Today, there exists a role for the State in social infrastructure development. We submit that to bring in efficiency in such State sponsored investments, decentralized planning plays a key role. However, decentralized planning has unique problems. Problems of setting of proper priorities and selection of beneficiaries, and problems of lack of trained manpower to make use of local data and indeed a proper environment for taking up planning at the local level. We address both the problems, first, by developing a mathematical model the objective being to minimize inequality, in a region, and...