Women and Marginalised Sections in Grassroots Democracy

Presence, participation and power

The 73rd and 74th Amendments did something no other measure in Indian public life has matched: they placed well over a million women, and several hundred thousand Dalits and Adivasis, in elected office simultaneously and permanently. The reservation clauses were the least contested part of the constitutional package and have turned out to be the most consequential. They also generated the sharpest disappointment, because a reserved seat delivers a body into a room and nothing more. Reservation guarantees presence. It does not guarantee participation, and participation is not the same thing as power.

• That sentence is the whole subject. Every serious assessment of women and marginalised sections in local government is an argument about the distance between the three terms.
  • Presence is a seat occupied — the arithmetic of who is elected.
  • Participation is a voice exercised — attendance, speech, moving and voting on resolutions, signing cheques.
  • Power is an outcome altered — a budget redirected, a scheme’s beneficiary list changed, a contractor refused.
• The Indian record is unambiguous on the first, contested on the second, and dependent on something the Amendments never supplied on the third.
• The third depends on the strength of the institution itself. A representative cannot exercise power an office does not have. Women and Dalits were given a large share of a body with no guaranteed functions, funds or functionaries — a fair share of a weak thing.

The vocabulary: descriptive and substantive representation

Hanna Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation supplies the categories that organise the entire debate, and they are worth stating precisely because they are routinely collapsed into each other.

• Pitkin separates four distinct things that the single word “representation” is made to carry.
  • Formalistic representation — the authorisation to act, and the accountability that follows: who conferred the right to act, and who may remove her.
  • Descriptive representation — the representative body resembles the represented, its composition mirroring that of society: so many women, so many Dalits, so many Adivasis.
  • Symbolic representation — what the representative stands for in the minds of the represented, independent of what she does. A Dalit woman presiding over a gram panchayat carries meaning even on a day she decides nothing.
  • Substantive representation — acting for the represented. Whose interests actually get advanced. This is the only category in which “empowerment” can be measured.

	Descriptive representation	Substantive representation
Question asked	Who sits there?	Whose interests get acted on?
Measured by	Composition of the body — seats held	Policy outputs, budget allocations, agenda
Instrument	Reservation, quotas	Institutional power, capacity, autonomy
Indian record	Achieved on a world-historic scale	Real, but uneven and contested
Failure mode	None — the seats are filled	Proxy rule; the office has nothing to decide

• The Indian reservation scheme is an instrument of descriptive representation that was justified by an argument about substantive representation — that putting women in the room would change what the room decided.
• That justification is testable, and it has been tested. The finding, examined below, is that the descriptive-to-substantive link is real but conditional, not automatic.

The politics of presence against the politics of ideas

Anne Phillips, in The Politics of Presence, made the argument that best defends the Indian design against the standard liberal objection to quotas.

• The liberal tradition, she argued, has treated democracy as a politics of ideas. What is represented is a programme, a preference, an interest. Who carries it is incidental — an able advocate may represent anyone’s interests faithfully.
• Phillips’s response is that this works only where interests are fully articulated in advance. Where a group’s concerns have never entered public debate, no one can advocate for them, because no one has framed them.
• Excluded groups suffer not from bad advocacy but from unarticulated interests — questions never asked because nobody in the room had reason to ask them.
  • Drinking water, the distance to the handpump, the anganwadi’s opening hours, the location of the liquor vend: these are not “women’s ideas” that men happened to vote against.
  • They were items that never reached the agenda.
• The remedy is therefore presence, not persuasion: put members of the group in the room and the agenda changes because the experience in the room changes.
• Phillips is careful about the limits. Presence does not guarantee that a representative will act for her group; women are not a homogeneous bloc; and a quota can produce tokenism. She argues for presence and ideas together, not presence instead of ideas.

The case for reservation was never that women vote differently. It was that men never put the handpump on the agenda.

• Critical mass theory, drawn from Drude Dahlerup’s work on Nordic legislatures, adds the numerical claim: below roughly a third, minority representatives assimilate to the dominant style and cannot alter institutional norms; above it, they begin to change the institution rather than being changed by it. The Indian one-third floor tracks this reasoning.
• The corrective is critical actors — change often comes from a few determined individuals rather than a threshold being crossed. The Indian record supports this: the transformative cases are individual sarpanches, not average ones.
• Against all of this stands the classic objection, made in India by opponents of the women’s reservation bills for three decades.
  • Quotas produce tokens, entrench identity as the basis of politics, and insult the represented by implying they cannot win on merit.
  • The Indian panchayat evidence is the largest body of data anywhere with which to test it.

The constitutional guarantee stated precisely

The reservation provisions are among the compulsory clauses of Part IX and Part IXA. Unlike Articles 243G and 243W, which merely permit states to devolve powers, the reservation Articles bind every state legislature and admit no discretion downwards. This asymmetry explains the entire pattern of outcomes: compliance on representation has been near-total, compliance on power has been optional.

