Regional Development and Social Movements in India – Geography – UGC NET – Notes

Regional Development

• In the 1950s when the discipline of regional development emerged it had a strong economic base and the focus was on what firms did in regions and how their performance influenced a range of economic indicators; employment, profit, GDP, and growth. Towards the end of the 20th century, regional development became more multi-disciplinary in its approach. Political science, public policy, and sociology became critical disciplines alongside economics focusing more on the notion of what a region might be and how a range of factors-not just economic-shaped the idea of a region. In the 21st century, economic geography has joined the disciplines and the focus of regional development is more on the spatial dynamics of regions-as places to live, work and invest, the focus for the discipline is just as much on people as drivers of regional development as smokestack industries, regional development agencies, and firms. Regional development is a broad term that can be seen as a general effort to reduce regional disparities by supporting (employment-and wealth-generating) economic activities in regions. In the past, regional development policy tended to try to achieve these objectives by means of long-scale infrastructure development and by attracting inward investment. Awareness of the need for a new approach is driven by the observation that past policies have failed to reduce regional disparities significantly and have not been able to help individual lagging regions to catch up, despite the allocation of significant public funding. The result is the underused economic potential and weakened social cohesion.

Concept of Development

• Development is a dynamic concept. It has different meanings for different people. In fact, there is no
  agreement on the meaning of development among planners and thinkers. Some people say it means an increase in income. Other lay emphases on employment, quality of life on happiness, still others give stress on meeting the basic needs of the people. The only thing on which everyone agrees is that development is necessary, and everyone wants, although in his own image and perhaps in his own way.
• Development has been defined as “a process of growth, expansion or realization of potential; bringing regional resources into full production use.’’ In other words, development is a process of change aiming at the socio-economic transformation of traditional societies into modern one which is greatly influenced by human beings. Activities related to the development are generally directed towards national buildings and socio-economic transformation. Development planning has also been defined as “any action by the state whose purpose is to raise the rate of economic growth above that which would take place without any conscious effort”. Development planning is being done by the state; it has the dual purpose of economic growth and social structural change; it is comprehensive covering every sector, region, and aspect of life the achievement of a state of development would enable individuals to make their own histories and geographies under conditions of their own choosing.
• ‘Development is normally equated simply with economic growth; few studies attempt to grasp the more complex question of social change. The concentration of attention on economic ‘development’ is no doubt partly due to its easier measurement; how indeed is social development to be measured? In addition to the attention paid to economic issues. There lies the implicit assumption that, in general, development should take place along the lines of western countries. The use of the word ’development ‘tends to imply that there is a set of developed nations, normally identified with the western nations astride the north Atlantic ocean, and a set of less developed or under-developed or developing countries, which given the right set of conditions, will in their turn be able to become developed this, for example, is the implicit assumption behind Rostow (1978) sequence of stages of economic growth. even the concept of underdevelopment which introduces the idea that the poorer countries of the world are poor in some way because of the existence of rich ones and thus overcomes the problems associated with the sequential concept of growth and maintains an underlying concern with economic issues. Historically, economic change has always been associated, sooner or later, with the degree of social change, with much recent research has been on economic change.
• The United Nations University Expert Group on Human and social development in November 1975 gave the meaning of ‘development’ as “development is fundamentally…about, by and for human beings. Development must therefore begin by identifying human needs. The objective of development is to raise the level of living of the masses of the people and to provide all human beings with the opportunity to develop their potential”. Thus the definition clarifies that the development implies not only expansion in quantitative terms but also structural changes in the society and its economy as expansion proceeds. The structural change includes institutional, social, and economic (sectoral as well as spatial) aspects. This implicit assumption behind the lumping together of all these aspects is that change in one element depends on and generates changes in all others. Secondly, development means a change in the desired direction and at the desired speed. The direction and rates of change will depend upon the goals and objectives of development. Thirdly, development presupposes policy interventions–direct or indirect-in achieving the given goals and objectives. Fourthly, development also involves the socio-psychological transformation of a human being to prepare them for the eventual as well as current benefits occurring from the changing socio-economic structure of society; and finally, development involves temporal, sectoral, and spatial phasing and integration of planning.