(c) Copyright belongs to the author. Do not cite or quote without the express permission of the author.

The Development of Panchayati Raj in India

Draft only: not to be quoted

Crispin Bates
(University of Edinburgh)

The concept of Panchayati raj seemed for a while in the years after Indian independence to have disappeared permanently into the mists of India's romantic past. In the late twentieth century however the notion has returned once more to the political agenda, for a variety of reasons: strategic, practical, economic, and ideologic. This paper sets out to trace in brief the origins of the concept of Panchayati, offers some historical examples of the Panchayat in use, and attempts an explanation as to why it should once again have assumed importance in the minds of politicians, NGOs and administrators. To begin with, we need to ask about the place of the Panchayat in Indian tradition, upon which one discovers that the modern usage of the term has an etymology which is not very indigenous. 

Using inscriptions and other sources, historians have identified patterns of association and resistance among peasant communities in both north and south India. The terms used to describe such communities include the bhaiband or 'brotherhoods' in the villages of the Bombay Deccan, and the nurwa and patidar in Gujarat. Further back in time, the gana, sabha, samiti and parisad in the north and the nadu, brahmadeya and periyanadu in southern India refer to equivalent political or social communities, whilst anthropologists have observed the functioning of caste panchayats in the present day. To a large extent however the modern idea of the Panchayat, its nature and its functions, derives from the image of the Indian village Community conjured up in the writings of Sir William Jones, Hector Munro, Mountstuart Elphinstone, John Malcolm and a variety of other colonial authors of the Orientalist school in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

References to panchayats and ganapadas in ancient Vedic texts, translated into English for the first time by orientalist scholars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, played a part in persuading British officials that here was to found an elemental unit of Indian society and politics. Its most succinct and influential expression however lay in Charles Metcalfe’s defence of the mahalwari system of revenue settlement adopted in the newly ceded and conquered territories of the North-Western Province (later U.P.). Describing the fortified villages which sprung up around Delhi in the years after the collapse of Mughal power in 1761 Metcalf wrote to the 1832 Select Parliamentary Committee on the East India Company’s charter in brilliantly evocative terms:

 'The village communities are little republics, having nearly everything they can want within themselves and almost independent of any foreign relations. They seem to last where nothing else lasts. Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down; revolution succeeds to revolution; Hindoo, Pathan, Mogul, Mahratta, Sikh, English, are all masters in turn; but the village community remains the same...This union of the village communities, each one forming a separate state in itself, has, I conceive, contributed more than any other cause to the preservation of the people of India through all the revolutions and changes which they have suffered, and is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence'.

The same description was next picked up by Karl Marx and used to describe what he saw as one of the characteristic features of the societies that existed under ‘Oriental despotism’.

The idea of the Village Community, and of the Panchayat or village council, then went on to assume enormous importance in the writings of Henry Maine, who, in an effort to contradict the Roman school of law, represented by Austin, sets out to describe in his influential Ancient Law (1861), the historical evolution of legal systems, linking these systems to what he saw as the various stages in the progress of Civilisation. This theory was later underlined in the writings of Baden-Powell and others (The Indian Village Community) and became one of the backbones of the theory of indirect rule developed in India in the second half of the nineteenth century and extended elsewhere into other British colonial territories.

In the hands of these later colonial administrators, the main purpose of the idea of the village community and of its Panchayat, or council of elders, was that it purported to be a natural and customary source of authority upon whom the government could legitimately devolve certain responsibilities, thus avoiding the costs of a minute and detailed system of policing and of law, whilst at the same time avoiding the time-consuming and controversial business of holding elections and setting up local authorities to deal with matters such as street cleaning and petty theft. In time, a measure of democratic local government was also introduced, beginning with Municipal Boards in 1882, which were set up to administer towns which were also large enough to have a magistrate. However, the village community and its panchayat, remained a first resort in case of dispute, practically at least if not juridically, over large parts of rural India.

The problem was of course that lineage, locality and caste were the main determinants of traditional village tribunals, and the so-called village panchayats were often no more than caste panchayats (which were and still are widespread). This was a poor apparatus upon which to heap the burden of jurisdiction and the legal standards expected within a British-style system of justice  Furthermore, despite the best efforts of Elphinstone in Maharashtra, Munro in Madras, and the Lawrence brothers in the Punjab in particular, no matter how hard they were pressed, British district collectors were always reluctant to devolve much of their power to a lower level.

