Peoples Participation in Development Administration in a Democratic Perspective: Issues and Strategies

Abstract

Most of the Third World countries face the common problem of making towards twin goals of nation building and rapid social economic progress. Poverty, illiteracy, corruption, low level of agricultural and industrial productivity pose a formidable challenge of development to the governments of these nations. The idea of development administration as a direct state engineered effort to intervene in the process of socio-economic transformation was therefore, born and adopted. Development administration is the administration of policies, programmes and projects to serve development purposes. It is a post second w orld war emergence. The contents of development administration are still evolving. During the last few decades, development was virtually identified with economic growth. But the question is 'can we remove poverty without the involvement of human resources or can we achieve the objectives of development administration without the people's participation. People's participation is a typical subject which has engaged the attention of the developing as well as developed countries. Why it has become so important today and what are its inherent characteristics in a democratic polity has been analysed in this paper. We have also mentioned in brief factors of effective participation and the strategies involved in this process.