Target area and target group planning

Detail

Why the approach changed (cause → response)

• The problem: After about 15 years of planning, gaps between regions were growing, not shrinking.
• Industry and farm growth went mostly to regions that were already developed.

• Backward regions and poor groups fell further behind.

• The response: The Planning Commission brought in two new approaches. Both aimed to stop regional and social gaps from widening:

• target area planning, which picks backward places
• target group planning, which picks disadvantaged people

Feature	Target area planning	Target group planning
Unit of focus	A backward place (a canal command, a drought area, a desert, a hill district)	A disadvantaged group of people
Problem addressed	Regional imbalance	Social and economic imbalance
Examples	Command Area Development, Drought Prone Area Programme, Desert Development Programme, Hill Area Development	SFDA, MFAL/MFDA

Target area planning

• Definition: Development planned for a backward area that has a special physical or economic handicap, such as poor irrigation use, drought, desert land or steep hilly terrain.
• Its four programmes:
• Command Area Development Programme (CADP): for canal command areas
• Drought Prone Area Programme (DPAP): for dry, rain-short areas. It began in the Fourth Plan. Its aim was to create jobs and productive assets.
  • In 1967 the Planning Commission listed 67 districts as drought-prone, wholly or partly. (NCERT)
  • In 1972 the Irrigation Commission added a test: an area is drought-prone if less than 30% of its gross cropped area is irrigated. (NCERT)
• Desert Development Programme (DDP): for hot and cold deserts
• Hill Area Development Programme: started in the Fifth Plan (1974-79). It covered 15 districts, including the hills of Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand), the Mikir Hills and North Cachar Hills of Assam, Darjeeling in West Bengal and the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu. (NCERT)

Target group planning

• Definition: Development planned for a disadvantaged section of society, wherever its members live.
• Small Farmers Development Agency (SFDA): helps small farmers get credit, inputs and technology so their farms can earn a living.
• Marginal Farmers and Agricultural Labourers Development Agency (MFAL/MFDA): helps two groups:
• marginal farmers, who own very small plots

• landless farm workers, who work on other people's land

• Why it was needed: A scheme aimed at a place can still miss the poorest people living in it. A scheme aimed at a group reaches them directly.

Eighth Plan: special area programmes

• The Eighth Plan designed special area programmes to build infrastructure in four kinds of areas:
• hill areas
• north-eastern states
• tribal areas

• backward areas

• Logic: these areas have physical handicaps (rough terrain, remoteness, poor connectivity). So they need their own plans for roads, power, water and services.

Command Area Development Programme (1974-75)

• Command area: the farmland that a canal or irrigation project can water.
• The problem: A gap opened 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.

• The response (CADP, 1974-75), using these tools:

• Field channels: small channels that carry water from the outlet to each field
• Lining of watercourses: sealing channels to stop seepage
• Land levelling: so water spreads evenly across a field
• Warabandi: rotational supply, in which each farmer gets canal water for a fixed time on a fixed day, in proportion to the land they hold
• Drainage: to remove extra water and prevent waterlogging and salinity (salt building up in the soil)

• Afforestation: tree planting along canals

• Where it was applied: the Indira Gandhi Canal command in western Rajasthan.

• Current status:
• The scheme is now called Command Area Development and Water Management (CADWM).
• From 2015-16, CADWM is part of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) – Har Khet Ko Pani (HKKP) [3].
• PMKSY was launched in 2015-16 with three aims: get water to farms, expand the area under assured irrigation, and improve on-farm water-use efficiency [3].
• HKKP has 4 sub-components: CAD&WM, Surface Minor Irrigation, Repair-Renovation-Restoration (RRR) of water bodies, and Ground Water development [3].

