Patna, Aug. 12: Planning in Bihar is set to witness a sea change in the course of the Twelfth Five Year Plan document for 2012 to 2017. The state would introduce certain elements in the document, which were not taken into account earlier at the planning stage.

The first among them is land planning. Earlier, five-year plans did not take into account the land requirement for implementing schemes and projects at the time of their formulation. The Twelfth Five-Year Plan would take into account this aspect at the planning stage itself.

Earlier, there used to be provisions for setting up a number of community centres. But in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan standardisation of land requirement, estimation of required land and other aspects would be taken care of at the planning stage itself.

“Such things would help in speedy implementation of the plan as time would not be wasted in selecting suitable land or for its acquisition. Required land would be made available easily at the time of execution of the plan,” planning and development department principal secretary Vijoy Prakash told The Telegraph.

The new plan would also incorporate material requirements and inputs for projects.

“If a department plans in advance about the material it requires for a given project, steps can be taken for establishing and strengthening the supply chain. This would help in speedy completion of the project. Hence, we decided to incorporate this aspect at the planning stage,” Prakash said.

The Twelfth Five-Year Plan would also look into the human resource required for the schemes. It would touch upon both the requirement of skilled manpower and upgrade the skills of existing human resource to meet the requirement of the schemes.

While formulating plans for setting up new schools, the department concerned would have to give details about the number of teachers required for the proposed educational institutes. This input would allow planners to contemplate in advance on the need of setting up teachers’ training schools that could generate necessary trained manpower.

These three major aspects apart, the Twelfth Five-Year Plan would also include changes such as replacement of revenue villages as basic unit of the plan with tolas (habitations), and substitute mainstreaming with broad streaming at the time of plan formulation. A revenue village is the smallest unit for tax collection.

Broad streaming would introduce a system where schemes would be made in accordance with the needs of the people, instead of asking citizens to adapt according to the needs of the schemes. Similarly, by making tolas the basic unit of planning, the planners want to take care of all the habitations. Under the existing system, the primary focus was on the mainland of the village and the habitations in the periphery, which comprise mainly weaker sections of society, remained deprived of the benefits of the plan.

While there are 44,874 revenue villages in Bihar, the number of tolas is estimated to be more than 1 lakh.

With so many new elements to be introduced, the state government has started the groundwork for the plan. As a corollary of it, 16 sectoral working committees have been put in place to work out the details of the approach paper.