Article 243D: reservation in panchayats

• 243D(1) — Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Seats shall be reserved in every panchayat for SCs and STs, and the number of reserved seats shall bear, as nearly as may be, the same proportion to the total seats as the SC or ST population of that panchayat area bears to the total population of that area.
  • The reservation is proportional, not a flat quantum. A panchayat area with 40% Scheduled Caste population reserves roughly 40% of its seats; one with none reserves none.
  • It applies at all three tiers, and reserved seats may be allotted by rotation to different constituencies.
• 243D(2) — women within the SC/ST quota. Not less than one-third of the seats reserved for SCs and STs shall be reserved for women belonging to those communities. This is a quota within a quota, and it is the constitutional recognition that caste and gender disadvantage compound rather than substitute.
• 243D(3) — women. Not less than one-third of the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in every panchayat — including the seats reserved for SCs and STs — shall be reserved for women, and such seats may be allotted by rotation to different constituencies.
  • The words “of the total number of seats” matter. The women’s quota is computed on the whole house, not on the unreserved remainder, so it cannot be satisfied by counting only general-category seats.
• 243D(4) — chairpersons. The offices of the chairpersons at the village and every other level shall be reserved for SCs, STs and women in such manner as the state legislature may by law provide.
  • The chairperson offices reserved for SCs and STs across the panchayats at each level must bear as nearly as may be the same proportion to the total as the SC or ST population of the state bears to its population.
  • Not less than one-third of the total number of chairperson offices at each level shall be reserved for women.
  • Reserving the chairperson’s post, not merely membership, is the provision that produced the sarpanch, the pradhan and the panchayat president as figures in Indian public life. Membership without the chair confers voice; the chair confers signature authority.
• 243D(5) — duration. Reservation for SCs and STs ceases when Article 334 ceases to have effect; reservation for women is not time-limited.
• 243D(6) — backward classes. Nothing in Part IX prevents the legislature of a state from making any provision for reservation of seats or offices of chairpersons in favour of backward classes.
  • This is an enabling clause, in the permissive column. OBC reservation in panchayats is therefore a creature of state law, varies widely, and is the reservation category now most heavily litigated.
  • The triple test laid down by the Supreme Court governs it: an empirical inquiry into the nature and implications of backwardness by a dedicated commission, a proportionate quantum of reservation, and total reservation not exceeding 50% of the seats. Non-compliance has stalled local elections in several states.

Article 243T: the municipal mirror

• Article 243T reproduces the scheme for municipalities, clause for clause.
  • SC/ST seats in proportion to population in each municipal area (243T(1)), and not less than one-third of SC/ST seats for women of those communities (243T(2)).
  • Not less than one-third of total directly elected seats, including SC/ST seats, for women (243T(3)), and reservation of chairperson offices as state law provides (243T(4)).
  • The same cessation rule under Article 334 (243T(5)), and the same enabling clause for backward classes (243T(6)).

Provision	Panchayats — Article 243D	Municipalities — Article 243T
SC/ST seats	In proportion to population of the panchayat area	Same, for the municipal area
Women within SC/ST quota	Not less than one-third of SC/ST seats	Same
Women’s seats	Not less than one-third of all directly elected seats	Same
Chairperson posts	Reserved for SC, ST and women (one-third minimum), as state law provides	Same
Backward classes	Enabling only — 243D(6)	Enabling only — 243T(6)
Cessation	SC/ST reservation ends with Article 334; women’s has no end date	Same

• The symmetry is complete on paper. In practice the urban side is weaker, because the office being reserved is weaker still — a mayor in most states holds a one-year or two-and-a-half-year term with no executive authority, which rests with a state-appointed Municipal Commissioner. A woman mayor inherits a ceremonial chair.

What “not less than one-third” means

• The constitutional figure is a floor, not a ceiling, and not a target. A state may reserve more; it may not reserve less; and the phrase “not less than” was chosen precisely to permit upward movement without further amendment.
• Twenty states have legislated 50% reservation for women in panchayats: Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand and West Bengal, with two Union Territories added since.
  • Bihar moved first, in 2006, and the decision is generally credited with reshaping the state’s rural politics and with demonstrating that the political cost of the move was negligible.
  • The Supreme Court’s ceiling of 50% on total reservation, framed for backward-class reservation in Indra Sawhney, does not restrict the women’s quota, because women are not a caste or class group and the reservation cuts across every other category.

The scale of the achievement

India runs the largest experiment in mandated political inclusion ever attempted. The figures are not decoration; they are the argument.

• The arithmetic of the system is the first fact to fix.
  • India has roughly 3.1 million elected local representatives across about 2.6 lakh gram panchayats and the intermediate and district tiers, plus urban bodies.
  • Of these, approximately 1.4 to 1.45 million are women — the government’s stated figure is over 14.5 lakh, and the share is placed at about 46% of all panchayat representatives.
  • This is, by a very wide margin, the largest body of elected women anywhere in the world. No other country has a comparable number of women holding elected public office of any kind.
• India’s share of women in local government exceeds that of Germany, the United Kingdom and most of the Global South, and sits above the world average for local councils.
• Regional variation is wide. In absolute numbers Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have the largest cohorts of elected women; in percentage terms the North-Eastern states and Himachal Pradesh lead. Some states now routinely return women beyond 50% of seats.

[Suggested image: bar chart comparing women’s share of seats in Indian panchayats, the Lok Sabha, state assemblies, and the global average for national parliaments]

The contrast with the legislatures

• Women’s representation in the Lok Sabha stayed in single digits for four decades after 1952 and crossed 10% only in the 2000s. The 17th Lok Sabha (2019) returned a record 78 women (14.4%); the 18th Lok Sabha (2024) returned 74 — 13.6%, a decline, and well below the global average for national parliaments of around 26–27%.
• State legislative assemblies are worse on average, with several large states in single figures.

Tier	Women’s share	Reservation applies?
Panchayats and municipalities	about 46%	Yes — floor of one-third since 1993
Lok Sabha (18th, 2024)	13.6% — 74 members	Not yet — 106th Amendment pending
State assemblies	low double digits, single figures in several large states	Not yet
World average, national parliaments	about 26–27%	Varies

• The gap is therefore roughly thirty percentage points between the tier where reservation applies and the tiers where it does not.
  • The comparison is close to a natural experiment, and it is the strongest available evidence that the shortfall in the legislatures is a supply-side problem created by parties, not a shortage of willing or capable women.
• The parties’ standing defence — that women candidates are less “winnable” — is contradicted by the win rates of women candidates in general elections, which have generally matched or exceeded those of men.