• CADWM aims [3]:

  • use irrigation water more efficiently
  • give assured water to every farm field
  • hand control of the irrigation system to Water Users' Associations (WUAs) (farmers' groups that run local canals)

• Latest update: Modernisation of CADWM (M-CADWM)

• Approved by the Cabinet on 9 April 2025 as a sub-scheme of PMKSY for 2025-26, with an initial outlay of ₹1,600 crore [4][5].
• It uses underground pressurised pipes to carry water from the source to the farm gate, for plots of up to 1 hectare [4].
• It uses SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition: remote monitoring and control of canal gates and flows) and IoT (Internet of Things: connected sensors) for water accounting [4].
• It is expected to benefit about 70,000 farmers directly and about 3.5 lakh indirectly [4].
• 34 pilot clusters have been approved in 23 States/UTs, with central assistance of about ₹882.67 crore [5].

Desert Development Programme (1977-78)

• Desertification: good land turning into desert-like land. It is caused by low rain, wind erosion, overgrazing and loss of tree cover.
• Areas covered:

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, rain shadow of the Himalaya, very cold and dry

• 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 from drifting onto fields
• Pasture development: improving grassland for the livestock economy

• Water harvesting: collecting and storing rainwater

• How the scheme was merged:

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

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

• WDC-PMKSY today:

• It develops degraded and rainfed areas through integrated watershed projects [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, about 5,000 ha each [6]. The states were Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Nagaland, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Sikkim.
• Results of WDC-PMKSY 1.0: about a 70% rise in farmers' income and an average groundwater rise of about 3 metres [8].

Continuity of the idea

• Area-based targeting continues in NITI Aayog (2015), which replaced the Planning Commission. It continues especially in the Aspirational Districts Programme (2018), which picks the most backward districts for focused development.
• The same logic runs from the CADP of the 1970s to today's schemes: find the lagging place or group, then direct resources to it.

Prelims Hooks

• Target area planning = backward places (CADP, DPAP, DDP, Hill Area). Target group planning = disadvantaged people (SFDA, MFAL). A common trap is to list SFDA as a target area scheme.
• Start years in order: DPAP (Fourth Plan) → Hill Area Development (Fifth Plan, 1974-79) → CADP (1974-75) → DDP (1977-78).
• DDP covers: hot deserts in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Haryana; cold deserts in Ladakh (formerly J&K) and Himachal Pradesh. Punjab is not covered.
• IWMP (2009-10) merged three schemes: DPAP + DDP + IWDP [2]. In 2015-16 it became WDC-PMKSY [7].
• CADWM sits under PMKSY – Har Khet Ko Pani from 2015-16 [3]. The watershed part is under the Department of Land Resources (Ministry of Rural Development), not Jal Shakti [6].
• 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 piped irrigation up to 1 ha; SCADA and IoT [4]. 34 clusters in 23 States/UTs [5].
• Hill Area Development (Fifth Plan): 15 districts, including the Mikir Hills, North Cachar Hills (Assam), Darjeeling (West Bengal) and the Nilgiris (Tamil Nadu).
• Eighth Plan special area programmes: hill areas, north-eastern states, tribal areas and backward areas.

Mains Points

• Why target planning came in (GS-I, regional development):
• Growth-centred planning widened regional and social gaps.
• Target area plans tackle physical handicaps: drought, desert, hills, unused canal capacity.
• Target group plans tackle social handicaps: small and marginal farmers, landless workers.

• Using both together reaches backward places and the poor people inside them.

• The gap between irrigation created and used (GS-III, irrigation):

• Big dams without field channels waste water and cause waterlogging and salinity, for example in the Indira Gandhi Canal command.
• CADP's on-farm tools address this: field channels, lining, warabandi and drainage.

• Water Users' Associations [3] and piped, SCADA-monitored supply under M-CADWM [4] move the scheme from building canals to managing water.

• 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.
• Reported results of WDC-PMKSY 1.0: about a 70% rise in farmers' income and about a 3 m rise in groundwater [8].

• Lesson: desertification is best fought with ecological fixes (shelterbelts, pasture, water harvesting) rather than only by extending irrigation.

• Limits and the way forward:

• Projects were often run top-down with little local participation. They focused on building structures, and treated places and groups separately.
• Today's districts-first targeting (Aspirational Districts, 2018) and farmer-run institutions (WUAs) try to fix these weaknesses through ranking, monitoring and local ownership.