Grassroots Democracy: Panchayati Raj and Urban Local Government

The 73rd and 74th Amendments created local governments and then declined to give them functions, funds or functionaries as a matter of right. Every assessment of grassroots democracy turns on that omission.

This is chapter 26 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Indian Government and Politics in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.

The road to constitutional status

Community Development Programme (1952) and the National Extension Service (1953) were administratively driven and failed for want of popular participation, which is what the Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) diagnosed. Its recommendation of a three-tier structure, Gram Panchayat, Panchayat Samiti at block level and Zila Parishad at district level, with the block as the fulcrum, was adopted first by Rajasthan at Nagaur on 2 October 1959 and then by Andhra Pradesh.

The system decayed through the 1960s and 1970s as states postponed elections and superseded bodies. The Ashok Mehta Committee (1978) proposed a two-tier structure with the mandal panchayat as the base, open participation by political parties, and compulsory taxation powers. The G.V.K. Rao Committee (1985) restored the district’s centrality, and the L.M. Singhvi Committee (1986) made the two decisive proposals: constitutional status, and recognition of the Gram Sabha as the base of decentralised democracy.

The 64th Amendment Bill (1989) was defeated in the Rajya Sabha; the 73rd and 74th Amendments were enacted in 1992 and came into force in April and June 1993.

The 73rd Amendment: Part IX

Compulsory and voluntary provisions

The distinction is the single most examinable point.

Article 243O bars courts from interfering in electoral matters, including delimitation of constituencies and allotment of seats, except by election petition.

The Gram Sabha

The 2024 question described the Gram Sabha as a forum giving expression to the collective wisdom, aspirations and will of the people, and the answer must weigh that against practice.

In design, it is the only direct-democracy institution in the constitutional scheme: every registered voter in the village is a member, and its intended functions include approving the annual plan and budget, selecting beneficiaries for schemes, conducting social audits, and granting utilisation certificates. Under MGNREGA and the Forest Rights Act 2006 its powers are statutory and substantial, and under PESA in Scheduled Areas it must be consulted before land acquisition and controls minor forest produce.

In practice, quorum failures are widespread, meetings are frequently formal or fabricated, dominant castes and larger landholders control proceedings, women attend but rarely speak, and the sabha depends on a Panchayat secretary who answers to the state administration. Kerala’s People’s Plan Campaign from 1996 and Madhya Pradesh’s Gram Swaraj experiment are the standard counter examples showing what happens when the state actually devolves.

Women in local governance

The 2025 paper asked for the impediments to women’s participation, so the reservation must be stated before the obstacles. Article 243D(3) reserves not less than one-third of seats and of chairperson positions for women; about twenty states have raised this to fifty per cent by state law, and roughly 1.4 million women hold local office, the largest such body of elected women anywhere.

The impediments, in order of importance:

• Sarpanch pati or proxy rule: the husband or male relative exercises the office while the woman holds it. This is the central obstacle and it is widely documented.
• Rotation of reserved seats every election prevents incumbency, experience and constituency-building, so women rarely serve consecutive terms.
• Educational and informational deficits, compounded by rules that officials communicate in written English or formal Hindi.
• Caste and class, which cut across gender: a Dalit woman sarpanch in a dominant-caste village faces obstruction of a different order.
• Time poverty from unpaid domestic and care work, and restrictions on mobility and on attending meetings with men.
• No-confidence motions used to remove women chairpersons, and violence or its threat.

The evidence on effect is nonetheless positive and should be cited: Chattopadhyay and Duflo’s work on West Bengal and Rajasthan found that reserved panchayats invested more in the public goods that women reported as priorities, notably drinking water, and that voter bias against women leaders declined after exposure to them.

The 74th Amendment: Part IXA

Three types of urban body: Nagar Panchayat for an area in transition from rural to urban, Municipal Council for a smaller urban area, and Municipal Corporation for a larger one. Wards committees are mandatory in municipalities with three lakh or more population under Article 243S. The Twelfth Schedule lists eighteen functions, from urban planning and land-use regulation to water supply, public health, slum improvement and urban poverty alleviation.

The 2023 question asked whether the Act remains an unfulfilled dream, and the honest answer is largely yes, for reasons that are structural.

• Functions. Article 243W is permissive. The functions that matter most in cities, urban planning, water, and transport, are typically retained by state-controlled development authorities and parastatals, so the elected municipality plans nothing.
• Funds. Own-revenue collection is weak; property tax is under-assessed and under-collected; and State Finance Commission recommendations are frequently not acted upon. Municipal revenue as a share of GDP in India is far below comparable countries.
• Functionaries. Staff are usually state cadre, reporting upward rather than to the elected council.
• The mayor. In most states the mayor has a one-year or two-and-a-half-year term and no executive authority, which rests with a state-appointed Municipal Commissioner. There is no institutional counterpart to a Chief Minister for a city.
• Elections. Repeatedly delayed in several states despite Article 243U, and Article 243ZG limits judicial intervention in electoral matters.

District Planning Committees under Article 243ZD, asked about in 2023, are mandatory in every state to consolidate the plans prepared by panchayats and municipalities into a draft development plan for the district, with four-fifths of members elected from among the elected members of the district panchayat and municipalities in proportion to rural and urban population. Metropolitan Planning Committees under Article 243ZE apply to areas above ten lakh. Both are largely non-functional: most states constituted them late, many have never prepared a plan, and where plans exist they are rarely integrated with state budgets. Kerala is the standard exception.

Grassroots movements

The syllabus line includes movements, which Chapter 32 covers at length. The connection to make here is that the amendments created institutions while movements created capacity, and the two have interacted: the right-to-information campaign began with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan’s demand for wage records at village level and became the RTI Act 2005; the social audit provisions of MGNREGA descend directly from that; and the Forest Rights Act 2006 vests determination of claims in the Gram Sabha, which converts a movement demand into a statutory power.

Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.