I’m privileged to have been related intimately with the evolution and implementation of Panchayati Raj from the time of Rajiv Gandhi to the current. Aside from my work as a civil servant in drafting the constitutional amendments that have been finally numbered 73rd and 74th and included within the Structure as Components IX (“The Panchayats”) and IXA (“The Municipalities”) (the longest and most detailed amendments made to the Structure since its proclamation in 1950), I labored on the passage of the amendments by means of Parliament (1991-92) and for greater than a decade (1993-2003) each on the ground of the Lok Sabha and within the Joint Choose Committee (1991-92), in each the Parliament Standing Committee for Rural Growth (which handled Panchayat Raj) in addition to from the Rajiv Gandhi Basis (1991-2003) which prioritised the topic below a committee chaired by D Bandyopadhyaya, former rural growth secretary and later member of the Rajya Sabha.
On behalf of the Rajiv Gandhi Basis, and in session with the Bandyopadhyaya committee, I ready a draft Motion Plan after which undertook a journey across the nation addressing over forty Congress conventions in search of endorsement of the draft, which drew from Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress, the encomium that “it’s actually exceptional that you’ve personally attended all of the 40 conventions” and that “this displays your real dedication to the reason for panchayats”. She added that the Motion Plan displays “your deep examine of the topic and the sustained willpower you might have displayed.”
This was to lead to her urgent for my inclusion as India’s first-ever Cupboard Minister for Panchayat Raj in Dr Manmohan Singh’s first authorities (2004-09). She did so within the face of some opposition from social gathering hacks who by no means appreciated the importance of Panchayat Raj.
Later, Sonia urged, and Dr Manmohan Singh permitted, that I be designated chairman (2011-13) of the Knowledgeable Committee on Leveraging Panchayati Raj for the Extra Efficient Supply of Public Items and Companies. This Knowledgeable Committee produced a five-volume report, tantamount to an Encyclopaedia Panchayatica, which, nevertheless, moulders in forgotten cabinets because the Modi authorities assumed workplace in 2014 and has deleted the report from the web site of the Panchayat Raj ministry. I suggest together with it in my private web site and hope the Congress will restore it and, extra importantly, act on it as and when (and if ) it involves workplace once more. Nevertheless, I confess I’m disillusioned that the position of Panchayat Raj in radically rehauling governance in favour of individuals’s participation has nearly dropped out of the present Congress vocabulary.
That is regardless of Rahul Gandhi having assured me in March 2013, weeks after turning into vice chairman of the social gathering, that whereas he was solely “75 per cent in settlement” with me earlier, “now I believe you might be 100 per cent proper”. He adopted this up by selecting me out of the viewers on the AICC conference on January 17, 2014, to announce that my championing of Panchayat Raj confirmed me as simply the form of Congressman who gave hope for the way forward for the social gathering
That proved my swan track because the social gathering’s Panchayat Raj icon as a result of in August 2013, I used to be requested by the social gathering president to resign my submit as nationwide convenor of the Congress’s Rajiv Gandhi Panchayat Raj Sangathan (2007-13) and for the previous decade my persevering with Panchayat Raj work has been reworked into a private campaign, significantly in Karnataka and Kerala.
The very fact stays that it was my shut involvement with the drafting of the Panchayati Raj laws that sparked off my opting out of the IFS to take up an alternate profession in politics. This has made Panchayati Raj the definitive drumbeat of my life. I don’t assume every other international service diplomat would have made such a maverick transformation of his profession. In view of this, I hope the reader will bear with me as I take him/her by means of the lengthy labyrinth of thought and motion that has made Panchayat Raj ineluctable, irreversible and irremovable by giving constitutional standing, sanction and sanctity for native self-government in our nation.
We now have about 2,60,000 establishments of democratically elected items of native self-government unfold throughout our nation. To those, we now have elected some 32 lakh representatives. About 6.5 lakh of those representatives and workplace bearers, as sarpanch or up-sarpanch, are from the Scheduled Castes (SCs) or Scheduled Tribes (STs).
Furthermore, nearly half the representatives in native our bodies, rural and concrete – that’s, about 1.4 million (14 lakh) – are ladies, some 1,00,000 of whom maintain the submit of chairperson or vice chair and embody over 20,000 SC/ST ladies. The variety of ladies democratically elected to positions and posts of accountable governance in India is bigger than the whole variety of elected ladies members in the remainder of the world!
