People's community development and panchayati raj

During 1965, the National Institute of Community Development carried out a nation-wide survey on 'Awareness of Community Development in Village India'. All the sixteen states were covered in this survey and 7,224 respondents in 365 villages were interviewed to collect information on a larger number of subjects. The first report on this study was written by Charles P. Loomis of Michigan State University who was a Ford Foundation Consultant at the National Institute of Community Development at the time of the survey. His report entitled "Change in Rural India as Related to Social Power and Sex of Adults' has been published in the March 1967 issue of Behavioural Sciences and Community Development. Charles P. Loomis has also used some of the 'Awareness' data in his presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association held at San Francisco in summer this year. The second report on this study, Awareness of Community Development in Village India was written by Lalit K. Sen and Prodipto Roy and has been published by the National Institute of Community Development in October, 1966. A short summary of this report has

appeared in the May, 1967 issue of Kurukshetra. This is the third in this series and reports part of the data collected. during the survey. These three reports do not, however, exhaust the voluminous data which required about 100,000 IBM cards to store them. Since it is almost impossible to present and analyse all the data in one single report, we have planned to bring out a number of publications dealing with specific topics. A major report which focuses on modernisation in its various implications in our villages is now in preparation and is expected to be published early next year.

Reports on this study, including the present one, that have been published so far, are of a non-technical nature. This publication is primarily addressed to our policy-makers, administrators and the general public who are interested in gaining a first-hand knowledge of how the community influentials as well as the ordinary men and women in our villages feel about the two most important programmes aimed at modernising living conditions and attitudes of our rural people.