"GIS BASED RURAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING AT DISTRICT AND SUB-DISTRICT LEVEL"

Funded by Ministry of Rural Development (Principal Investigator)

In the context of rural India, although there have been blossoming-up of participatory approaches, rural development planning in the districts is mainly prescriptive (advocating certain uses in land areas through mandated schemes/programmes) and top-down (fostered by rural extension community).

Decision-makers of the district (Civil service officials) are now required to draw up and implement integrated development plans and those districts that have independent tax-raising powers can take additional initiatives of their own. However, this task is made the more difficult by the strictly sectoral structure of government activity and of formal information about natural resources, socio- economic conditions and infrastructure. To address this information problem, the Department of Land Resources of the Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, has entrusted CSRE to develop a geographical information system (GIS) model/framework for micro-level planning under the TDET Scheme.

Since the planning system operates in prescriptive manner (interventions in the form of development schemes and these may be targeted in the light of a formal zoning of the land according to its capability and suitability) and top-down approach, the project is aimed at developing rural-informatics for district/sub-district level officers (all line ministries are represented at district level) who are supposed to make plans and take appropriate decisions/actions.

The proposed pilot project is also an attempt to derive a standard GIS framework at various levels viz. sub-district/district/state/central levels.

Project Objectives

Main objective of the Project is to develop rural-informatics for decision making, which involves:

1. To assess the type and nature of databases those are felt necessary by various department functionaries/departments at the district/sub-district level
2. To identify and customize/standardize a GIS format and software that suits the requirements of the various development functionaries/departments at the district and sub-district levels for local level application in watershed/rural development sector
3. To generate /collect the required database for rural development in GIS format
4. To formulate action plans for watershed/rural development programs in the district
5. To formulate a policy framework for GIS application at district and sub-district as well as Central / State level in terms of appropriate nodal agencies, hardware/software requirements, capacity building/training requirements, mechanism for data transfer between various levels and network-based monitoring

Project Duration

2005-2006 and 2006-2007 (Two years)

Needs Assessment

To test and validate the concepts of Geo-ICT for rural development planning in Indian districts, a drought-prone and backward district, called Mahabubnagar, which represents semi-tropical region in the southern part of India, was selected. After establishing working relationships with the rural extension community and the district administration, a needs assessment exercise was carried out in the form of discussions (with the decision makers in a group and individually with each line department) / formulating questionnaires / workshops. This exercise is to establish the requirement of the district planners/functionaries in terms of type and nature of database, and thus a suitable GIS/Web system, for use in their day-to-day decision making on planning/ implementing/monitoring of rural development programmes in their jurisdiction. As a part of this exercise, in collaboration with the District Administration of Mahabubnagar District, a User Interaction Workshop ‘Needs Assessment for the Development of Rural-Informatics in Decision-making at District/Sub-district Level’ was organized at the district headquarters (http://www.csre.iitb.ac.in/adi/projects/adi-workshop.htm). One of the important observations and common requirement of the district planners is to have an online system to carry out mutual schemes in a collaborative way (distributed collaboration) as many these mandated schemes are inter-dependent and inter-departmental. A distributed collaboration model, GramyaVikas, being developed as a part of this Project is an attempt towards achieving this objective. Since this model is attached with the rural extension community for taking decisions on rural development aspects, the model is christened in Indian language as ‘GramyaVikas’.

This dynamic and interactive GramyaVikas model is a sequel to the simple, but static (using HTML maps), model ‘WebLUP (Web-based decision support system for rural land use planning)’ (Adinarayana, et. al, 2006 See Paper) designed to assist the rural extension community in Indian districts. WebLUP attracted feedback and initial interest from other academic / land use planners, and provided opportunity for those in similar ventures to make contact with each other within India and abroad. The insights from the above model/interactions also helped us in modeling the distributed collaboration rural-informatics model for decision making.

