Community planning or planning by community

While in office, the then President A. P. J. Kalam had come up with a scheme called pura—Providing Urban Facilities in Rural Areas. In a country of more than 5 lakh (500,000) villages, the scheme was to cover 7,000 villages only. No rational explanation was given for selecting such a tiny number. The scheme anyway never got going because of Centre-State conflict: villages were in the states, funding was to come from the Centre and the Planning Commission of India had no such allocation. Moreo...