USE OF GIS IN DISTRICT LEVEL PLANNING FOR SCHOOL EDUCATION

Abstract

Planning in India has generally been centralised. Accordingly Planning Commission in 1969 advocated the decentralised planning. Planning Commission also stated that " Planning is not something which comes from outside or above but what each state, district, locality and community does to develop its own resources and potential i ties " The role of education in .achieving rapid economic development and technological progress and in creating a social order, founded on the value of freedom, social justice and equal opportunity, has been clearly established. Hence, quite of late District level planning has been increasingly argued for in the context of general phnning as well in that of educational planning as District is found to be a. viable unit for decentralized planning. Geographic Information System (GIS) is an increasingly used tool now-a-days in analyses like Regional and Administrative Planning, Environmental Studies, Hydrology and Water Resources etc. because of its obvious advantages over the conventional methodS, being faster, economical and efficient in deriving the useful results. In this study, ARC/INFO-GIS is used for decentralised planning in the field of elementary education, for Hisar District in Haryana. With the use of GIS, a database for elementary education planning is generated which was used to define the possible locations for new schools at village level, taking the criteria of populatioh, distance, proximity to habitation and number of existing schools into account. The planning of resources in terms of cost has also been carried out which is a useful information for the planners to improve-the elementary education in the District.