Rural Development and Programme

District Rural Development Agencies (DRDAs) are district level development execution and monitoring agencies created under the Indian Societies Registration Act. Substantial sums of rural development funds of government of India were transferred and routed through them under various Centrally Sponsored Schemes. From purely a financial resource from Rural Development point of view the DRDAs are extremely important institutions at the district level. With the adoption of the Constitutional mandate for decentralization of powers that privileged those self-government institutions in planning for economic development and social justice, the proposal to re-think the status of DRDAs and also to merge them with the panchayat had emerged.