A Framework for Technological and Organisational Capacity Building for Local Level Planning in India

The planning process of the Indian government has undergone many changes since its launch in 1951. Decentralised local level planning is currently accepted as the national planning strat egy. Towards this end, the Constitution (73 rd and 74 th Amendments, 1992 & 1993) has been amended to empower the State Governments to form the Institutions of Local self -Governance (ILG). The mandates of such local level bodies are to draw up and implemen t integrated development schemes. These schemes require the collation and collection of data relating to local resources as well as the appropriate tools for processing the data to generate relevant information for local level planning. To address this need, the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India, launched the Natural Resources Data Management System (NRDMS) programme with the purpose of developing and providing geo-Information and Communication Technologies (geo -ICT) and tools to potential users. NRDMS started in 1982 as an R&D programme and has consumed about US$2 million to date. Many tools and techniques have been developed and demonstrated to potential users, including some ILGs. However, a recent NRDMS programme assessment revealed that utilization of geo -ICT tools and techniques has not been institutionalized in ILGs. The most prominent reasons include: (i) lack of technological capacity at ILGs (ii) poor linkage of geo-ICT with the organizational work flows at ILGs, ( iii) unavailable standardised and up -todate spatial data at all levels and (iv) lack of data sharing. Currently, joint federal efforts between DST and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to implement the Indian National Spatial Data Infrastru cture (NSDI) are expected to address the data availability and sharing problem at a federal level. Hence, building the requisite technological and organizational capacity at ILGs deserves special attention. In this paper, we (i) highlight the evolution of the NRDMS programme over the past 20 years, (ii) propose a framework for the assessment & development of technical and organizational capacity of ILGs, (iii) develop a local Spatial Data Infrastructure strategy for the generation and sharing of data pert inent to local level planning and (iv) outline a validation methodology of the proposed framework at the Bankura District of West Bengal in India.