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District development planning to fulfill the basic needs of rural areas: GIS based assessment A case study of Kaski District, Nepal  Rajesh Bahadur THAPA Research Associate Remote Sensing and GIS Field of Study Asian Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 4, Klong Luang Pathumthani 12120,Thailand Tel: +66-2-524-6406 Fax: +66-2-524-5597 Email:rajesh@ait.ac.th Specialization: Geography, Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System. Kedar BASNET, PhD Associate Professor in Geography Department of Geography PN Campus, Tribhuvan University Pokhara, Nepal Tel: +977-61-528902 Email:gislab@fewamail.com.np Specialization: Geography, Urban and Regional Planning Abstract The District Development Planning (DDP) has been accepted as the focal point of coordination between national and village level planning in Nepal. As such, in Kaski district the DDP is inclined to provide development infrastructures in the villages, so that growth and development process can be accelerated. For the balanced development of the villages, some basic infrastructures such as road, electricity, drinking water, education, health service, communication, irrigation and rural industry are to be extended up to the grassroots level, however, the efforts of development concentrated only in some accessible sector of the district. In this study, a GIS based assessment has been performed to measure the efficiency of district development planning based on facilitated population from government provided development infrastructures. The eight major development infrastructure indicators are taken as parameters for measuring the level of development at district level. The distribution of development infrastructures of Kaski reveals the poor condition of the development at local level. The status of VDCs ranges from very low to high development. Uneven distribution pattern of development infrastructures was found in the district. Two VDCs are found highly facilitated, whereas other VDCs are still lacking development infrastructure. About 92% VDCs fall on the low development areas which presents failing of DDP to fulfill the basic needs of rural people in some extent. The major causes of failure may be physiographic complexity of rural VDCs, political instability in the country, financial constraint, biases in decision making, lack of detail spatial database on resources, etc. This effort will be a guideline to the district planners while allocating the development resources in rural areas where as GIS application found very interesting in measuring the DDP at district level. |