India’s push for Atmanirbhar Gram Panchayats increasingly relies on indicators, rankings and digital reporting, but these may not reflect what villages themselves consider priorities.
The Panchayat Advancement Index uses about 150 indicators across nine themes, while Gram Panchayat Development Plans are intended to guide local development.
Digital tools could be more useful if they helped Gram Sabhas address local needs such as water security, agricultural storage, women’s safety, healthcare access and local livelihoods.
Own Source Revenue is important for panchayat self-reliance, but measuring reported revenue without assessing actual resource mobilisation risks rewarding compliance rather than capacity.
Genuine Gram Swaraj requires Gram Sabhas to identify their own economic and social priorities, with government schemes, technology and funding supporting rather than determining those choices.
It is close to ten-thirty on a weekday morning, and a Gram Sabha is gathering under a neem tree outside a panchayat bhawan somewhere in central India. The Secretary reads out an agenda sheet sent down by the district administration, point by point. Nobody asks what the village itself wants to prioritise this year. The Gram Panchayat Development Plan has to be uploaded and the Panchayat Advancement Index (PAI) updated before a deadline. By the time the reading ends, many present have drifted back to their fields.
This scene, repeated across thousands of Gram Panchayats, captures a quiet confusion at the heart of India's rural governance push — between the Atmanirbhar Gram Panchayat that national programmes measure, and the Atmanirbhar Gaon that villages actually need to become.
The Ministry of Panchayati Raj's framework, built around the RGSA scheme and its awards, is defined mainly through the PAI — roughly 150 indicators across nine themes, aligned with India's Sustainable Development Goal commitments. That alignment serves a real purpose: countries need a way to aggregate what millions of villages are doing into a picture for the world. But a reporting tool built for Delhi or any state capital and a planning tool built for a village are not the same instrument. When the same checklist is handed down as the plan, the panchayat stops asking "what do we want for ourselves" and starts asking "what do we need to tick to move up the ranking." A village's particular struggles get squeezed into someone else's template.
The alternative that several civil society organisations, committed officials, Sarpanchs and Secretaries are trying to build works the other way round: starting from a village's own vision, arrived at through genuine Gram Sabha deliberation, and only then asking how schemes and funds can act as catalysts for that vision — not substitutes for the conversation that forms it.
In Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi imagined a civilisation so taken with machinery that daily life would shrink to a series of buttons: "They will press a button, and they will have their clothing by their side... They will have a variety of delicately dished up food. Everything will be done by machinery." He meant this as a warning about what happens once convenience replaces genuine labour — and labour stops being valued at all.
A century on, cities run on exactly that civilisation: an app, a button, and dinner is at the door. Panchayats have acquired a version of the button too — except what gets pushed is not an order for food, but a demand for data. The Union government's new SabhaSaar tool, for instance, is meant to record a Gram Sabha's discussions and generate its minutes using AI, freeing the Sarpanch and Secretary from paperwork, in principle. In practice, picture a crowded meeting under a tree, several people speaking at once, and the two of them sharing one low-end smartphone — recording the noise, struggling for a signal, then uploading it before the day ends. For many panchayats, this is one more uphill task, not a shortcut.
None of this argues against digital tools — only against tools designed around what the state needs to see rather than what the village needs to do. The same capability, aimed differently, could help. Could an application let women mark stretches of a village that feel unsafe after dark, giving the Gram Sabha a map to act on? Could one help a panchayat log its standing crop area, expected produce and nearest usable warehouses, so storage decisions happen before the harvest rots? Could a simple tool map unused buildings — an old school block, a disused godown — for conversion into storage, a meeting hall, or a Kisan Pathshala?
The same thinking extends to water: technologies already exist to track falling groundwater levels, chip-based systems to regulate overhead-tank filling in piped water schemes, and systems to meter and fairly charge farmers for irrigation groundwater. Built into a planning tool, such readings could help a Gram Sabha plan water security ahead of time rather than reacting once a handpump runs dry — and the same logic could track the road to the nearest Primary Health Centre, or let a panchayat book and follow an ambulance for an emergency institutional delivery.
Many such tools exist, often built by social entrepreneurs working closely with communities — but rarely get mainstreamed or scaled beyond the block where they were piloted. Madhya Pradesh's Panchayat Darpan portal, which lets residents pay water tariff and house tax online, is a rare example that did scale: a small but real piece of digital Own Source Revenue, done honestly. What such experiments need to multiply is not more apps, but sustained capacity-building and handholding.
Walk into most Gram Sabha meetings and scheme names dominate — whose house is sanctioned, whose pension is due. What rarely comes up is the village's actual economic life: the farmer whose tomatoes rot for want of cold storage; the potter, carpenter, bamboo-basket weaver, tailor or mechanic never asked what support would help their trade; whether farmers selling together could fetch a better price than one at a time. The panchayat's economic development function, on paper a central responsibility, has narrowed in practice to implementing whichever scheme arrives from above.
The same has happened to its social justice function, reduced largely to disbursing welfare, while the Gram Sabha stays silent on a woman's safety walking home after dark, on why girls stop studying after class ten even when a college is nearby, or on who looks after elderly parents left behind by migrating families. None of these need a large budget — they need the village to treat them as legitimate agenda items, backed by social audits and its own youth. This, perhaps, is close to what Gandhi meant by Gram Swaraj and Poorna Swaraj: not just entitlements delivered on time, but a village capable of governing its own economic and social life.
Own Source Revenue is often held up as the test of a panchayat's self-reliance, and it matters — a panchayat that raises nothing of its own will always be a supplicant. But it is a means, not the end. The 16th Finance Commission ties a meaningful share of its performance grant to OSR — a tighter link than under the 15th FC, and one that carries real risk. Unless monitored closely, it will not be the most self-reliant panchayats that gain, but the most digitally adept ones, skilled at moving numbers around a form rather than genuinely widening the revenue base. An inflated tax roll raises a score, not a rupee of real capacity.
Gandhi's idea of the village republic was never meant to be implemented from Delhi. It was a wager that ordinary people, talking to each other in their own Gram Sabha, could be trusted to know what they needed and build it together — with outside resources helping, never commanding. No checklist, however well-intentioned, can replace that conversation; it can only report on whether one happened.
That suggests a concrete shift: let the PAI do what it is good at — aggregating outcomes for national SDG reporting. Give every Gram Sabha space, before any indicator is filled, to answer one question in its own words: what does this village actually want, and what is stopping it? Build the capacity-building support that experiments like Panchayat Darpan show is possible, rather than leaving it to individual initiative. And measure Own Source Revenue growth against resource mobilisation that is real, not merely reported.
Seventy-nine years after Independence, and thirty-two after the 73rd Amendment gave panchayats constitutional standing, that is the honest measure of how far India's village republics still have to travel.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth