Target area planning

Topic: Regional Planning and Sustainable Development in India · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 6 "Planning and Sustainable Development in Indian Context"

Meaning

Target area planning is a way of planning in which the government picks a backward area (a place held back by drought, desert land, hilly terrain or poorly used canal water) and makes a special development programme just for that place. It matters because India used it to stop regional imbalance (the gap between developed and backward regions) from growing. The same idea of "find the lagging place and send resources there" still shapes today's watershed, irrigation and district-level schemes.

Explanation

Why it came in (cause → response)

• The problem: planning widened the gaps between regions
• After about 15 years of planning, the gaps between regions were growing, not shrinking.
• Most of the growth in industry and farming went to regions that were already developed.

• Backward regions fell further behind.

• The response: two new approaches from the Planning Commission

• Target area planning picks backward places.
• Target group planning picks disadvantaged people.
• Both aimed to stop regional and social gaps from widening.

How it works

• Step 1: Find the handicap. Every target area has a special physical or economic weakness. Examples are drought, desert land, steep hills, or canal water that farmers cannot fully use.
• Step 2: Mark the area. The area must meet a clear test. For example:
• In 1967, the Planning Commission listed 67 districts as drought-prone, wholly or partly.

• In 1972, the Irrigation Commission added a test: an area is drought-prone if less than 30% of its gross cropped area is irrigated.

• Step 3: Use tools that suit the handicap. A desert needs shelterbelts. A canal command needs field channels. A hill district needs roads and services.

• Result: Money and effort go to the place that is falling behind, not to the place that is already growing fastest.

Its four programmes

• Drought Prone Area Programme (DPAP): for dry areas that get too little rain.
• Began in the Fourth Plan.

• Aim: create jobs and productive assets (lasting things like ponds and wells that keep earning).

• Hill Area Development Programme: began in the Fifth Plan (1974-79).

• Covered 15 districts.

• Command Area Development Programme (CADP), 1974-75: for command areas (the farmland a canal or irrigation project can water).

• The problem it fixed: a gap between irrigation potential created (land a dam and canal could water) and irrigation potential used (land that actually gets water).
  • Main canals were built, but small field channels were missing.
  • Water was lost to seepage (leaking into the soil) and waterlogging.
  • Farmers at the tail end of a canal got little water.

• Its tools:

  • Field channels: small channels from the outlet to each field
  • Lining of watercourses: sealing channels so water does not leak away
  • Land levelling: so water spreads evenly over a field
  • Warabandi: rotational supply. Each farmer gets canal water for a fixed time on a fixed day, in proportion to the land they hold.
  • Drainage: removes extra water to prevent waterlogging and salinity (salt building up in the soil)
  • Afforestation: planting trees along canals

• Desert Development Programme (DDP), 1977-78: for hot and cold deserts.

• Desertification means good land turning into desert-like land. It is caused by low rain, wind erosion, overgrazing and loss of tree cover.
• Aims: control desertification, restore ecological balance, and raise the productivity of land, water, livestock and people.
• Tools:
  • Afforestation: planting trees on degraded land
  • Shelterbelts: rows of trees that block wind and stop sand drifting onto fields
  • Pasture development: better grassland for livestock
  • Water harvesting: collecting and storing rainwater

How it grew and changed

• Eighth Plan: special area programmes. These built infrastructure in four kinds of areas:
• hill areas
• north-eastern states
• tribal areas
• backward areas

• Logic: rough terrain, remoteness and poor connectivity mean these areas need their own plans for roads, power, water and services.

• Merger into watershed management

• Step 1: DPAP, DDP and the Integrated Wastelands Development Programme (IWDP) were all run by the Department of Land Resources, with the watershed as the planning unit [2]. (A watershed is the area drained by one stream, so all its rain flows to one common outlet.)
• Step 2: From 2009-10, the three were joined into the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP) [2].

• Step 3: In 2015-16, IWMP became the Watershed Development Component of PMKSY (WDC-PMKSY) [7].

• CADP today

• It is now called Command Area Development and Water Management (CADWM).
• From 2015-16, it is part of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) – Har Khet Ko Pani (HKKP) [3].

• It hands control of local canals to Water Users' Associations (WUAs) (farmers' groups that run local canals) [3].

• Continuity: NITI Aayog (2015) replaced the Planning Commission. It continues area-based targeting through the Aspirational Districts Programme (2018), which picks the most backward districts for focused development.

Where it occurs

• Hill Area Development Programme (Fifth Plan, 1974-79): 15 districts, including:
• the hills of Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand)
• the Mikir Hills and North Cachar Hills in Assam
• Darjeeling in West Bengal

• the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu

• Command Area Development: applied in the Indira Gandhi Canal command in western Rajasthan.

