The move is part of the special eight-year development plan announced in the budget earlier this year to remove regional disparities.

Speaking at a workshop on ‘Special development plan for addressing regional imbalances and formulation of district-level perspective plan’, Science and Technology and Planning Minister Ramachandra Gowda said the department-wise action plan will focus on the most backward taluks, more backward taluks and backward taluks as identified by the Nanjundappa Committee.

To begin with, a sum of Rs 1,571 crore has been provided for the financial year 2007-08 and additional funds would be made available as and when required depending upon the resource availability.

Planning Department Senior Director M A Basith said the objective of the special development plan was to invest a total of Rs 30,725 crore over a period of eight years for accelerated growth of backward taluks.

It includes building infrastructure to make good the identified backlog in backward taluks and providing location specific sectoral schemes.

Special cell
A special cell will be created in the planning department for the purpose, he said.

Some of the target outcomes include measures to control population in North Karnataka, that no village is without school, all district headquarters are linked to Bangalore by air and attracting IT investments to Hyderabad-Karnataka region among others.

The workshop was organised by the State Planning Board.