Inaugurated on 17 August 1996 for the Ninth Five-Year Plan, the People's Plan Campaign devolved 35-40 per cent of Kerala's plan outlay to its 1,214 panchayats and municipalities and required them to prepare their own development plans. Gram sabhas, development seminars, volunteer resource persons and sectoral task forces produced local resource maps, project reports and plan documents in a statewide training exercise involving hundreds of thousands of people. It was steered by the State Planning Board together with the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, drawing on decades of literacy and popular-science organising. Kerala's annual plan is still assembled from these local plans.
This was the only large-scale Indian attempt to give the 73rd and 74th Amendments genuine fiscal and planning substance, and it remains the reference case in international debates on participatory budgeting and district planning. It also proposed an alternative to master-planning for Kerala's continuous rural-urban settlement: a territory managed through thousands of local plans rather than one metropolitan blueprint.
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