Rural Planning: General

The heading 'rural planning' as a sector or government involvement is often absent from plan documents in many countries. But policy and legislation related to agricul tural, transporta tion and comt11unica tions, education, health and human services. and social welfare, sectors generally addressed in plans, have had far reaching and profound impacts on the physical conditions of, and infrastructure availabilitv in, rural areas, They have also determined the range a;ld quality of services accessible to rural populations, When headings such as rural planning, rural development, integrated rural development are present in plan documents. as discrete sectors requiring attention and having related funding lines in national and state budgets, these sectors are often defined in terms of engagement with social welfare agendas. The goals of such sectoral policies have often included statements about the need to redress inequalities in access to public services and redistributive justice. A broader definition of rural planning as encompassing policy that has both explicit and implicit intention to impact rural conditions, economic, social, and physical is adopted here. During the formative period of the United States in the nineteenth century, agriculture production was a central element in its' robust growth and development. Similarly, an agriculture-based economy and a pre­ dominantly agrarian population was the legacy of heavily populated, newly independent. countries like China and India, which faced the task of nation building in the second half of the twentieth century,