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Mainstream, VOL XLIX, No 30, July 16, 2011

Valuable and Out-of-Box Study on Panchayati Raj

Wednesday 20 July 2011

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BOOK REVIEW

by Preet Pal Singh

Local Democracy and Good Governance: Five Decades of Panchayati Raj by Ranbir Singh and Surat Singh (eds.); Deep and Deep Publication, New Delhi; Rs 1280.

Local democracy refers to the local level institutions, and not to those operating at the provincial/State and federal/national/Union levels. A sine qua non of local democracy is the devolution of powers, funds and responsibilities from the highest to the lowest level. In other words, local democracy is to make the institutions of local government more democratic, powerful and autonomous. There will always be a need for a positive engagement of citizens to make it really vibrant.

India has been having the tradition of local democracy since the ancient period. To begin with, local democracy was also direct democracy; as the general assembly of a village, the Sabha used to decide every matter. Subsequently, a Council of Five Representatives, popularly known as the Panchayat, was constituted for this purpose.

But local democracy was operated by traditional Panchayats in the pre-colonial period. However, statutory Panchayats were set up for this purpose during the colonial period.

In the post-colonial period, these were democratised by introducing universal adult franchise. Later on, the Panchayati Raj System came into being in 1959 for streamlining the administration of the Community Development Programme. It had a three-tier structure comprising of the Gram Panchayat at the base, the Panchayat Samiti at the block level in the middle and the Zilla Parishad at the district level on the apex.

The 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution (1993) has now constitutionalised local democracy in India. It seeks to make them institutions of self-government for making and implementing plans of economic development and social justice on those subjects out of 29 listed in the Eleventh Schedule that may be devolved by the State Legislatures on the Panchayati Raj Institutions.

The book being reviewed here is an out-of-box study on Panchayati Raj which is very different from the large number of studies that have been made so far. This interdisciplinary work, to which well-researched articles have been contributed by as many as 39 distinguished scholars from different parts of India, has been divided into five parts in a very systematic manner.

However, the quality of the articles is not uniform. The articles in the Section on the ‘Theme Papers’ by eminent experts like Ms Urvashi Gulati, Dr Ramashray Roy, Prof Ashwini K. Ray, Prof Partha Nath Mukherji and Dr George Mathew are of a very high quality. Among the articles included in the Section of ‘Special Papers’, those of Professor K.B. Saxena and P.C. Mathur are outstanding. In the Section on ‘Conceptual and Operational Dimension of the Democratic Decentralisation’, the chapter contributed by Prof S. Bhatnagar is remarkable. Among the articles in the Section, ‘Experiences of Democratic Decentralisation in States’, the contributions of Prof P.P. Balan on Kerala, Yatinder Singh Sisodia on Madhya Pradesh and Prof Kesar Singh and Paramveer Singh on Punjab are worthwhile and rewarding. In the Section ‘Democratic Decentrali-sation and Women Empowerment’, all the papers are good but none of them is outstanding.

Nevertheless, this book having a very high price deserves the attention of policy-makers, administrators, social scientists and research scholars. It is suggested that the publishers should bring out a paperback edition of affordable price so that this valuable publication could be used by a large number of teachers, research scholars and students in the disciplines of Political Science, Public Administration, Sociology, Social Work and Women Studies.

Dr Preet Pal Singh is an Assistant Professor, Haryana Institute of Rural Development, Nilokheri (Karnal).

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