The 106th Amendment and the argument that made it possible

• The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023, the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, reserves one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha, in state legislative assemblies and in the Legislative Assembly of the National Capital Territory of Delhi for women, including one-third of the seats reserved for SCs and STs.
  • It inserts Article 330A (Lok Sabha), Article 332A (state assemblies) and amends Article 239AA for Delhi.
  • Article 334A is the operative condition: the reservation takes effect only after the first census taken after the commencement of the Act has been published and a delimitation exercise undertaken on its basis; it lasts fifteen years; and reserved seats rotate after each subsequent delimitation as Parliament may determine.
• The Act received assent in September 2023 and was notified in April 2026, but notification is not implementation.
  • The census and the delimitation on which it depends remain the gate.
  • The Delimitation Bill, 2026 was introduced to address the sequencing, proposing delimitation on a modern census base and a substantially enlarged Lok Sabha.
  • Litigation seeking earlier implementation is before the Supreme Court.
• The local experiment is what made the national one arguable.
  • Every previous attempt — the bills of 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2008 — failed against the claim that reserved women would be proxies and that the measure would degrade the quality of legislatures.
  • Thirty years of panchayat data is the reason that claim can no longer be made without evidence to the contrary being produced.
• The 106th Amendment also reproduces the panchayat design’s worst feature. Rotation of reserved seats after each delimitation carries into Parliament the same incumbency-destroying mechanism that has done the most damage at the village level. The lesson available from the local experience was learnt in the wrong direction.

India solved women’s under-representation at the level where power had not been transferred, and left it unsolved at the levels where power actually sits.

Did it work? The evidence

The proxy charge

• When reservation was introduced, the immediate and near-universal prediction of the political class was that women would hold the office and men would exercise it. The charge acquired names in every language: “Pradhan Pati”, “Sarpanch Pati”, “Pati Panchayat”, “bahu-beti raj”, the “Mukhiya Pati” in Bihar.
• The mechanism alleged was specific and remains recognisable: the husband or father-in-law attends meetings, speaks for the office-holder, deals with the block officials, controls the seal and the cheque book, and negotiates with contractors, while the elected woman signs.
• The charge is not fabricated. It describes something real and widespread, heaviest in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan, and it remains the single most cited impediment.
  • A study in Bihar found more than 60% of elected women representatives reporting that a husband or male relative attended meetings and took decisions on their behalf.
  • A survey in Haryana found most women sarpanches unable to state their own panchayat’s budget.
• What the charge is not is a description of the whole, and it was advanced before any evidence existed. It functioned as an argument against the reservation itself.

What the studies found

• The Ministry of Panchayati Raj’s 2008 study of elected women representatives remains the largest survey of its kind: 1,368 gram panchayats across 23 states, covering pradhans, ward members, former women representatives and more than twenty thousand community members.
  • Its central finding was that a clear majority of women representatives were taking decisions themselves — the commonly cited figure is around three in five — that most attended meetings in person, and that a substantial proportion reported growing confidence and standing over a term.
  • Independent research organisations working on participatory governance reached the same conclusion on smaller samples, and the finding has held up across two decades of replication.

Chattopadhyay and Duflo: the randomised evidence

Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo exploited a feature of the Indian design that researchers elsewhere can only dream of. Because reserved seats were allotted to constituencies by a rule effectively unrelated to local politics, the reservation functioned as a randomised policy experiment at national scale — the closest thing in the social sciences to a controlled trial on political representation.

• They studied gram panchayats in Birbhum district, West Bengal and Udaipur district, Rajasthan, comparing panchayats whose pradhan post was reserved for a woman with those where it was not.
• They first established what men and women in the same villages actually complained about, and found systematically different priorities.
  • In West Bengal, 31% of women’s complaints concerned drinking water and 31% roads, against 17% and 25% for men.
  • In Rajasthan, 54% of women’s complaints concerned drinking water against 43% for men, and 19% concerned welfare programmes against 3% for men.
• They then measured what reserved panchayats actually built. Reserved panchayats invested more in the goods women named as priorities.
  • In West Bengal, reserved panchayats had roughly nine more drinking-water facilities and better road conditions.
  • In Rajasthan, reserved panchayats had about 2.6 more drinking-water facilities, with roads relatively worse — a result that fits the local complaint pattern rather than contradicting it.
• The finding is narrow and therefore strong: reservation changed policy output in the direction of women’s stated preferences — direct evidence of the descriptive-to-substantive link, produced by the design of the Indian reservation itself.

Beaman, Duflo, Pande and Topalova: exposure, bias and aspirations

• Beaman, Duflo, Pande and Topalova used the same random reservation to test what exposure to a woman leader does to attitudes.
  • Villagers in never-reserved panchayats rated hypothetical women leaders worse than identical male leaders; after one term of a reserved woman pradhan, the explicit bias fell; after two terms, voters were substantially less likely to prefer a male leader, and women’s chances of winning unreserved seats rose.
  • The mechanism was exposure, not persuasion. Attitudes changed because people had watched a woman do the job, not because anyone argued with them about gender.
• The companion study on adolescents surveyed roughly 8,450 adolescents aged 11–15 and their parents across nearly 500 villages.
  • In villages with two consecutive terms of a reserved woman leader, the gender gap in parents’ aspirations for their children closed by about 25%, and the gap in adolescents’ own aspirations by about 32%.
  • The gender gap in adolescent educational attainment was erased, and girls spent less time on household chores.
  • The researchers found no evidence that new job opportunities explained the result, concluding it reflected a role-model effect — which is Pitkin’s symbolic representation producing a measurable material outcome.
• Taken together, the two bodies of evidence answer the two halves of the original objection. Reservation changes what gets built, and it changes what people believe women can do.

Re-election: the single strongest indicator

• Because reserved seats rotate, a woman who wishes to serve a second term must usually contest a seat that is no longer reserved, in open competition with men, on her record.
• The number of such re-elections has risen steadily, and it measures most directly whether the quota is producing politicians or placeholders.
• Every such win is a demonstration that the electorate has revised its estimate of women’s competence, and it is the cleanest available refutation of the proxy thesis: a proxy does not get re-elected from an unreserved seat.

How women govern differently: the qualitative record

• Timing of business. Women sarpanches hold panchayat meetings during the day rather than at night. The consequence noted repeatedly by field observers is that fewer dubious deals are struck, because the arrangements that require darkness require a night meeting.
• Accessibility. Women office-holders are more often present in the village and reachable, where men are frequently away. Being findable is a governance capacity that is invisible until absent.
• Honesty and transparency. Fieldwork across states associates women-led panchayats with more transparent local administration and a better record on petty corruption — not because of any claim about innate virtue, but because women entering the office are outside the established contractor-official networks and have not accumulated the obligations that sustain them.
• Agenda shift. The subjects that rise when women preside are consistent across states: drinking water, sanitation, anganwadis, fuel and smokeless stoves, school enrolment and attendance, public conveniences, and opposition to liquor vends. These were not absent from village life; they were absent from the agenda.
• Anti-liquor action is the most politically charged of these. Women-led panchayats were the institutional base of anti-liquor mobilisation in several states.

The record in names

The abstractions above are made of individual cases, and the cases are the substance of the answer.

• Fathima Bi, sarpanch of Kalva village, Kurnool district, Andhra Pradesh, mobilised rural women into cooperatives and micro-finance groups, and was recognised by the UNDP at the United Nations, receiving the Race Against Poverty Award. Hers is the case that establishes that a village sarpanch’s work can be recognised as development practice at the international level.
• The Fatehabad panchayats led by women achieved zero female infanticide and 100% piped water provision — a pairing that captures the agenda shift exactly: one item is a public-health infrastructure target, the other is a direct assault on the sex ratio.
• Malugoda panchayat, under a woman sarpanch, secured 100% enrolment of girls in school and enforced zero tolerance towards alcohol, using the fines collected from liquor offences to build toilets — a small, exact demonstration of what a redirected local revenue stream can do.
• Uma Maiti of Kanthipad village, Midnapore district, West Bengal, stood against corruption in the allocation of housing funds under the Indira Awaas programme. Ratna Roy Choudhury of the same village, a disabled woman, fought for and obtained her entitlement under the same scheme.
• Tahmina Bibi of Barogharia in north Bengal, with almost no formal education, stood against the men of her panchayat and forced through the construction of a culvert. The case is cited precisely because she is the profile the proxy thesis assumed would be a rubber stamp.
• A woman member in a gram panchayat meeting in Kolar district, Karnataka, intervened on where the panchayat should buy land and saved it ₹20,000 — a reminder that the quiet form of substantive representation is a better decision, not a dramatic one.
• Kantibai Dhurve, a disabled Adivasi woman in Savalkheda gram panchayat, Madhya Pradesh, was elected president by 273 votes against the opposition of seven men, and over four years built a village road and installed handpumps.

“If the government helps us we can do much more.” — Kantibai Dhurve, Savalkheda gram panchayat

• Saroj Rana, the first woman pradhan of the Siyoni block panchayat, Uttarkashi district, built a school and a road, and then attacked the mechanism of contractor capture directly.
  • The established practice was that employment-scheme money went to a contractor who built substandard works, with the pradhan and the contractor sharing the difference. Rana announced every allocation publicly to assembled villagers before spending it.
  • She then changed the distribution rule. Her block had six villages; instead of splitting each allocation six ways into sums too small to build anything, she gave the entire allocation to one village at a time, in rotation, so that each village in turn received a usable amount.
  • This is the most sophisticated single intervention in the case record: a design change that made works large enough to be visible, and therefore large enough to be audited.
• Majah Wankhede, sarpanch of Metikhede village, Yavatmal district, Maharashtra, built toilets in the school building and forty biogas plants, and provided smokeless chullahs.
  • She confronted the Block Development Officer who had demanded a tin sheet from each of the forty boxes the panchayat purchased.
  • She suspended two gram sevaks for corruption, despite his warning that she would ruin her reputation by insisting on it.

“Getting elected was not difficult. What was difficult was what we had to deal with after getting elected, particularly dealing with government officials.” — Majah Wankhede, sarpanch, Metikhede

• A woman panchayat member in Yavatmal organised a camp for village women on dowry, and persuaded households to adopt improved stoves and biogas.
• The woman pradhan of Kashlog, near Darlaghat in Himachal Pradesh, opposed limestone mining by a cement company in her area — an early instance of a panchayat office being used against an extractive project.
• In Chamba, Himachal Pradesh, the federation of mahila mandals closed two liquor vends in a single year, and both lay in panchayats led by women. Across several states the support base of anti-liquor movements traces directly to panchayats where women held key positions.

The impediments, ranked

The obstacles are not a list of equals. They differ in how much damage they do and in how tractable they are, and the ranking is the analytical core of the subject.

Rank	Impediment	Mechanism	Tractability
1	Proxy rule (sarpanch pati)	Male relative exercises the office; woman signs	Hard — social, but attackable by procedure and penalty
2	Rotation of reserved seats	Destroys incumbency, experience, constituency	Easy — a pure design defect, fixable by statute
3	Educational and informational deficit	Official business in written English or formal Hindi	Medium — training, translation, plain-language rules
4	Caste and class cutting across gender	Dominant-caste obstruction of Dalit women office-holders	Hard — requires enforcement of criminal law
5	Time poverty and mobility restriction	Unpaid care work; norms against meeting men	Medium — meeting timing, childcare, honoraria
6	No-confidence motions and violence	Removal or intimidation of inconvenient office-holders	Easy in law — bar motions in the early term; enforce the criminal law
7	Party and community discipline	The organisation that sponsored her runs the office	Hard — internal party democracy
8	No funds, functions or functionaries	A share of a weak institution	Structural — the subject of the whole devolution debate

1. Proxy rule and how it actually operates

• The practice is not usually a fraud imposed on an unwilling woman. It is more often a household arrangement entered into by everyone concerned, in which the seat is treated as the family’s and the woman’s name is the qualification for holding it.
  • It is sustained by officials as much as by families. A block development officer who finds it easier to deal with the husband, and addresses instructions to him, is a co-author of the arrangement.
  • It is heavily concentrated where female literacy is low, purdah norms are strong and land is concentrated — the northern plains — and is markedly weaker in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and the North-East.
• It decays with time in office. This is the single most important empirical fact about proxy rule, and it converts rotation from an inconvenience into the central design failure.

