Comprehensive District Planning

Goal

The primary goal of CDP is to achieve the well-being of the entire population of the district in all respects, in other words, participation in the planning processes, livelihood enhancement through preparing projects based on local resources and elimination of deprivation and social discrimination in any form (e.g. gender, caste, communal and economic).

Process

The CDP process is complex and often requires clarity in terms of what a district wants to achieve and who are the stakeholders needed to be involved in the process. A conducive and enabling environment is also crucial for the success of the process.

CDP can be viewed as a sequence of steps which include the following:

• Mobilization of people to participate: People from different walks of life, segregated on the basis of their social or economic status, are mobilized to participate in the process. Sometimes people get mobilized by themselves based on the necessity of the issue. In other circumstances, the role of civil society and citizen groups is important in this regard.
• Meetings of stakeholders from different sections of societies to identify needs: They have to develop a common consensus on the felt needs. They identify goals and set the vision for the district.
• Focused group discussions among the different sections or groups, such as schedule castes, schedule tribes, youth, women, physically challenged and so on: This is important because all the stakeholders are not comfortable enough to express their concerns and needs in front of the more privileged and powerful.
• Generation of a database for planning by the community themselves, using various tools such as social mapping, resource mapping, preparing a timeline, transect walk, seasonal mapping, problem tree analysis and so on
• Identification of variations in the planning unit and their causes, using various tools such as rapid rural appraisal and Participatory Rural Appraisal
• Preparation of reports based on information collated using the above tools and techniques and their analysis
• Preparation of plans on the basis of these reports and depending upon the unit of planning
• Sharing of these plans with the larger public, such as the village or town/district
• Integration of local plans with higher order plans, such as development block or district level
• Approval of the plans by the appropriate body at the district level
• Integration of the district plan with the state plan or any other higher order plan.
• Formulation of projects on the basis of these plans with the support of technical and financial experts
• Approval of the projects by local-level institutions
• Implementation and monitoring of the plan

CDP and Action Research

The process of action research does not limit itself to knowledge generation; it is also applied to the process of utilization of that knowledge. CDP is a process which draws heavily on action research. When people or communities come together to find solutions to their needs, they collectively prioritize what is most important to be addressed, what are the resources required to address those felt needs, where these resources are available, what could be the most sustainable approach to utilizing those resources and what the benefits are in doing so. The planning exercise—from formulation to implementation—is a continuous process of inquiry, finding solutions and applying those to solve the desired, identified needs. The knowledge generated during the process is not only useful in the short term but in the long term also provides support to the process itself and sets a benchmark for the community to respond to. It is a process which brings together people to work for a common cause.

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