• Desert Development Programme (1977-78):

Desert type	States / UT	Main features
Hot desert	Rajasthan (Thar), Gujarat (Kachchh), Haryana	Very little rain, high temperatures, moving sand dunes
Cold desert	Jammu and Kashmir (now Ladakh), Himachal Pradesh (Lahaul-Spiti)	High altitude, in the rain shadow of the Himalaya, very cold and dry

• Drought Prone Area Programme: dry, rain-short districts. In 1967, 67 districts were listed as drought-prone, wholly or partly.
• Who runs the programmes now:
• WDC-PMKSY (the old DPAP + DDP + IWDP line) is run by the Department of Land Resources (Ministry of Rural Development) [6]. It develops degraded and rainfed areas [6].
  • WDC-PMKSY 2.0: in 2021-22, 1,150 projects were sanctioned, covering about 50 lakh hectares at ₹12,303 crore [7].
  • 56 new projects worth ₹700 crore were approved for 10 best-performing states (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Nagaland, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim), about 5,000 ha each [6].

• CADWM sits under PMKSY – HKKP from 2015-16 [3].

  • Modernisation of CADWM (M-CADWM): approved by the Cabinet on 9 April 2025 for 2025-26, with an initial outlay of ₹1,600 crore [4][5].
  • 34 pilot clusters in 23 States/UTs, with central help of about ₹882.67 crore [5].

• Aspirational Districts Programme (2018): run by NITI Aayog in the most backward districts.

Don't confuse with

• Target group planning: it picks disadvantaged people (small farmers, marginal farmers, landless workers) wherever they live, through SFDA and MFAL/MFDA. Target area planning picks a backward place. Listing SFDA as a target area scheme is a common trap.
• Growth-centred (sectoral) planning: the earlier approach put money into fast growth of industry and farming. That growth flowed to already-developed regions and widened gaps. Target area planning was the fix for this.
• Irrigation potential created vs. irrigation potential used: "created" is the land a canal could water. "Used" is the land that actually gets water. CADP targets the gap between them, not the building of new dams.
• IWMP vs. WDC-PMKSY: IWMP (2009-10) merged DPAP + DDP + IWDP [2]. WDC-PMKSY is the same work under PMKSY from 2015-16 [7].

Prelims Hooks

• Area vs. group: CADP, DPAP, DDP and Hill Area Development are target area programmes. SFDA and MFAL are target group programmes.
• Start years in order: DPAP (Fourth Plan) → Hill Area Development (Fifth Plan, 1974-79) → CADP (1974-75) → DDP (1977-78).
• DDP coverage: hot deserts in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Haryana. Cold deserts in Ladakh (formerly J&K) and Himachal Pradesh. Punjab is not covered.
• Drought-prone test (Irrigation Commission, 1972): less than 30% of gross cropped area irrigated. Planning Commission list (1967): 67 districts.
• Warabandi = rotational canal water supply, with fixed turns in proportion to landholding. It is a CADP tool.
• M-CADWM (2025-26): ₹1,600 crore. Underground pressurised pipes up to the farm gate for plots of up to 1 hectare. Uses SCADA (remote monitoring and control of canal gates and flows) and IoT (connected sensors) for water accounting [4]. Expected to benefit about 70,000 farmers directly and about 3.5 lakh indirectly [4].

Mains Points

• Why target area planning was needed (GS-I, regional development):
• Growth-centred planning widened regional gaps. Backward regions fell further behind.
• Target area plans tackle physical handicaps (drought, desert, hills, unused canal capacity) with tools suited to each.

• Used with target group planning, it reaches both backward places and the poor people living in them. A place-based scheme alone can miss the poorest.

• From building canals to managing water (GS-III, irrigation):

• Big dams without field channels waste water and cause waterlogging and salinity, as in the Indira Gandhi Canal command.
• CADP's on-farm tools (field channels, lining, warabandi, drainage) close the gap between irrigation potential created and used.

• Water Users' Associations [3] and piped, SCADA-monitored supply under M-CADWM [4] move the focus to farmer-run, measured water use.

• From separate schemes to watershed management (GS-III, environment):

• DPAP, DDP and IWDP overlapped on the same dry lands. Merging them into IWMP (2009-10) [2] and then WDC-PMKSY (2015-16) [7] made the watershed the single planning unit.
• Results of WDC-PMKSY 1.0: about a 70% rise in farmers' income and an average groundwater rise of about 3 metres [8].
• Weaknesses and how today's schemes respond:
  • Older projects were top-down, built structures and had little local participation.
  • Aspirational Districts (2018) and WUAs try to fix this with ranking, monitoring and local ownership.

Related concepts

• Target group planning
• Command Area Development Programme
• Desert Development Programme

Read more

• Target area and target group planning