2. Rotation of reserved seats: the most damaging design feature

• Under Article 243D, reserved seats “may be allotted by rotation to different constituencies”, and every state has adopted rotation, typically every term.
• The intention was fair: no constituency should be permanently reserved, and no group of voters should be permanently deprived of an open contest.
• The consequences are severe, and they compound.
  • Incumbency is impossible. A woman elected from a seat reserved this term cannot contest that seat as a reserved seat next term. She either exits or contests an open seat against an established male politician.
  • Experience is destroyed at the point it becomes valuable. The evidence says a woman representative becomes substantially more autonomous and effective in her second and third years; rotation guarantees that this capital is discarded at the end of the term.
  • Constituency-building is prevented. Political careers rest on cultivated relationships with voters; a representative who cannot return to the same electorate cannot build one.
  • Proxy rule is entrenched. If the seat rotates away, the household’s rational strategy is to treat the office as a family asset and run it through the person who will still be in politics next term — the husband.
• Rotation therefore turns the quota into a rotating apprenticeship that never produces a journeyman. It is a statutory choice, not a constitutional command: Article 243D says seats “may” be allotted by rotation, so a state is free to lengthen the cycle or abandon it.
• Longer cycles — reserving a seat for two or three consecutive terms — would preserve fairness across constituencies while allowing incumbency to form. The reform is available and costs nothing.

3. Educational and informational deficits

• The business of a panchayat is conducted on paper: resolutions, muster rolls, utilisation certificates, tender documents, scheme guidelines and audit objections.
• Officials frequently correspond in written English or formal administrative Hindi, neither of which is the working language of the office-holder. Language is used, deliberately or not, as an instrument of exclusion.
• The remedy — training — is provided at scale but is often a single orientation at the start of a term, which is precisely the moment at which it is least usable, and which rotation then wastes.

4. Caste and class cutting across gender

• Women are not a class. The obstacles a landowning dominant-caste woman faces are of a wholly different order from those facing a Dalit woman sarpanch in a village where the dominant caste owns the land and controls employment.
• A Dalit woman office-holder confronts two systems of subordination that reinforce each other, and faces forms of obstruction — physical exclusion from the office, refusal to let her preside, denial of a chair, ritual humiliation — that a dominant-caste woman does not encounter at all.
• Class operates through economic dependence. A representative whose household depends on wage work from the families she is supposed to regulate is not free to regulate them.
• Elite women can be the instrument of dominant-caste continuity rather than a break from it, when a dominant household fields a woman to hold a seat reserved for women.
• This is why intersecting quotas — one-third of SC and ST seats reserved for women of those communities — were constitutionally necessary, and why they are insufficient on their own.

5. Time poverty and restricted mobility

• Unpaid domestic and care work is the binding constraint on the time of most rural women, and holding office adds an unpaid or barely paid job on top of it.
• Travel to the block or district headquarters — where the money is discussed — requires permission, an escort, or both, and honoraria are small and irregular, so office-holding is close to voluntary work with substantial travel.
• Norms restricting interaction with unrelated men cut a woman off from the officials, contractors and fellow representatives with whom the business of the office is transacted.
• Meeting timing and venue are decisive and almost never adjusted. A meeting called at short notice, in the evening, at the block office, is one a woman representative in a conservative district cannot attend.

6. No-confidence motions and violence

• Most state panchayat laws permit removal of a chairperson by a no-confidence motion, and these are used disproportionately against women and Dalit chairpersons, often within months of election.
• The motion requires no proof of misconduct. It requires numbers, which the dominant faction in a panchayat usually has, and it converts an elected office into one held at the pleasure of the local elite.
• The typical trigger is not incompetence but refusal — to sign a contractor’s bill, approve a beneficiary list, or defer to the vice-chairperson.
• Several states bar a no-confidence motion in the first year or two of a term; where such a bar exists it demonstrably reduces early removals, and the reform is directly available to the rest.

7. Party and community discipline overriding the office

The most instructive obstacles are those where the office-holder faces not prejudice but organisation.

• Fatima Suhra, a primary school teacher, was elected president of the Puthige panchayat, Kasargod district, Kerala, as the candidate of the local unit of the party that sponsored her. That unit then constituted a sub-committee to oversee panchayat affairs and to instruct her.
  • She refused. The local unit ordered social ostracism against her — a lethal instrument in her region — and she was forced to resign.
  • The case matters because it is not a story about patriarchal backwardness. It occurred in India’s most literate state, in its most politically mobilised local government system, and the agent of the capture was a modern political organisation. Party control of a reserved office is proxy rule in institutional form.

“I was on the side of justice.” — Fatima Suhra, on being forced to resign as president of Puthige panchayat

• Muktiben Patel, a backward-caste woman elected sarpanch of Nitaya village, Hoshangabad district, Madhya Pradesh, faced repeated no-confidence motions brought by the dominant-caste Thakur households of the village, and continued in office repairing school buildings and securing a metalled road.
• Kesarbai, a Dalit sarpanch of Sona Savri gram panchayat in the same district, faced threats from dominant-caste men who sent hooligans to attack her house. The escalation from procedural obstruction to physical violence is the standard sequence where the office-holder does not yield.
• The three cases together map the full range: capture by a party, removal by procedure, removal by force.

8. The structural impediment: a share of a weak institution

• Every obstacle above operates inside an institution that has, as a matter of right, no functions, no funds and no functionaries. Articles 243G and 243W say the state legislature may endow local bodies with powers; they do not require it.
• Panchayats raise about 1% of their revenue from their own taxes. Roughly 80% comes from central and 15% from state transfers, and average own-tax revenue is about ₹21,000 per panchayat a year.
• Staff are state cadre, reporting upward. The panchayat secretary answers to the administration, not to the sarpanch — which is why Wankhede’s suspension of two gram sevaks was extraordinary enough to be recorded.
• Parallel bodies — district rural development agencies, mission societies, special purpose vehicles, and MP and MLA local area development schemes — carry money and decisions around the elected body altogether.
• The conclusion follows without rhetoric. A reserved seat transfers a share of whatever power the institution holds. Where the institution holds little, the share is small, and no amount of capacity building changes the arithmetic.

The women’s quota did not fail to deliver power. It delivered a proportionate share of an office that had not been given any.

Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in local government

The design

• The guarantee has three limbs and one gap.
  • Article 243D(1) and 243T(1) reserve seats in proportion to population in each panchayat and municipal area — a materially different principle from the fixed all-India quantum used for the legislatures under Articles 330 and 332, and a stronger one where SC or ST populations are locally concentrated.
  • Chairperson posts are reserved at each level in proportion to the state’s SC and ST population, which is what places a Dalit or Adivasi at the head of a village government — the position that most directly inverts the local social order.
  • One-third of SC and ST seats are reserved for women of those communities, and states at parity reserve half.
  • The gap is backward classes, covered only by the enabling clauses 243D(6) and 243T(6), so OBC representation depends entirely on state law and is now constrained by the triple test.
• The effect at scale is that several hundred thousand Dalit and Adivasi representatives hold local office continuously — a transformation of the social composition of Indian public authority that has no precedent and almost no international parallel.

What happens when a Dalit presides

The gap between the reserved seat and the exercised office is wider for Dalit office-holders than for anyone else, and the Tamil Nadu record is the best documented in the country.

• Dominant-caste members have refused to permit a Dalit panchayat president to attend meetings at all, and where attendance is conceded, refused to let her preside.
• The chair itself is used as the instrument. Dalit presidents have been given a broken or plastic seat while other members use the standard revolving chair, told in terms that the chair was a favour; others were given no chair or desk for months after election, until the district collector intervened.
• Dalit presidents, disproportionately women, have been made to sit on the floor during official meetings, with legs folded, and have been barred from hoisting the national flag on Republic Day and Independence Day — the single most visible act of a panchayat president’s year.
• A survey of 114 Dalit panchayat presidents in Tamil Nadu (79 women, 31 men) documented the pattern in numbers.
  • 11 denied a chair, 60 subjected to abusive language, 58 prevented from moving or passing resolutions.
  • 26 whose office nameboards were destroyed, 12 blocked from hoisting the flag, 11 denied entry to the office and 6 regularly locked out.
• The “two-tumbler” system and cognate untouchability practices follow the office-holder into the office: separate cups, forms of address requiring a president to defer to her own members, restrictions on gesture while speaking.
• The vice-president, ordinarily from a dominant caste, becomes the effective executive, receiving officials and signing in practice what the president signs in law. This is the caste analogue of the sarpanch pati.
• Where the humiliation fails, procedure is used: no-confidence motions, and dominant-caste boycotts of elections in reserved panchayats so that no nomination is filed, elections are repeatedly postponed or annulled, and the reserved panchayat simply goes unfilled.

Melavalavu and the price of a reserved seat

• On 30 June 1997, at Melavalavu near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, K. Murugesan, elected panchayat president from a seat reserved for Scheduled Castes, was murdered along with six other Dalit men while returning from Madurai by bus.
  • The panchayat had been reserved for SCs in the 1996 elections; dominant-caste groups had opposed the reservation itself, forced the postponement of polling, and Murugesan had sought protection from the district administration before the killings.
  • Of forty persons charged, seventeen were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial court did not apply the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 to the convictions — a failure that recurs across atrocity prosecutions.
  • Three convicts were released in 2008 and thirteen more in 2019 under remission, and restrictions on the released were later withdrawn. Victims’ families have consistently described the releases as politically driven, and the village’s Dalit residents report continuing intimidation decades on.
• Melavalavu is the extreme case, but it is not an isolated one, and it makes the analytical point exactly: the reserved seat was worth killing for, which is a measure of how much power the local order believed was at stake — and of how little the constitutional guarantee is worth without enforcement behind it.

The Prevention of Atrocities Act as the fallback

• The SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 is the legal instrument standing behind the reserved seat.
  • It creates specific offences, establishes special courts and provides for victim rehabilitation.
  • Offences are cognisable and non-bailable, with punishment from six months to five years.
  • A public servant’s wilful neglect of duties under it is punishable with up to one year’s imprisonment.
• Its catalogue of atrocities reaches the conduct documented in reserved panchayats: forcing a person to consume an offensive substance, parading, sexual assault, and forcing a person to leave house or village.
• Its use in panchayat cases is patchy. Complaints are recorded as ordinary offences, the Act is not invoked, charges are diluted, and the public-servant neglect provision is almost never applied against block officials who preside over the exclusion.
• The Act’s own trajectory shows how contested it is. In 2018 the Supreme Court introduced a preliminary-inquiry requirement and permitted anticipatory bail; Parliament restored the original provisions by amendment in August 2018; and the Court subsequently accepted that it had strayed into legislative territory and upheld the restored provisions.

Scheduled Areas: PESA, forest rights and Niyamgiri

Where the state actually devolved, the results are visible. The Fifth Schedule areas are the one part of the Indian local government system where the gram sabha was given real statutory power, and they are the best available evidence of what marginalised communities do with authority when it is genuinely transferred.

PESA 1996

• The Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 extends Part IX to Fifth Schedule areas, but with modifications that reverse the ordinary hierarchy: it makes the gram sabha the primary unit rather than the panchayat.
• State legislation must conform to customary law, social and religious practices, and customary modes of dispute resolution.
• Every gram sabha is competent to safeguard and preserve the traditions and customs of the people, their cultural identity, community resources and the customary mode of dispute resolution.
• The gram sabha’s powers are substantive, not advisory in most respects.
  • Approval of plans, programmes and projects for social and economic development before implementation.
  • Mandatory consultation before land acquisition in Scheduled Areas and before resettlement or rehabilitation of displaced persons.
  • Ownership of minor forest produce.
  • Recommendation prior to prospecting licences or mining leases for minor minerals, and prior to auction of minor mineral concessions.
  • Power to enforce prohibition or regulate the sale and consumption of intoxicants, control money lending to Scheduled Tribes, and manage village markets.
• On representation, PESA goes further than Part IX: reservation for Scheduled Tribes shall not be less than one-half of the total seats, and all chairperson posts at every level are reserved for Scheduled Tribes.
  • A crucial safeguard requires that panchayats at a higher level shall not assume the powers of a lower level or of the gram sabha, which is the anti-centralisation clause missing from Part IX.
• For Adivasi women the combination is the strongest representational guarantee in Indian law: half the seats for Scheduled Tribes, one-third of those for women, all chairs reserved.