But this astonishing political, social, financial, cultural, civilizational, and administrative revolution – arguably essentially the most vital since freedom got here at midnight – shouldn’t be broadly applauded and even acknowledged throughout the nation. I think it’s because it has not been matched by ladies’s illustration in our state legislatures and Parliament.8 Elite ladies are, due to this fact, not a lot enthused by what has been achieved for and by their humbler sisters. Most sadly, the United Nations Growth Programme (UNDP) in its annual Human Growth Report solely takes account of the share of ladies in Parliament and the state assemblies, overlooking the social and political empowerment of 1.4 million ladies by means of reservations within the democratically elected native our bodies. India would register an exponential leap on the index if elected ladies on the grassroots have been included as a criterion for figuring out the extent of ladies’s participation in nationwide life.
The efficiency of those humble and sometimes poor ladies from each social phase of our extremely segmented society has been so spectacular that whereas the Structure mandates a minimal of 33 per cent reservation of seats and posts for ladies (whereas permitting states to boost that quota, if they want) as many as 21 states, starting with Bihar, have equalised the illustration of women and men of their native our bodies. It’s time to guarantee by means of a constitutional modification that 33 per cent is raised to 50 per cent and made obligatory throughout the board.
Additionally overdue is rising in follow ladies’s illustration mandatorily by means of applicable constitutional and authorized amendments to make sure gender justice within the state legislatures and Parliament. Not till ladies’s illustration reaches these ranges of proportion within the higher tiers of our democracy would possibly we anticipate India to be thought to be house to essentially the most excellent instance on the planet of gender equality in democratic establishments of governance and authorities, assured and assured by means of constitutional provisions.
Equally, at each stage of Panchayat Raj in each rural and concrete native our bodies, it has been constitutionally ensured that elected SC representatives, and their share of illustration within the native our bodies, replicate their share of the inhabitants at every tier of the system and that their total share of reserved posts displays their share of the inhabitants on the nationwide stage. That is “elite seize” – the only most stinging criticism of native self-government in caste and gender discrimination-ridden rural society in India – sought to be elided. This additionally reconciles Mahatma Gandhi’s impassioned advocacy of Panchayati Raj as the muse of our democracy and Dr Ambedkar’s equally impassioned opposition to village-based establishments which he thought to be ‘sinks of localism’ and “dens of ignorance” and as “the ruination of India” for his or her perpetuation of caste discrimination. Ambedkar’s view of the Indian village was dismal:
The present village system has the impact of creating the Scheduled Castes within the villages slaves of the caste Hindus . . . Below the village system the Scheduled Castes aren’t allowed to stay contained in the village. They should stay on the outskirts . . . They haven’t any impartial technique of livelihood. They personal no land . . . They should do pressured labour day in and time out on ache of being pushed away from their quarters by the Hindu landlords . . . They should stay a lifetime of degradation, dishonour, and ignominy from technology to technology. It’s a state of everlasting perdition.
Rajiv Gandhi’s unprecedented transfer to base the share of seats reserved for SCs/STs in proportion to their focus at every of the three tiers of native self-government ensured due illustration for SCs/STs at every tier and in posts of chairperson/vice chairperson. It reconciled the apparently irreconcilable and diametrically opposed views of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Ambedkar on village India.
As for the STs, they fall into three totally different clusters. First, states reminiscent of these within the north-east hills and Ladakh (listed within the Sixth Schedule) the place they represent practically all the inhabitants. Sixth Schedule areas are exempted from the 73rd Modification to allow their very own native tribal governance techniques to prevail. Second, there are concentrations of tribal populations in 9 composite states recognized within the Fifth Schedule of the Structure the place PESA – “The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996” applies, which exempts these tribal habitats from the 73rd Modification and makes particular provisions for solely tribal panchayats to behave autonomously. Third, states aside from these 9 states the place scattered ST habitations type an integral a part of non-ST panchayat areas. On this third class, the identical reservation provisions apply to the SC.
Excerpted with permission from The Rajiv I Knew and Why he was India’s Most Misunderstood Prime Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Juggernaut.