At the same time, the parallel development of the British court system meant that villagers were becoming increasingly reluctant to submit their disputes to the informal jurisdiction of a group of elderly high caste peers, and when they did so, would often then turn to the local British magistrate to overturn a judgement they had just received if it were not to their liking. The real authority of the village Panchayat therefore, where it existed, was thus steadily eroded.

Despite this reality, however, by the later nineteenth century the ideal of village self-rule had been firmly entrenched in the minds of most colonial officials, and indeed that of the wider public. After all, were not such ‘communities’ the origin of democracy in Ancient Greece and, transmitted to us via the Teutons, the fount of democracy in British society itself? The India village community, and its leitmotif, the Panchayat, had thus become firmly embedded in the orientalist imagining of India. And within that imagination, it had an important political role to play: the village, and the sturdy peasant being always loyal to the British regime, in the minds of the British, no matter how hard the wily Congressmen and educated elites might attempt to mislead them.

It was no great surprise therefore that in the wake of Lord Ripon’s enthusiasm for local self-government in the 1880’s attempts were made by William Wedderburn in Bombay, Elphinstone’s former province, and by others, to revive the village Panchayat. 'On the platform under the tree in the village', Wedderburn wrote, 'truth is spoken, but not often in the law courts...'. Unfortunately, just as many were suspicious as there were enthusiasts for the idea of village committees, arguing that they were liable to corruption and anyway so irrevocably faction-ridden as to make them incapable of impartially administering any form of justice, no matter how trivial the limits of their authority may be.

In 1920 however, following the report of the Royal Commission on decentralisation, and the Montagu-Chelmsford report of 1918, the nettle was grasped again, and village Panchayats were formally vested with legal powers in no less than five provinces, including the Punjab, Central Provinces and U.P. The reasons for doing this were of course purely practical: most official commentators accepted that by this date the ‘ancient’ village communities of which Metcalf had written, if they had ever existed, were all but extinct. And should anyone doubt it, reference could be made to the 1911 census, in which particular efforts had been made to track down and enumerate village committees. The census concluded that the ‘myth’ of their existence had ‘probably arisen from the fact that a village is generally, if not invariably, formed by members of the same caste’ and that castes often had their own panchayats, even though the village might not.

Nonetheless, the various provincial administrations went ahead and formally invested village committees with a combination of administrative and judicial powers, for a variety of reasons: one being the obvious grounds of economy as it was hoped that they might relieve pressures on the overstretched district and provincial courts. There was also the hope that by conferring powers upon villages, and cutting out the over-educated (and increasingly troublesome) class of collaborators upon whom the British depended for much else in their administration, the white rulers might further cement the bond between themselves and their loyal subjects.

The composition of these village committees and the powers they exercised varied enormously from Province to Province. Most were democratically elected, although in the U.P. all elections by the  gaon sabha had to be approved by the local magistrate. Although hardly a ‘traditional’ method of selection, this procedure at least had the merit of locality combined with some sort of oversight. Nearly all of them were constituted primarily to carry out judicial business.  In Punjab, Bombay and the Central Provinces the Panchayats covered about one-tenth or one-fifteenth of the countryside; in U.P. a quarter of the province was brought under their jurisdiction; and in Bengal and Madras presidencies panchayats were set up throughout the length of the country.  Whilst initially the village committees set up by the 1920 act enjoyed some measure of success (the Bengal panchayats disposed of some 122,760 cases in 1925), the picture thereafter was one of steady decline, probably partly because, as previously stated, their jurisdiction was all too easily subverted by resort to a British court.

Ironically , it was during this same period, when the British were somewhat cynically encouraging the Panchayati system and putting its role into statute, that the idea of the Panchayat also entered into nationalist discourse. To nationalists however the Panchayat was not simply a cheap and easy means of indirect rule. It  instead had become emblematic of the type of democratic government which Mahatma Gandhi and others wished to see supplanting that of the Europeans post-independence.

Gandhi of course was well educated and deeply influenced by a variety of western writers, including Leo Tolstoy, whose vision of a self-sustaining community he absorbed. He was also strongly influenced by his reading of Sir Henry Maine, using Maine's Indian Village Communities  as one of the principal items of evidence in a petition to the Natal Assembly in 1894, in which he argued that the franchise should be extended to members of the Indian community.  A key passage in the Petition reads as follows:

The Indian nation has known, and has exercised, the power of election from times prior to the time when the Anglo-Saxon races first became acquainted with the principles of representation... In support of the above, your Petitioners beg to draw the attention of your Honourable Assembly to Sir Henry Summer Maine's Village Communities, where he has clearly pointed out that the Indian races have been familiar with representative institutions almost from time immemorial. That eminent lawyer and writer has shown that the Teutonic Mark was hardly so well organised or so essentially representative as an Indian Village community until the precise technical Roman form was grafted upon it.