The Forest Rights Act and Niyamgiri

• The Forest Rights Act, 2006 — formally the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act — recognises four classes of right.
  • Individual title to forest land under cultivation as on 13 December 2005, up to four hectares.
  • Use rights over minor forest produce and grazing, and community forest resource rights.
  • Rights to protect and manage forests, including sacred groves.
  • Decisively, it vests determination of claims in the gram sabha, which converts a movement demand into a statutory power and makes the village assembly a body that adjudicates property rights.
• Its weaknesses are well identified: exclusion errors where distress migration breaks continuity of occupation, under-recognition of community rights relative to individual titles, and delays in relief. Virginius Xaxa recommended stronger gram sabha powers over land acquisition, mining rights vested in tribal cooperatives, and use of acquired but unused land for tribal rehabilitation.
• Niyamgiri, 2013 is the demonstration case. The Dongria Kondh of the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha resisted bauxite mining allocated to a company by the state mineral corporation, organising as the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti. The Saxena Committee (2010) found violations of the Forest Rights Act and PESA, and the project nonetheless continued.
  • The Supreme Court then directed that the question of religious and cultural rights be decided by the gram sabhas. Twelve gram sabhas were convened and all twelve rejected the project.
  • It is the first instance of a referendum on a development project in India, and the strongest single demonstration of what tribal grassroots power looks like when the law actually places the decision in the village.
• The contrast with the rest of the country is the lesson.
  • Where the gram sabha was given a real power, the most marginalised community in India used it — coherently and unanimously, against the largest available concentration of capital and state pressure.
  • The problem elsewhere is not the capacity of the marginalised; it is the emptiness of the office.
• PESA’s own implementation record is poor. Several states framed conformity rules a decade or more late, some have still not aligned subject laws on land, mining, forest produce and excise, and the gram sabha’s consent power is routinely converted into a formality through manufactured resolutions and manipulated quorum.

Elite capture and Ambedkar’s objection

The uncomfortable question is whether decentralisation into an unequal society empowers the excluded at all, or simply hands the local elite a constitutional instrument.

• Dominant castes adapted to the new institutions rather than being displaced by them, and the adaptation is systematic rather than incidental.
  • Fielding a woman or Dalit from a dependent household for a reserved seat, so that the seat changes hands and the power does not.
  • Capturing the vice-chairperson’s post and the standing committees, which are unreserved.
  • Working through the panchayat secretary and the block administration, who are outside the elected structure entirely.
  • Using no-confidence motions and litigation against inconvenient office-holders.
• The theoretical argument is that decentralisation without prior social equalisation entrenches local oligarchy. Power devolved to a village goes to whoever dominates it, and the smaller the arena, the more complete the domination, because exit and anonymity are unavailable.
• This is precisely Ambedkar’s objection, made in the Constituent Assembly against those who wanted the village made the unit of the Indian polity, and it should be raised here honestly rather than dismissed as settled.

“What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?” — B. R. Ambedkar, Constituent Assembly of India

• Ambedkar’s position was not anti-democratic.
  • It was that the village as it existed was the most complete apparatus of caste subordination in Indian life, and that the individual was its casualty.
  • A Dalit’s protection lay with a constitutional state and its law, not with the community that had excluded him; he preferred the individual as the unit of the Constitution.
• The Melavalavu killings, the chair denied to a panchayat president and the annulled election in a reserved panchayat are all evidence that he described something real and enduring.
• Gandhi’s position was the opposite and equally serious: the village republic as an oceanic circle of self-governing units, in which power flows outward from the individual and the village rather than downward from the state. Article 40 is the compromise between them, and the compromise was placed in the unenforceable Directive Principles.
• The counter-evidence is nevertheless substantial and must be weighed at full strength.
  • Reservation has produced a genuinely new political class — first-generation representatives from households that had never held public office, in numbers that cannot be absorbed by any elite.
  • Re-election from unreserved seats shows the class surviving the withdrawal of the quota.
  • Measured policy change in the direction of women’s priorities shows the new class doing something with the office.
  • Reduced voter bias and raised girls’ aspirations show the effects reaching beyond the office-holders.
  • Dominant-caste violence against Dalit presidents is itself evidence of a real transfer. Nobody murders a figurehead.
• The honest resolution is that both propositions are true at once: elite capture is pervasive, and a new political class exists.
  • Which one dominates in a given district depends on land distribution, literacy, the strength of women’s collectives, and how much the state has actually devolved.
  • It is not settled, and treating it as settled in either direction is the characteristic error in this subject.

Remedies

Immediate and procedural

• No resolution to be passed without the presence of women and Dalit members. A quorum rule that makes the marginalised member’s attendance a condition of the panchayat’s ability to act converts her presence from a formality into leverage, and is the cheapest available reform.
• Compulsory video recording of gram sabha and panchayat meetings, with recordings retained and open to inspection. Recording defeats the bogus meeting, the fabricated resolution, the president excluded from her own proceedings and the member whose objection is not minuted.
• Fix meeting times and venues in advance, hold business by day, and hold it in the panchayat office rather than at the block headquarters, so that attendance does not depend on permission to travel.

Design changes

• Lengthen or abolish the rotation cycle. Reserving a seat for two or three consecutive terms would let incumbency, experience and constituency-building form while preserving rotation’s fairness across constituencies. Nothing in Article 243D requires the current practice.
• Bar no-confidence motions in the first two years, and require a higher majority and recorded reasons thereafter. Several states already do this and the effect is measurable.
• Reserve chairperson posts of standing committees in the same proportion as the chair itself, so that capture of the unreserved offices cannot hollow out the reserved one.

