Planning for rural growth centre

Abstract

This Thesis and its research have aimed to better understand and insight the highly relevant topic of rural planning of growth centre concerning the decentralisation of urban amenities to selected rural growth centres. Growth Centre is one of the strategy of research for micro-level planning of rural development of the region. It acts as a service centre and centre of diffusion of innovations by providing basic needs and innovative ideas to the people for sustaining livelihood and exercising better to achieve balanced regional development. Growth center approach is one of the leading approaches to micro- level planning. The regional planning perspectives advance Perroux's definition of growth points by viewing the growth centre concept as a strategy to reduce regional inequalities between core regions and their peripheries. This allows the growth centre concept to be seen as an extension of the growth point definition. Perroux was the one who originally proposed the development centre or growth foci based regional planning in 1955. This was later followed by Von Thunen's Concentric Ring Model, Chirtaller's Central Place Theory, and Losch's hierarchy of central places notion.

Two concomitants but opposite spatial tendencies are observed in the process of socio-economic development i.e., concentration and dispersion of human activities. Since both occur simultaneously in real world; the relative strength of these two processes determines the spatial arrangement of human activities at any point of time. Whenever, centripetal forces are stronger, there is centralized concentration leading to the emergence of few large urban centres, whereas large tracts hinterlands are left underdeveloped. Therefore, there is a need to decentralize human activities at optimal location in rural areas by establishing rural growth centres for balanced socio- economic development. An identification of the potential and viable growth centres is based on the types of infrastructure facilities that need to be provided at optimum site with a view to improve the health of the rural economy. It is observed that certain level of functions is offered by a certain size of population cluster.

In recent years, a greater focus has been placed on the grass-roots planning method, and various rural development programmes have been developed to fulfil this objective. Both of these trends are positive developments. In accordance with the New India vision, the Indian government has initiated a mission known as PURA (Provision of Urban Amenities in Rural Area) with the objective of bringing about a change in rural India. This will be accomplished by introducing employment opportunities and urban conveniences into certain rural growth hubs in order to raise the standard of living in rural areas. This strategy of rural growth centres is predicated, on the one hand, on selectivity and, on the other, on the decentralisation of social amenities. It makes suggestions as to what kinds of facilities ought to be situated at various levels of the hierarchy. As a result, an all-around development of every village within a region can be ensured in an integrated fashion at a cost that is kept to a minimum.

The goal of the Thesis project was to build new infrastructural facilities in certain rural growth centres. These rural growth centres were chosen after careful consideration of a number of factors, including centrality and social amenity index, which were used to determine which rural growth centres already existed.