Profile of the Study Area and Scenario

Mahabubnagar district is in the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh State, falling in the Southern Plateau & Hill Agro-climatic region of India. It lies roughly between 16° - 17° North Latitude and 77° ? 79° East Longitude. Mahabubnagar district is bounded by Karnataka state (west), Nalgonda district (east), Ranga Reddy (north), and Kurnool district (south). The total geographical area of the district is 18,432 sq. km. The district is divided into Sixty Four Mandals (sub-district unit). The rural to urban population in the district is 9:1. The Achaean and Cuddapah formations of Basalt form the predominant geological formation of the district. The district is roughly divided into two physiographic units: the plains with low lying scattered hills and the extensive
Amarabad-Farhabad plateau with a continuous range of hills. The important rivers Krishna and Tungabhadra flow through the district.

The major rainfall is through southwest monsoon. Evaporation losses vary between 90 mm and 220 mm in summer. Annual evaporation of the region is in the range of 250-300 cm. There is a wide range of variation in the rainfall, number of rainy days and temperature in this region, and hence the climatic variation is remarkable. This indicates the periodic reversal of drought. Mean monthly wind speed ranges from 0-29 Mts/sec. Maximum mean wind speed is observed generally during southwest monsoon.

Principal crops in the district include jowar, paddy, groundnut and cotton. The major soil type includes black cotton soil, red soil and sandy soil. The total agricultural area and forestlands occupy about 37 % and 14.5 % (1997-98), respectively. The percentage of wastelands from the satellite data interpretation is about 13.5 (Wastelands Atlas of India,
MoRD/NRSA, 2000) to the total geographical area.

Soil erosion is a major environmental threat in the district. The problem is compounded by poor soil conservation practices, scantily distributed vegetation cover, moderate to steep slopes and with an erratic monsoon rainfall.

The common feature in the district is the inadequate means of survival. Unless very large-scale developmental measures to promote agriculture, water supply, industries and communication are effectively taken up, the district will continue to remain inert and un-progressive. Hence, a major planning, on the basis of ecological-socio-economic situation, is necessary for sustainable development of this rural-oriented district

Approach

1. Conceptualization of the problem

* Needs assessment for watershed/rural development programme. Consult / discuss with the rural extension community in the district and prioritize the GIS applications. Consultations could be at individual level or by group discussions.

* Identify the planning unit (Mandal/s; Watershed/s) after discussing with the district authorities.

* Database design application description; dataflow diagram; GIS function list and entity-relationship diagram.

2. The required thematic maps / database will be generated / collated from multi-source (space-, map- and ground-based systems) data to match the local (watershed / village-level) requirements.

3. Various watershed/village-level useful views/scenarios will be generated for watershed / rural development programmes.

4. Sectoral / Action plans will be formulated in line with the objectives of the project derived on need basis.

5. Customization / standardization of the GIS enabled / Geo-ICT tool / package will be carried out for local level acceptance / adoptability.

6. A policy framework for GIS applications in rural development (i.e. GIS Platform) will be envisaged.

* Identify the nodal agency.
* Define hardware/software requirements at district/state/central level .
* Capacity building.
* Mechanism for data transfer between various levels.

GramyaVikas

Realizing the current level rural development planning and the increasing demand of Geographical-Information & Communication Technology (Geo-ICT) applications in the rural systems in India, a distributed collaboration tool, called GramyaVikas (rural development), is being developed to assist the rural extension community in their own decision making process more interactively and in an integrated / coordinated manner. GramyaVikas, evolved out of the needs assessment with the user community, is a secured and cost-effective system developed for defined users with open source (a) content management system (PLONE) and (b) Geographical Information Systems (ALOV MAP/TM JAVA). This web-based tool will help the users to share/ retrieve the data/information; communicate for taking mutual decisions; make useful queries on spatial/non-spatial database to identify candidate villages/entities; and generate various views/scenarios for different rural development schemes. Presently, this Geo-ICT tool is being developed in an intranet environment. The resulting system is intended to assist the remote users in analyzing the rural-informatics for rural development planning decisions online and with the customized GIS tool to suit the requirements of a few line departments for decision making.

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