Rural development projects have been implemented since 2004 to minimize the income gap between the rural and urban communities and to improve the quality of life to these rural communities as well as to promote a balanced approach to developing our li...
Rural development projects have been implemented since 2004 to minimize the income gap between the rural and urban communities and to improve the quality of life to these rural communities as well as to promote a balanced approach to developing our limited land resources. At the initial stage, most of the investments were concentrated on the improvement of resident conditions including new construction, renovation of housing and facilities for increasing income(* After this it is called by 'income facility'). And then the flow of investments was slowly changed and the investments were focused to the projects for invigorating interaction between the rural and urban communities. It was expected to contribute to restoring rural communities or revitalizing rural development zones. However, the most important portion of projects is still on constructing facilities even if the target or the purpose of the projects is changing after 10 years past. It has caused some problem like non productive idle facilities and made awakened about the importance of operation and management sector in the rural development plan.
The reasons that these rural development projects were slow to take off are various such as the lack of specialized facility operation and management plan, the excessive spending on operating costs caused by the irrationality of the plan, problems for the operating personnel and natural resources or conflict between local residents.
This study was started in the consciousness for the absence of rational operating and managing plans of income facilities and rural assets after analyzing the previous cases and research. These business plans should be planned through analysing local resources and condition comprehensively.
The rural development is supposed to be creative depending on resources and the environment in rural villages, but actually the master plan for each rural areas has been made by the standardized manual. The plan of each sites is consisted of similar content. In most of cases, there are no specific detailed plans which are showed how to operate and manage individual parts in the master plan. The projects by public sector are different from private sector ones. The responsibility for the success or failure of business in private sector is quite obvious, but the responsibility for public project is ambiguous and project can be executed by unprepared organizations or personnels. If the business in the private sector failed partially, it could cause the fatal loss for entire business. This is the reason why private business are thoroughly well prepared. Comparing with private business rural development projects weren't prepared well relatively.
In this study, it is analyzed how much the executive staffs are aware of the importance of the criteria for selecting rural development projects and how much these criteria are reflected when the plan is executed. 'Continuity of business' and 'Easy maintenance' are very low graded even when they are very important criteria for selecting projects. The main reason for the poor business and non-operating facilities was the lack of facilities operations personnel and maintenance costs. Therefore, the analysis and feasibility of the site or zone should be geared for success to these rural development projects.
As a result, several proposals of rural development plans are introduced to overcome the limitations and problems that occur during implementation of these projects. First, the master planning model were developed based on the criteria for selecting rural development projects and case studies. Second, the business planning model for increasing income in rural area was developed by considering the business plan model for entrepreneurship ' which consists of a revenue-generating private sector.Third, a business plan model of income facilities was proposed to the operating and management model of idle facilities.