Gandhi went on to quote Chisolm Anstey in a speech delivered before the East Indian Association in London, in which 'the East' was described as 'the parent of municipalities' and it was said that 'local self-government in the widest acceptation of the term' was 'as old as the East itself'. Gandhi himself then insisted, somewhat imaginatively, that:

Every caste in every village or town has its own rules and regulations, and elects representatives, and furnishes an exact prototype of the Saxon Witans, from which have sprung the present Parliamentary institutions.

He warmed to this theme again in a letter addressed to 'Every Briton in South Africa', published as a  pamphlet in 1895:

To say that the Indian does not understand the Franchise is to ignore the whole history of India. Representation, in the truest sense of the term, the Indian has understood and appreciated from the earliest ages. That principle - the Panchayat - guides all the actions of an India. He considers himself a member of the Panchayat, which really is the whole body civic to which he belongs for the time being. That power to do so - that power to understand thoroughly the principle of popular government - has rendered him the most harmless and docile man on earth.

His argument was three-fold: firstly that the Indian people were as civilised as any other and therefore entitled to vote, secondly that they were long accustomed to the concept of representative democracy and indeed enjoyed the powers of voting (at least some of them) for members of municipal councils and provincial assemblies in India, and thirdly, that the Indian community was not at all political and that if given the vote they could be relied upon more often than not never to exercise it or, when doing so, to confine their support to modest and conventional candidates who would uphold the status quo.  For good measure (and perhaps with some cunning) he reassured his readers that Indians were rarely ever likely to stand for election, as few of them were sufficiently well educated in English to be able to keep up with the level of debate in the assembly chamber.

In later years Gandhi's supporters saw in village based action not only the means to swaraj, in a personal sense, but also the means towards a national awakening and wholesale programme of social and economic reconstruction. Gandhi himself though was rarely so radical in his own writings on the subject, indeed he does not even mention the idea of village self-government at all in Hind Swaraj, his erstwhile nationalist manifesto, published in  1910. He nonetheless insisted that it was a good Indian tradition to subordinate self-interest to the collective decision of a Panch, and often described the Indian National Congress central working committee as one such Panch: a sort of elected oligarchy to which unquestioning obedience was expected. At the same time, he freely admitted that the practising institution of the Village Panchayat was rarely if ever likely to be found in effect. And although he expressed the hope that it might be revived, he clearly did not expect it to happen in a hurry. When asked in 1925 what should be done with those who borrowed funds from khadi boards and then failed to return it, he answered that in an ideal world they would submit themselves to the judgement of a Panchayat, but that since the idea of the Panchayat is 'as good as non-existent now' it would be best just to take them to court. And in 1931 he wrote in Young India as follows:

...we may not replace trained judges by untrained men brought together by chance. What we must aim at is an incorrigible, impartial and able judiciary right from the bottom. I regard village panchayats as an institution by itself. But thanks to the degradation of the caste system and the evil influence of the present system of government and the growing illiteracy of the masses, this ancient and noble institution has fallen into desuetude, and where it has not, it has lost its former purity and hold. It must, however, be revived at any cost, if the villages are not to be ruined.

Gandhi was thus a believer, but hardly an unequivocal champion of village self-government, and he fully accepted the practical limits to such a scheme. Others, however were more enthusiastic. The idea of village development through self-regulated councils was in fact first deployed politically in India, not by Gandhi, but by Rabindranath Tagore as early as the 1900's  and it became a major issue during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal between 1905 and 1910  C.R. Das, the Bengali swadeshi campaigner, was amongst those who supported it. Like Gandhi, Das was a student of law, cognisant of the writings of Maine and Baden-Powell, and he shared the same thoroughly orientalised and idealistic view of rural India., but in many ways though he was more radical and politically ambitious. Thus in 1918 Das spoke on the issue during his Presidential Address to the Bengal Congress in 1918, advocating the growth village councils as a means of economic development, this policy though was written out of the manifesto of the Bengal provincial congress following pressure from the Zamindar lobby. 

