The government will merge most of the 208 centrally sponsored rural development schemes to ensure that the funds reach the district-level bodies directly, and not through state governments. 
 
This will be part of a new rural development policy to be unveiled by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the conference of chief ministers on rural development and poverty alleviation, on Tuesday. 
 
"The prime minister will propose that almost all centrally assisted rural development schemes be merged to create individual district plans," said an official in the prime minister's office. 
 
This will be a radical departure from past practice where the state, and not the district, was considered the administrative unit for rural development. 
 
The crux of the prime minister's proposal is that it will be up to the districts to come up with plans for their development. These are to be conceived and implemented by the zilla parishads or the district development or planning boards, which will be constituted for each district. 
 
The centrally sponsored schemes not likely to be included in the list will be the big ones like the Indira Gandhi Awas Yojana and the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. 
 
The prime minister will also talk about the "vertical and horizontal proliferation of schemes and programmes and therefore a multiplication of effort" while implementing rural development schemes. 
 
"For the last three weeks, the prime minister has been intensively studying ways in which a new approach can be devised for financing rural development schemes," said the official. 
 
In the last Budget, the allocation under various rural development schemes was around Rs 17,000 crore (Rs 170 billion). With roughly 500 districts, the allocation per district comes to around Rs 400 crore (Rs 4 billion). 
 
The prime minister, according to sources, is not "unaware" that this policy might rub some state governments the wrong way. "We are apprehensive that state governments that have not implemented the Panchayati Raj Act will see this as an imposition of the Centre's will on them," said the official. 
 
More to the point, central funds have always been funnelled through the state government, which have often diverted them to their own pet projects. Direct allocation from the Centre to the level of districts is going to take away this power from the state governments. This move is part of the common minimum programme, although it was hotly opposed by the Left parties. 
 
"However, the prime minister says the policy shift should be seen within a wider framework of agricultural changes. He has kept in mind the fact that the southern states, with their good record on implementation of the Land Ceiling Act, and Punjab, where the green revolution was implemented, are miles ahead of several northern states," said the official.