Synopsis A lot has been written and is also being written on rural development. People’s participation, basic minimum needs and target-groups oriented approaches to development and other related topics. All of them suggest that a broad consensus has been emerging on what went wrong in the past in the matter of planning and what new approaches should be adopted in the future to bring about distributive justice. The present book aims to address in a very direct way the issues involved in people-oriented development planning and attempts to explore the conceptual and operational problems of an alternative development strategy with particular focus on people’s participation and local level planning. The basic purpose of this volume is to attempt to provide a new strategy for rural development in the framework of integrated rural development. It covers the problem of local level planning and rural development in five chapters. The last chapter, besides devoting itself to summary and conclusions, also tries to provide some effective suggestions with regard to local level planning and successful implementation of different rural development programmes in order to provide opportunities for full and gainful employment to every person in the community starting from the poorest.