In 1922 Das became President of the Indian National Congress, and in his Congress Presidential address he again urged, as a requisite of Swaraj, the 'organisation of village life and the practical autonomy of small local centres'. Village communities must not exist as disconnected units' he argued, but 'held together by a system of co-operation and integration'. He concluded: 'I maintain that real Swaraj can only be attained by vesting the power of government in these small local centres', and he advised the Congress to draw up a scheme of government based upon these proposals.

As a result of this an Outline Scheme of Swaraj was drawn up by C.R. Das and Bhagavan Das and presented to Congress in 1923 and was adopted as party policy. This plan recommended a massive decentralisation of government after independence, the higher centres of governmental power being reduced and the organ of administration becoming the panchayat, organised into village, town, district, provincial and all-India units of government. The purpose behind this idea was the upliftment of India’s villages, and as the memorandum put it, the 'spiritualising of India’s politics by changing the whole culture and civilisation of society from its present mercenary to a missionary basis'.

Gandhi and the Indian National Congress though were not the only advocates of Panchayats. The enthusiasm for the village, for co-operation and for local self-government, was shared too by a variety of liberal colonial officials  - particularly members of the government’s revenue and agricultural departments, who saw the ‘intermediary classes’, whether moneylenders or lawyer-politicians as a drain upon society and a barrier to progress: particularly in the progress of the revenue receipts.
Neither Gandhi nor the British officials of course advocated anything so radical as land reform - this would be too revolutionary, but both enthused equally about the possibilities afforded by co-operation - the co-operative movement being adopted with increasing enthusiasm by the British in the 1920s as the idea of the Panchayat was taken over by the nationalists. A particular influence here was another ‘friend of the peasant’: ‘Punjabi’ Malcolm Darling.

As the nationalist struggle progressed though Gandhi became more ambitious for the idea of village self-government. His clearest and most often quoted exposition of the idea dates from 1942, when he wrote of ‘village swaraj’, in words that closely echoed those of Metcalf:

‘My idea of village swaraj is that it is a complete republic, independent of its neighbours for its own vital wants and yet interdependent for many others in which dependence is a necessity...As far as possible every activity will be conducted on the co-operative basis. There will be no castes such as we have today, with their graded untouchability. Non-violence with its technique of satyagraha and non co-operation will be the sanction of the village community... The government of the village will be conducted by a Panchayat of five persons elected annually by the adult villagers, male and female, possessing minimum prescribed qualifications. ..Since there will be no system of punishments in the accepted sense, this Panchayat will be the legislature, judiciary and executive combined to operate for its year of office... Here there is perfect democracy based upon individual freedom. The individual is the architect of his own government. The law of non-violence rules him and his government. He and his village are able to defy the might of a world. For the law  governing every villager is that he will suffer death in the defence of his and his village’s honour...’ 

Later on, Gandhi described his vision more poetically still in an interview given just two years before his death:

'In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever widening, never-ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic rule of which they are integral units.'

Jawaharlal Nehru also warmed to the idea, asserting in The Discovery of India that in ancient times 'the Village Panchayat or elected council had large powers both executive and Judicial and its members treated with great respect by the Kings officers.' For Nehru though this was nothing but a fit of historical imagination, with few practical implications as far as Congress policy was concerned. Soon after writing it he was indeed engaged in discussions with P. Thakurdas, G.D. Birla, J.R.D. Tata and others, which led to the drawing up of the famous Bombay Plan of January 1944, which set the framework for India’s social and economic development post independence: a world of industry, urbanisation and of partnerships in development between government and the national bourgeoisie.

The Resuscitation and Revival of Panchayati Raj

Following Gandhi’s death the  possibility of a continuing judicial and administrative role for the village Panchayat was considered, criticised and rejected from the deliberations of the Indian Constituent Assembly: the view being held, as by the British previously, that they were all too prone to corruption. Ambedkar’s experience of the suffering of his Mahar community gave him particular insights into this problem, according to one source.  Consequently, the only reference to Panchayats at all in the Indian Constitution adopted in 1951 is in Part IV (in the Directive Principles of State Policy), which is non justiciable, and which merely stated that ‘The state should take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such power and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government’. The same fate befell the co-operative movement. After a brief flurry of enthusiasm in the 1950’s, co-operation was found more often than not to be sham in practice, and the co-operative ideal, together with the panchayati ideal was shelved by most government departments.

