In the Golden Jubilee year of Karnataka, it is a pity that we still have to talk about regional balance, a goal set out at the time of the state’s reorganisation. However, on the eve of formulating the strategies for the Eleventh Five Year Plan for the state, some lessons from the past can be reviewed, and new strategies can be carved out.
The much talked about Nanjundappa Committee report has made all efforts to examine the intricate issues of regional imbalance in the state, be they economic, social, political or historical. It is repeatedly heard in the media that the government is fully committed to implement the recommendations of the committee.

Apart from identifying 39 most backward taluks in the state, the Nanjundappa Committee has suggested the setting up of a Special Development Fund to a tune of Rs 16,000 crore to redress the imbalances in the state.

Futile strategies
Lessons from investment strategies till today, send us a clear message. New strategies are required today. Simple approaches of investment pumping, subsidies, distributing the slice too thinly, and political compromises do not yield any more results, except on paper. Put the people up front. It is time to identify such development strategies, which are more and more of people oriented, and not led by political pushings and influences.
Second, the development unit should have sufficient capabilities of designing plan strategies independently through a consultative process among the people. How many people can one consult? At the zilla panchayat level, sufficient planning machinery should be set up to prepare their own District Plans. This should be based on a process of consultation — purely within the district, and not being influenced or guided by the state headquarters.

Specialised cadre of posts is  required at the ZP level, with background in sociology, anthropology and history and economics. As found in the Nanjundappa Committee report, there are backward taluks in the forward districts, as much as forward taluks in backward districts. Therefore, flexibility should be exercised in the design of rural and taluk development strategies.

Third, it is time that in every taluk a citizen committee is set up to report regularly to the media, people and the government about the state of development attained in the region. They should prepare Citizen Report Cards, on the lines of a model developed by the Public Affairs Centre, Bangalore.

Decentralisation
It is observed that there is an increasing trend of rural-urban divide in recent years. This cannot be tolerated. President A P J Kalam has coined a new concept of PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) to redress this imbalance. ZPs should make specific attempts to allocate resources to abate this issue.

Secondly, it was also observed in the Nanjundappa Committee report that there are significant mis-matches between infrastructural investments and the development attainments in a large number of taluks in the state. This is true with both agricultural and industrial sectors, and not to simply talk of social sectors like health and education.

The only remedy to improve this mis-match is to make budget allocation to the projects and to ZPs, totally on incentive basis, depending upon the delivered performances. Thirdly, the employment and income potentials of different villages and taluks should be properly assessed, to formulate clusters of villages as an economic unit, with well-identified products or services to concentrate on. This is almost on the lines of the Channapatna model on wooden toy making, or Medigeri blocks of Tumkur district concentrating on growing and processing pomegranate fruits. Such an approach will have both technological and skill advantages, apart from having economies of the desired scale. This is alternatively known as “One cluster one product model”.