as at Rajkot and Palakkad.
  • Dune stabilisation restored parts of the Rajasthan desert fringe, and solar parks such as Bhadla now use former wasteland.
  • The Tribal Sub-Plan ring-fenced funds for tribal areas.
  • The BRGF made District Planning Committees functional across the country.
  • The aspirational programmes brought measurable gains in health, nutrition and financial inclusion. On NITI Aayog data for 2018–22, 61% of the districts improved on health indicators and 56% on education.
• Limitations:
  • Spread too thin: incentives and grants were extended to backward districts in every State instead of the most backward.
  • Fiscal incentives favoured backward districts of advanced States and branch units of established firms.
  • Steel and mining poles (Bhilai, Rourkela, Bokaro) created enclaves and displacement, not regional transformation. Local tribal people mostly got unskilled jobs.
  • Spatial planning stayed secondary to sectoral planning, and no new programme idea came after the Seventh Plan.
  • Programmes were sector-specific and top-down, with little people’s participation, as the Hanumantha Rao Committee found for DPAP and DDP.
  • Erratic and inadequate funding, as under the BRGF.
  • The core of backwardness remains in the central and eastern tribal and mineral belt, where poverty, displacement and left-wing extremism persist. Separatism and demands for separate States elsewhere show that the root causes of discontent remain.