One important source for this article, the 1994 report of the Indian Social Science Institute, asks the rhetorical question: ‘Why did the Panchayats not come under the legally enforceable section of the constitution?... The answer is [it states] that ‘the urban and the rural elites, their representatives in politics (from the time of the national freedom movement onwards), and a bureaucracy conditioned by its class character, had a disdain for panchayat, and has ever since remained intact’. 

This disdain seems real enough. In what has thus become a famous quote, B.R. Ambedkar wrote: ‘what is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism’. If men of this view indeed monopolised political decision making in the 1950s, it would be sensible then to ask what might have changed since to bring the idea of Panchayati Raj back into fashion? One explanation would be to point to the same sort of financial pressures that first brought the Panchayati experiment seriously into vogue in the 1930’s. These pressures began to make themselves felt soon after the launch of the first five year plan. With the concentration of development resources on the industrial sector in the first, and particularly in the second five year plan, it rapidly became apparent that there were not the means available to carry into effect the rural arm of the government’s development programme. 

These shortcomings quickly became apparent in the Community Development and the National Extension Service programmes, both of which became the subject of an enquiry by a national planning committee study team led by Balwantrai Mehta, a member of Parliament, in 1957. The study team concluded that if these programmes were to be effective,  affordable, and repeated interventions by officials were to be avoided, there was a desperate need for an agency at the village level ‘which could represent the entire community, assume responsibility and provide the necessary leadership for implementing development programmes.’ The case for governmental decentralisation was also subsequently affirmed by the National Development Council, and once again panchayats came back onto the political agenda and the phrase ‘panchayati raj’ came into fashion: zealots even claiming that the phrase was coined by Jawaharlal Nehru although it had obviously been previously used by Gandhi and many others.

Rajasthan was the first State to pass legislation authorising the constitution of a new style of Panchayat, the first such Panchayat, assuming largely administrative powers, being established at Naguar, about 260 kms from Jaipur, the state capital in October 1959. Another was soon set up at Shadnagar in Andhra Pradesh, and by 1959 every State had passed a Panchayati Act and some sort of Panchayat was thereafter established, in theory at least, in nearly every village.

It seems likely that the idea of Panchayati raj was not only a response to financial exigencies, but also the emergent conflicts between the Congress government’s espousal of equality and welfare for all, and its heavily urban and industry biased development planning. The conflict in this area was not only causing social but also political tensions, and it is likely that Jawaharlal Nehru espoused the Panchayat ideal for the same reason that in 1963 he espoused the so-called Kamraj Plan - which called upon Congress politicians to resign from office and devote themselves to grass-roots work in the rural areas. Both could be seen as an attempt to undermine the influence of powerful and reactionary landed and bourgeois state level politicians and to reaffirm his party’s links with the rural masses - just as the British had sought to do some forty years earlier. There was also strong support in favour of the Panchayati ideal coming from opposition groups. Jai Prakash Narayan, for example, was a great advocate of Panchayats in the late 1960's and early 1970s - his vision being quite a radical one, championing the notion of partyless democracy. 

The problem was of course, that these Panchayats were set up largely, as already stated, for developmental reasons, and although Panchayats were constituted at village level (including always a certain number of women and SC/STs), most often the executive powers lay at block level, where a block Samiti was constituted by delegates from a number of villages. Executive powers here were effectively shared with the government block development officer, and of course above the block there were also Zilla Parishads playing a supervisory and co-ordinating role. There was thus very little continuity with the primarily judicial Panchayats of the 1920’s, let alone Metcalfe’s or even Gandhi’s idea of little village republics. Where they functioned at all, they served as a channel for developmental and improvement works, and when in the later 1960’s these programmes flourished, the village level Panchayats played little part in administering them.

Government officers therefore once again came to the fore, and with the shift of government expenditure away from industrial projects and into rural development after 1966 there were funds available to train and appoint the officials to carry on the business of project implementation and management. The Block Development Officer therefore flourished, and was soon joined by a variety of other specialist teams sent by different ministries - each of which set up their own committees and other means of consulting with villagers, and none of whom were willing to entrust their pet projects to the control of villagers themselves.

