(Premium) Gist of Yojana: November 2013

Premium Gist of Yojana: November 2013

TOWARDS HOLISTIC PANCHAYATI RAJ (Full Material Available Only For Premium Members)
EQUALITY AND ITS DEMANDS ON DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS (Full Material Available Only For Premium Members)
COPYRIGHTS AND COPYWRONGS (Full Material Available Only For Premium Members)
ECONOMIC PARADIGMS AND DEMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF FINANCIAL GLOBALIZATION (Full Material Available Only For Premium Members)
PEOPLES, VOICES, DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOCRACY (Full Material Available Only For Premium Members)
E-BHARAT INITIATIVES (Full Material Available Only For Premium Members)
POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN: PATHWAY TO INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY (Full Material Available Only For Premium Members)

TOWARDS HOLISTIC PANCHAYATI RAJ

It is not by coincidence that this article carries the same title as our Report, for this is by way of an introduction to a Report that we believe should be essential reading for all those who would like to see the fulfillment of Gandhiji’s dream for independent India. Replying to a query on his “Dream for Independent India”, he wrote in his journal, Young India, 10 September 1930:

“I shall work for an India in which the poorest will feel it is his country, in whose making he has an effective voice”

This vision is inscribed on the cover of the Report and constitutes its leitmotif. There is no way in which the aam admi, let alone the poorest Indian, can have a sense of belonging in a Parliament in which his MP represents 15-20 lakh others, or an effective voice in decisions are taken in remote State capitals or Delhi, let alone even in the inaccessible reaches of the Collector’s of five 65 years after. Independence almost every Indian feels alienated from the political and administrative process, the sense of alienation being the greater the lower down the economic scale and social hierarchy that person finds himself or herself in, and also the more distanced he or she is geographically from the imposing Bhawans where his or her future is decided. Six and a half decades of democracy leave most individuals as distant from having an “effective voice” in the making of their country as their parents and grandparents were under colonial rule.

The one ray of hope is a return to Gandhian first principles. Gandhiji wanted our democratic institutions to be built on the foundations of Panchayat Raj, as evidenced in the 1946 publication by Shriman Narayan Agarwal, A Gandhi Constitution for Independent India that Gandhiji himself endorsed in entirety in the Foreword he wrote to the book.

After many travails, Parliament eventually incorporated key elements of the Gandhian vision in our scheme of government, by passing, virtually unanimously, the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution in December 1992 followed by The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 [PESA] in December 1996, as required by Part IX (The Panchayats) of the Constitution. The Constitution describes PRIs as “institutions of self-government”, not self-governance, a distinction vital to the effective empowerment of the Panchayats.

Nearly a quarter century later, we have some Panchayat Raj but not “holistic” Panchayat Raj. Our Report aims at correcting that deficiency.

More specifically, it aims to ensure far greater efficiency in the delivery of public goods and services by shifting the burden of bottom-up planning are last-mile delivery to the Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRI) from a bureaucratic mode of delivery that has patently failed.

How dramatically the present system of delivery has failed is well illustrated by two sets of irrefutable facts. One, whereas Central budgetary expenditure on social sector and anti-poverty programmes has grown by 25 times since the onset of economy reforms (from around Rs. 7500 crore in 1992-93 to over Rs. 2 lakh crore in the current budget) our ranking on the UN Human Development Index continues to hover around 135 as it did at the start of economic reforms. We appear to be like Alice in Wonderland: the faster we run, the more we remain where we were. The Report characterizes this as “treadmill growth”.

The second set of facts derives from the Twelfth Five-Year Plan documents: that whereas our economy has grown at nearly 8 per cent over the previous Plan period, the rate of poverty alleviation which languished at under 0.8 per cent in the previous eleven years, is now averaging no more than 15 per cent per annum. Thus, widening disparity and inequality has been compounded by gross failure to make optimal use of the additional Government revenue generated by reforms even if the Union Government has evolved over 150 Centrally Sponsored Schemes, with very much higher budgetary allocation than could have been conceived of 25 years ago. This appalling was of resources is much more disturbing than the so called leakages affecting subsides or even the falling growth rates in the face of “stimulus” through revenues foregone in the amount of over Rs.25 lakh crore furnished to the productive elements of our economy since 2007.

Neither growth nor justice will be secured without more equitable sharing of resources between the 70 percent “poor and vulnerable” segment of our population, identified by the late Dr. Arjun Segputa in his celebrated 2007 Report, and the better off segments of our people on whom we are increasingly relying to enlarge the national cake.

Unfortunately, CSS guidelines only very rarely oblige State-governments to effectively devolve Functions, Finances and Functions, Finances and Functionaries to Panchayat Raj Institutions. PRIs are occasionally-mentioned asan- option but in such a passing and casual manner that State bureaucracies prefer to themselves be the delivery agency or set up parallel bodies to do their bidding as registered societies (whose accounts are not subject to local or CAG audit). This leaches the entire delivery system of any responsibility to the intended beneficiaries. In the absence of accountability to the local community, and the transparency in transactions that such accountability would impose, while vast sums of money are expended and a widening network of gigantic mechanisms of delivery are devised, the beneficiaries themselves are, for the most part, reduced to beggars with their begging bowls or silent spectators to decisions that intimately impinge on the welfare of themselves and their families. Thus, the principal reason for the failure of our systems of governance to make “the poorest feel it is their country, in whose making they have an effective voice” is that, notwithstanding the 73rd and 74m amendments, Panchayat Raj has little or no role in CSS. There are two exceptions to this generalization: MNREGA, that has given a place under red the sun to the Village Panchayat (or, at any rate; to the village sarpanch) and the Backward Regions Grant Fund that makes grassroots planning the “sine qua non”, as Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has said, of the BRGF. If district planning in accordance with Constitutional provisions can be obligatory and mandatory for the most districts of the country, hat why can this not be done for the more of advanced districts or, indeed, for other CSS in the same backward districts?