New India Requires New Imagination For Local Government
The 24th day of April is celebrated as National Panchayati Raj Day in India. The institutional mechanism of panchayats roots back to ancient Indian history which was not eradicated even during coercive British rule. One of the prominent reasons for it was the deeply ingrained perspective of localized dispute resolution. Even today, the word “panchayat” is used as a slang for the practice of people having very open conversations.
Debate and discussion!
Whenever we see a deadlock in the Parliament of the country, some or the other of the prominent faces underlines the ethos of Indian polity by saying
“we should solve our differences through debate and discussion”.
This idea is the fulcrum of democracy and Panchayats being the nearest institution to the masses become the defacto anchoring institution of realising democracy in daily life. After the 73rd and 74th amendments in the constitution of India, Panchayats got the new avatar of being a systemic body, which brought a huge shift in the status of citizens. How?
Panchayats being the nearest institution to the masses become the defacto anchoring institution of realising democracy in daily life
Do you have contitutional authority to intervene in development planning?
All Panchayats are made up of Gram Sabhas. And a Gram Sabha is a constitutionally recognised body which is made up of people who are enrolled in the voters list of the territory of that Panchayat. This means that Gram Sabha designates and authorizes each and every voter to make official intervention in the policy formulation and its implementation. But that authority is yet to be fully realized.
Gram Sabha expresses the constitutional authority vested in each voter for contibuting in governance
Looking at the development cycle, size of the country, its geo-political and geo-economic situation,
I find we have made significant progress in a very short span of time so far. 29 years (1993 - 2022) is a short span of time when we see the human development cycle, that too in a young country like India which got its independence in 1947.
Recent developments in Panchyati Raj System
Till the recent past, we didn’t have data of villages available in the public domain - now we have. Mission Antyodaya framework which assesses each of the 6 lakh villages in the country on 141 indicators. It develops a gap report which gives a ready made checklist to all the systemic elements to target the development goals. I feel fortunate to have worked on this project and contributing exclusively with a convergence framework chapter in the Model Training Module developed by the NIRDPR, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India.
Till the recent past we did not have any tracking system of how the villages and panchayats are planning their development. Now we do have multi platforms like GPDP (Gram Panchayat Development Plan) Plan Plus, e-gram swaraj and e-panchayat. These platforms give us exact information about the fund allocated to any particular panchayat and the projects undertaken with the fund.
The challenge that Panchayati Raj System is facing at present are of two types:
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The visualization of a policy or a project is fine. But the execution of the same on the ground is a different ball-game altogether. And to do that, we have got a system which places people who can prove that they can mug-up the facts and formulas in the largest amount. Whereas, the situation requires smart professionals who understand the technicalities of needs and can plan for holistic community development. At present, we face technical capability gap in both the selected and elected officials.
The skill gap in the selected officials in Panchayats hurts the most.
2. The systemic dependency of Panchayats on state governments
To be very direct and precise, the states are very apprehensive about sharing the functions with panchayats. Apprehension is heavily influenced by the presence of skill gaps at the Panchayat level. State governments hardly believe that if Panchayats are given the responsibility to prepare exclusive development plans, they will be able to do it. This is the reason why we see that funds are either not being utilized or being misutilised. This lacunae is a big stumbling block for the initiatives where Panchayats can work directly with corporates and mobilize investments.
Panchayats are the type of "government" which has hardly any own source of revenue. It is hard to run the life of an individual without own source of revenue, how can a government run?
Time for academia to underline its presence
Amidst all these, the only hope that we see is injecting acceleration by bringing in new talent as a catalyst force. Development sector is trying to do that through private companies, social enterprises and voluntary efforts. But the surprising fact of the paradigm is that we are missing the bus on this track as well.
During thousands of interviews with scholars from reputed universities of national and global repute, I have observed that Indian academia is very light on addressing the issues of local government.
After pursuing masters degrees in Public Policy, Rural Development or Regulatory Governance, the students are not having very clear ideas about the architecture, function and importance of local government in the country. It brings retardation. Once Elon Musk was asked about the secret of processing information and visualizing the future - how does he do that? - he responded - “You need to know the basics first and then only you can build on it”.
We are trying to localize the SDGs, find contextualized solutions for sustainability of development but how would we be able to map it until and unless we know the paradigm, the system, in and out, through which the intervention will either make it or break it?
The other reason for this problem may be our detachment from local government. We do not promote our own engagement in local government at household level from the very beginning. It remains an affair of the eldest.
We study the problem of lack of peoples’ participation in local government after actually contributing to it.
It needs to be changed. Digital India has made it easier to start.
New Imagination is required to make rich local government
Academia needs to have convergence with the real ground. And the local government is probably the best place to do experiments. We need intellectual anchoring of mechanisms, frameworks and theories. Much more knowledge creation is required to find the right way of ensuring holistic sustainable development, new public management for Indian Villages, new technology for transparency and accountability with which we will be able to build strong and effective Institutions of Local Self Government.