On the 30th year of Panchayati Raj, the rise of the Gram Sabha holds the hope of making local-government accountable
On June 7, the Union Ministry of Panchayati Raj’s web dashboard showed an impressive figure: Some 261,203 Gram Sabhas (village assemblies) have been scheduled by village Panchayats across the country to prepare the village development plans for 2022-2023.
A Gram Sabha is an assembly of all eligible voters in a village and its function is similar to a legislative Assembly. Elected Panchayat members are accountable to this body.
The Gram Sabha meetings are part of the People’s Plan Campaign rolled out by the Union government to make local development locally driven and implemented. The village takes stock in each meeting of various development schemes; it also decides on what development works need to be taken up.
A village with the Gram Sabha at the core of decision making is mandated to make at least five five-year plans (covering education, employment, water and sanitation) and is engaged in certifying implementation and beneficiary of more than 200 development schemes.
Who should get a bore well? Or a house? Whose name should be added to the list of the households below poverty line? The Gram Sabha decides. It establishes four to five ‘standing committees’, like in Parliament or Assemblies to directly supervise government officials involved in implementation of schemes. For instance, only a standing committee comprising women certifies a water project.
It is a unique body with legislative, supervisory and executive powers. The village plan must have its approval, and it supervises the implementation of development works. This way Panchayati Raj system is the world’s largest experiment on decentralising governance and electoral democracy.
On any day, one can encounter a Gram Sabha sitting under a huge tree, inside a Panchayat building, on the veranda of the local school or even at a cleaned-up cowshed. India is celebrating the 30th year of Panchayati Raj — a constitutional amendment of 1992 that made India a three-tier democratic system
One of the contributions is to formalise and energise the Gram Sabha.
These village Assemblies are a replay of India’s ancient village governance systems. S Radhakrishnan asking for a governance system based on the existing village republics in the constituent assembly debate on January 20, 1947, quoted this conversation:
When a few merchants from the north went down to the south, one of the princes of the Deccan asked the question: ‘Who is your king?’ The answer was, ‘Some of us are governed by assemblies, some of us by kings’.
Mahatma Gandhi fiercely advocated for such assembly driven self-reliant villages. BR Ambedkar, on the other hand, countered, “What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow -mindedness and communalism?”
The Constituent Assembly failed to legalise and adopt the traditional village institutions as units of governance. However, the Constitution’s Article 40 as a directive policy says “states take steps to reorganise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and functions as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government.” The constitutional amendment formalised Panchayat.
But, to begin with, the elected Panchayat members resisted the Gram Sabha’s scrutiny thus undermining its power. Without the direct supervision of the assembly of voters, Panchayati Raj became ‘sarpanchraj’, killing the very spirit of this decentralised governance system.
But states like Karnataka in the 1980s started formalising the role of Gram Sabha with dedicated and compulsory sessions for the elected body to place progress reports. Kerala took up people’s campaigns to make decentralised planning for villages with the Gram Sabha at the core of planning.
By early 2000s, the government had already set two sessions of the Gram Sabha compulsory. With Panchayats now the prime executioners of rural development schemes with budgets over Rs 1.5 lakh crore, governments started making the Gram Sabha the main supervising body for the elected members and government officials in charge of implementation of these schemes.
An institution, by nature, evolves. Panchayats are considered the most corrupt among the three-tiers. The rise of the Gram Sabha — representing all voters — reflects the need for further deepening decentralised governance through direct involvement of the voters. If anything to celebrate in the Panchayati Raj, it is this evolution.
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