Bangladesh is a small country having 147570 square kilometers area with 94% rural area where 76% of the total population live. These rural population mostly depends on agriculture which contributed 40% of GDP during 1980-81 after the independence of Bangladesh. So, rural development is the key element of the country development. On the contrast, rural people live with poverty, unemployment and other socio-economic challenges. After being an independent state in 1971, poverty alleviation and rural development initiatives were foreign aided. Rural poor depended on foreign aids. The then government of Bangladesh tried to focus on poverty alleviation and rural development through cooperative approach giving importance on the role of local government and local level planning. Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (BARD) initiated a research based ‘Total Village Development Programme’ in 1975 with the view of ‘One village, one organization’ to establish rural cooperatives for own socio-economic development and to avoid foreign aids and carried out the project with own resources in a limited scale until 1983. The project was inserted in the Third Five Year Plan as ‘Comprehensive Village Development Programme’ and accepted in Annual Development Plan in 1988-89 to implement in 80 villages primarily. After the success of the rural development model, it has been implementing throughout the country in 4375 villages.
Thus ‘Comprehensive Village Development Programme (CVDP)’ is a rural development model that aims to promote overall development of a village through self-help and self-effort by bringing all inhabitants under a single cooperative society. Until December, 2015, about 164500 jobless people are self-employed after getting trade-based trainings from different nation departments and micro-credits from respective cooperative societies in 4375 villages.
The paper intends to review the ‘Comprehensive village development Programme’. The paper also focus on effectiveness of this rural development model through analyzing its successes and shortcomings.
The research-data has been collected from both primary and secondary data sources such as key-informants interviews, project manuals and reports, journal articles etc. The researcher used discourse analysis of relevant policy papers to attain the objectives. The research found that the CVDP is highly successful in rural economic development, self employment generation, social and environmental quality enhancement, poverty reduction, public participation enhancement and women empowerment. However, the study identified some shortcomings of CVDP that includes corruption in cooperative governance, illiteracy, poor leadership quality in villages, lack of cooperative values etc.
Key words: Rural Development, Comprehensive Village Development Programme (CVDP), Cooperative approach
0b Indigenous, afro, and rural communities involvement with sustainability