Even as early as 1964 these problems were publicised in a seminar held by the All-India Panchayat Parishad, a voluntary association of panchayat organisations across India, presided over by Jayaprakash Narayan.The rapid deterioration of the Panchayats constituted in the late ‘50’s and early 1960’s was further underlined in the report of the Asoka Mehta Committee on Panchayati Raj institutions which was set up in December 1977, including such luminaries as E.M.S. Namboodiripad and M.G. Ramchandran amongst its membership. This government committee observed that the activities of the Panchayati Raj institutions, even at block level, were meagre, their resource base limited, and that they had been stagnating, if not declining, since 1965. They further noted that the Panchayats were mistrusted by State government officials, and that a growing range of developmental activities, such as the Small Farmers Development Agency, the Drought Prone Areas Programme and the Intensive Tribal Development Project, were not being brought under the purview of the elected Zilla Parishads in states such as Gujarat and Maharashtra. The Panchayati Raj institutions were also dominated, it was said, by economically or socially privileged sections of society, 'and have as such facilitated the emergence of oligarchic forces yielding no benefits to the weaker sections'.

The solution, and key recommendation, of the Asoka Mehta committee was that the Panchayats be brought closer to the people by putting executive powers in the hands of ‘Mandal Panchayats’, which grouped together villagers of 15,000 to 20,000 in number, with a single tier of district level Panchayats above them. Although a contrast with the system adopted in the 1960’s, this still hardly equated with the orientalist dream of village self-government, the foundation of 'Swaraj', as noted in a dissenting minute to the report by Siddharaj Dhadda.  The idea of further reform was in any case shelved at a meeting of (mostly Janata) Chief Ministers in 1979 - presumably confident as they already were in their democratic credentials.

This then effectively remained the situation for the next few years. Panchayats were constituted in many villages, but had few responsibilities beyond village drainage, street lighting, sanitation and the arbitration of petty disputes, and development money was dispersed at the block level and remained largely in the hands of officials. A rare exception to this pattern is perhaps the experience in West Bengal, where village panchayats have been elected on a universal suffrage since 1978 and where they are seen as both successful and egalitarian: the Food for Work programme, for example, has been organised for a long time now through these local bodies, turn out at election time is often of the order of 75 per cent, and significant amounts of surplus land has been redistributed to poorer SC/ST peasants through a land reform programme (Operation Barga) administered by elected panchayats. Other exceptions include Orissa, where the driving force of Biji Patnaik’s personaility has kept Panchayati Raj on the agenda almost uninterruptedly since the 1950s. and Karnataka, where it has been reported that democratic decentralisation in the eighties led to a major improvement in the performance of village teachers and health workers. It is further claimed that in Nagaland Village Development Boards have achieved a great deal, but these exceptions tend to prove that the opposite was generally true: that decentralisation and agrarian reform rarely went hand in hand. In these cases, important qualifications further need be noted: at the same time as promoting Panchayati Raj in Karnataka, the Janata Dal state government, led by Ramkrishna Hegde between 1980 and 1984, simultaneously raised land ceilings, indicating that an important motivation was the attempt to increase electoral support among the richer, landowning peasantry. There are parallels here with Charan Singh’s vigorous support for Panchayati Raj in U.P., at a time when, post Green revolution, the rich peasantry were achieving political ascendancy. In Gorkhaland, the demand for greater political influence even led to violence – Subhas Ghising's Gorkhaland agitation - supported by disappointed rich peasants and other local elites when the CPIM’s proposals for an autonomous Hill District Council were shot down by the central government in the early 1980s. And even Bengal’s agrarian programme has been criticised, amongst other things, for its gender bias.  It should be noted, furthermore, that Bengal’s advances in land reform and agricultural production, have not been matched (as in Kerala) by advances in education – hardly surprising, since local primary and secondary school teaching positions are often used as sinecures for loyal CPI (M) party members and activists.

This mixed and generally unsatisfactory state of affairs began to change dramatically in 1985, when soon after Rajiv Gandhi became Prime minister, two committees were constituted. The first, under G.V.K. Rao was established to review the arrangements for rural development and poverty alleviation. It recommended the revitalisation of Zilla Parishads, with the appointment of a District Development Commissioner as Chief Executive of the Zilla Parishad. The second committee, chaired by H.M. Singhvi, proposed the re-organisation of Panchayati raj institutions and the setting up of effective village level committees. Following this report the Sarkaria Commission on Centre-State relations and a Parliamentary Consultative Committee also recommended that there should be a significant strengthening of Panchayati raj institutions.

After consultations with Collectors and District Magistrates, and representatives of existing Panchayats, a special meeting of the All-India Congress Committee was convened to consider the matter. This obviously included the political implications of a program of administrative decentralisation, but with the popularity of Rajiv’s government by this stage sinking in the polls there was clearly nothing to lose by it. 

