Planning at the Grassroots: An Experiment with Integrated District Planning

This short reflection has emanated from the author’s involvement in a project on Integrated District Planning in an action research mode in the context of 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution; and about a year long experience of field work related to it. The note begins with an introduction, a brief account of the project and processes adopted therein; followed by a section that puts the issues, discussed in some detail later on, in perspective. Then, it goes on to outline the major academic and practical issues as well as challenges that emerged with an attempt to provide a critique of the whole approach towards decentralised planning in particular, and democratic decentralisation in general.