Ashok Mitra, a renowned economist, proposed a scheme for the economic regionalisation of India as a way to address the imbalances and disparities in the country's economic development. The idea behind this scheme was to divide India into various economic regions based on certain criteria such as natural resources, geographical features, industrial activities, and socio-economic factors, so that each region could be developed according to its specific needs and potential. This would help in decentralising economic activities and promoting balanced regional development. Mitra's approach to economic regionalisation focused on the idea that economic policies, when applied uniformly across the entire nation, often fail to cater to the unique characteristics of different regions. He argued that India's diverse geography, culture, and resources required a more region-specific approach to economic planning. His vision was to create regions with their own identity and set of economic priorities that would enable local economies to grow in harmony with each other while addressing regional disparities. One of the key principles of Ashok Mitra's regionalisation theory was to move away from a top-down approach where policies from