A bill proposing an amendment to the Constitution, the 64th, was therefore finally drawn up and presented to Parliament in May 1989. This bill proposed to make it legally binding upon all states to establish a three-tier system of Panchayats at the village, intermediate and district level, each of them to be appointed by direct election and to enjoy a fixed tenure of no more than five years. At the first attempt, the bill was passed by the Lok Sabha, but rejected by the Rajya Sabha, following which the Congress called an election. The bill eventually passed after it was re-introduced (as the 74th amendment bill) for the second time in 1991. It was passed by the Lok Sabha on 22-23 December 1992, and following its ratification by half the states, it achieved Presidential assent in April 1993 as the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution. Along with the requirement to establish elected panchayats it further required that one-third of municipal and panchayat seats should be reserved for women

Following the passage of the 74th/73rd amendment into law, the States introduced in some cases radical measures, which delegated significant powers and responsibilities onto Panchayats. Some states, notably Andhra Pradesh, began to jump the gun and evolved legislation extending Panchayati raj into scheduled (i.e. adivasis) areas also, not always on favourable terms. The A.P. was in fact struck down by the Andhra Pradesh High Court after an agitation launched by adivasi groups. In 1996 therefore the Lok Sabha passed a bill extending the proposed Panchayati system of the 73rd amendment into all Scheduled (i.e. adivasi) areas. This Act obliges state governments with scheduled areas in Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Orissa to devolve responsibility in key areas onto elected Panchayats in tribal areas, no less than half of whose members had to be Scheduled tribes. Every village, furthermore, was to have a gram sabha whose mandatory responsibilities were to include preservation of the traditions, customs and resources of the community and which was to be empowered to approve plans and projects for social and economic development. They were also to have the right to be consulted in matters of land acquisition and in the exploitation of mineral resources, and State Governments were directed in section 4(m) of the Act to devolve onto the gram sabhas powers which would enable them to become effective institutions of self-government, including control over prohibition, ownership of minor forest produce, the ability to prevent alienation of land, the power to mange village markets, to exercise control over moneylending, social services, local plans and development resources. Above all, the Extension Act recommended that the powers of the gram sabhas should be protected so that panchayats and state institutions at a higher level could not overrule them and assume their responsibilities, and their devolution of responsibilities should be in line with the 6th schedule of the constitution – in other words that they should include legislative, administrative and judicial responsibilities.

Altogether, the 73rd constitutional amendment and the 1996 Extension act, proposed a radical upgrading of the juridical position of the Panchayats, which state level administrations are now only beginning to come to terms with. Thus far, it is difficult to draw conclusions, but the early signs are not promising. Earlier successes in Bengal, and arguably also in Karnataka, were arguably only achievable because of systematic political activism at a local level. Where this is absent, or where there is extreme social and economic equality, the chances of success are more limited. In U.P., there is already evidence the institution of elections under the new Panchayati scheme have fared no better than attempts at democratic decentralisation in the early years of zamindari abolition. Meanwhile, in Karnataka it is alleged that the Panchayat Act in 1993 introduced significantly erodes the powers of the elected panchayat when compared with their original status in the path-breaking Karnataka Panchayat Act of 1983, defining them as no more than bodies ‘for the effective implementation of rural development reforms’ rather than real units of local self-government. The powers of the panchayats over local officials (including the police) are thereby, it is alleged, effectively withdrawn, and what powers they do possess can at any time be withdrawn by notification in the gazette.  At the same time, the collapse of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Lok Sabha in July 1998, has caused caused some even to raise doubts about the constitutionality of the 73rd constitutional amendment. The silent gender revolution anticipated by the legislation may well therefore be stilled at birth. 

Perhaps most disappointing of all is the legislation enacted by the State governments in regard to the Scheduled areas. In most cases they have conspicuously avoided devolving the powers recommended by the 1996 Extension Act. In many instances State government have exploited an ambiguity in the Act, and powers have not been devolved to the gram sabha at the village level, but remain with a Panchayat or even a non-elected state government authority at a higher level. Crucially, furthermore, not a single State Panchayat Act, or any of their subsequent amendments to date, have included a clause making Panchayats or gram sabhas at a village level into effective Institutions of Self-Government. Even where powers have been devolved, for example in control over minor forest produce, the State government has retained the right to assume their powers and authority and to over-rule the Panchayats and gram sabhas at any time. In the view of Mahi Pal, in a recent report, the majority of the states have completed the formalities in regard to devolution of powers in scheduled areas, but with the exception only of Maharashtra, Orissa, and to some extent M.P., they have entirely avoided the spirit of the legislation.

