Indigenous regional systems and Rural Development in Southern India

As a result of critism of the industrial-urban biased paradigm of development, a new social development approach is beginning to emerge. According to this strategy, development must be fitted to ecological constraints, priority attention must be given to rural development, and planning for rural development must be decentralized, participatory, and deeply immersed in the particulars of local settings. Agropolitan districts, or networks of socio-economic and political interaction, have been suggested as a suitable territorial basis for this paradigm. In India, where local planning has not been successful, indigenous regional systems, which correspond closely to criteria suggested to delineate agropolitan districts, have existed for hundreds of years. This is especially true in Tamil Nadu where a hierarchy of nesting socio-spatial units is firmly established in peasant tradition. Information is presented on the positive and negative aspects of the use of such regions for rural planning. It is suggested that these regions may better fulfil the objectives of agropolitan development than sets of functional regions derived from the urban hierarchy.