The question that we are left with then is whether the new enthusiasm for Panchayati rule is likely to fare any better than those that have gone before, and whether it is a long cherished dream finally come true, or merely the latest twist in a struggle for power and control over government expenditure between central and state governments and newly emergent village elites. Given the signs of a back lash against some of the more radical implications of the legislation, and the evidence of serious attempts at foot-dragging by State governments in the manner of its implementation, it is tempting to conclude that the latter is most likely.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berreman, Gerald D.	Hindus of the Himalayas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) 	
Dalton, Dennis 	Mahatma Gandhi: nonviolent power in action (University of Columbia Press, 1993)	
Dewey, Clive	'Images of the Village Community: a study in Anglo-Indian ideology', Modern Asian Studies, vol. 6, no. 3 , pp  291-328	
Dreze, J. & Sen, A. (eds.)	Indian Development: selected regional perspectives (New Delhi: OUP, 1996&1998)	
Fox, R. J. 	Gandhian Utopia: experiments with culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)	
Galanter, M.	Law and Society in Modern India, (Oxford University Press, 1989)	
Gandhi, M.K.	Collected writings of Mahatma Gandhi,  c. 86 vols. (New Delhi: 1958 - )	
Ghosh, Jayati	‘Voices break the silence: women define their rights and demands within the changing land relations in West Bengal’, The Journal of Women’s Studies, 1, 2 (Oct-March 1997), pp 59-89	
Government of India	Report of the Committee on Panchayati Raj Institutions (New Delhi: GOI, Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, Dept. of Rural Development, August 1978)	
Government of the Central Provinces and Berar	Report of the Village Panchayat Committee, Government Press (Nagpur, 1926)	
Institute of Social Sciences	Status of Panchayati Raj in the States of India, 1994 (Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi: 1995)	
Maithani, B.R.	Environmental planning for sustainable development of hill areas: a case study approach (New Delhi: Mittal, 1992)	
Maithani, B.R.	Case studies on rural poverty alleviation in the Commonwealth: India (London: Food Production and Rural Development Division, Commonwealth Secretariat, 1992) 	
Mathew, George	Panchayati Raj: from legislation to movement (New Delhi: Concept, 1994)	
Mishra, A., Vasavada. S. & Bates, C.	'How many committees do I belong to?' in N. Sundar & R. Jeffery (eds.) Organising Sustainability: NGOs and joint forest management in India (London: Sage, 1998)	
Mukherjee, Rudrangshu	The Penguin Gandhi Reader (New Delhi; London: Penguin, 1993)	
Muthiah, C.	Co-operative Credit in Raipur District (Factors contributing to Heavy Overdues) (Gwalior: Agro-Economic Research Centre for Madhya Pradesh, 1966)	
Nehru, Jawaharlal	The Discovery of India (Centenary edn., New Delhi: OUP, 1989; first pub. Calcutta: Signet Press, 1945)	
Pal, Mahi	‘Panchayats in Scheduled Areas’, Economic & Political Weekly, 35, 9 (May 6 2000), pp 1602-1606.	
Parel, Anthony J.	Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and other writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)	
Perlin, Frank	'Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Deccan', Journal of Peasant Studies, V, 2 (1978)	
Ray Rajat K.	Social conflict and political unrest in Bengal: 1875-1927 (New Delhi; Oxford: OUP 1984)	
Rudolph, S.H & L.I. 	The Modernity of Tradition: political development in India (Chicago, 1967)	
Sarkar, Sumit	The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-08 (New Delhi, 1973)	
Srinivas, M.N.	Caste in modern India and other essays (London: Asia Publishing House, 1962)	
Stein, B.	Peasant, State & Society in Medieval South India (Oxford, O.U.P., 1980)	
Thapar, R.	From Lineage to State: social formations in the mid-first millennium B.C. in the Ganga valley (Bombay: O.U.P., 1984)	
Tinker, Hugh	Foundation of Local Self Government in India, Pakistan and Burma (London, 1954)	
Zaidi, A. M. (ed.)	Congress presidential addresses (5 vols.) (New Delhi: Publication Dept., Indian Institute of Applied Political Research, c1985-1989), vols. 3 & 4