Capacity, money and enforcement

• Continuous capacity building rather than a single induction — repeated, in the local language, delivered in the panchayat rather than a district training centre, and covering what the office actually requires: reading a budget, distinguishing tied from untied funds, moving a resolution, chairing a meeting, using the Right to Information Act.
• A model code of conduct governing officials and elected representatives, on the Kerala pattern.
  • It would define what a block officer may and may not require of a sarpanch, and what a representative may and may not demand of an officer.
  • The 73rd Amendment created no obligation whatever on the bureaucracy towards panchayat representatives, and this is the gap.
• Action against proxy rule, which has moved from exhortation to policy.
  • The Ministry of Panchayati Raj’s panel on the subject recommended exemplary penalties in confirmed cases, and the Ministry ran a national “Say No to Proxy Sarpanch” campaign from March 2026.
  • States including Rajasthan have announced action against representatives who delegate their duties to husbands or male relatives.
  • The workable instruments are a statutory bar on non-members transacting panchayat business, refusal by officials to deal with anyone but the office-holder, and disqualification on repeated proof.
  • The caution matters: penalising the woman for her household’s conduct punishes the victim of the arrangement.
• Enforce the criminal law. Obstruction of a Dalit office-holder should be charged under the Prevention of Atrocities Act, and the public-servant neglect provision should be used against officials who preside over it.

Money that belongs to the agenda

• A women’s component in local plans, requiring an identified share of the panchayat’s development fund to be spent on projects directly benefiting women. Kerala requires 10% of the Development Fund of every local government under its Women Component Plan, and it is the only such mandate operating at scale in the country.
• Gender budgeting at panchayat level — gender status studies, gender-responsive planning and gender audit of local plans — so that the agenda shift documented in women-led panchayats becomes a procedural requirement rather than a matter of who happens to hold the chair.
• Untied funds. The Sixteenth Finance Commission’s award of about ₹4.35 lakh crore to panchayats over 2026–31 is large in nominal terms, but 80% is basic grant with half of that tied to sanitation, solid waste and water, and 20% is performance-linked. A representative with no discretionary money cannot set an agenda, however well trained.

The capacity infrastructure behind effective representatives

• The most effective women representatives are almost never isolated individuals. They come out of, and are supported by, women’s collectives.
• Kudumbashree in Kerala is the clearest case — a state-wide network of neighbourhood groups, area development societies and community development societies federated at panchayat level.
  • It gives women prior experience of running meetings, keeping accounts and negotiating with officials, and functions as a standing constituency a representative can mobilise.
  • Kerala’s simultaneous strength on devolution and on women’s participation is not a coincidence.
• The National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) has brought roughly 10 crore rural women into self-help groups and their federations. Where these federations engage with the gram sabha and with panchayat planning, they perform the same function: they convert an individual office-holder into a represented interest with an organisation behind it.
• The general principle is that presence becomes power when it is organised. A representative with a collective behind her can survive a no-confidence motion, refuse a contractor and outlast a hostile secretary. One without it cannot.

Where it stands now

• The Status of Devolution to Panchayats in States 2024 report records a national devolution score rising only from 39.9% (2013-14) to 43.9% (2021-22) — under four points in nine years.
  • It scores six dimensions: framework, functions, finances, functionaries, capacity building and accountability.
  • Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh lead; the smaller Union Territories are at the bottom.
  • The functionaries index improved from 39.6% to 50.9%, the only dimension to move substantially.
  • The relevance to inclusion is direct. The dimensions that determine whether a woman or Dalit representative can act — functions, finances and functionaries — are the ones that have moved least. Capacity building scores improved on paper while the powers being built for did not arrive.
• The Panchayat Advancement Index, launched on 24 April 2025, scores gram panchayats on 435 local indicators across nine localised SDG themes.
  • The themes include a socially just and socially secured panchayat, and one on women-friendly panchayats.
  • Of the 2.16 lakh gram panchayats from 29 states and Union Territories that submitted validated data, no panchayat reached “Achiever”.
  • Only 0.3% were “Front Runner”, 35.8% “Performer”, 61.2% “Aspirant” and 2.7% “Beginner”.
  • A distribution in which more than three-fifths of gram panchayats are “Aspirant” and none is an “Achiever” is a measurement of the institution, not of the people elected to it.
• The Ministry of Panchayati Raj’s current programme is aimed squarely at the participation gap.
  • The Sashakt Panchayat-Netri Abhiyan, launched in March 2025, with over 7.18 lakh women representatives trained in 2025-26 and 744 women-friendly gram panchayats identified across 32 states and Union Territories.
  • The “Say No to Proxy Sarpanch” campaign of March 2026, and “Nirbhay Raho” under the Nirbhaya Fund on women’s safety in panchayats.
• The 106th Amendment remains notified but inoperative, awaiting the census and the delimitation on which Article 334A conditions it, with the Delimitation Bill, 2026 and litigation before the Supreme Court both bearing on the timing.
• The Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025, passed in December 2025, repeals MGNREGA 2005 and subsumes its programmes and structures.
  • It guarantees 125 days of work, funds on 60:40 Centre–State sharing, and permits states to suspend employment for up to 60 days in sowing and harvesting seasons.
  • It mandates Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans, and retains social audit and public disclosure at gram panchayat level.
  • MGNREGA’s worksite entitlements — equal wages, crèche facilities, work within five kilometres — made it the scheme in which rural women participated most heavily, and in several states women supplied the majority of person-days.
  • Its gram sabha social audit was the most usable instrument a woman or Dalit representative had against a contractor or an official, because it put the muster roll in front of the village.
  • The shift from a demand-driven legal guarantee to normatively allocated employment weakens the entitlement that gave the gram sabha something concrete to audit, and the seasonal suspension removes work when distress is highest.
  • Whether the retained social audit machinery survives the change of statute is the open question, and it bears directly on the leverage available to marginalised representatives.

The balance sheet

• As an instrument of political inclusion, the reservation provisions succeeded beyond any comparable measure attempted anywhere. They created the largest body of elected women in the world, placed several hundred thousand Dalits and Adivasis in local office continuously, and did it in three decades without significant reversal.
• The evidence that inclusion changed outcomes is real and, in the randomised studies, unusually clean: different public goods were built, voter bias fell, girls’ aspirations and schooling rose.
• As an instrument of empowerment, the achievement is a large share of a small thing. The office into which the excluded were admitted has no guaranteed functions, almost no own revenue, and no staff answerable to it.
• The obstacles that remain divide sharply into two classes, and the distinction is the practical conclusion of the subject.
  • Those that are defects of design and can be corrected by ordinary legislation — rotation, no-confidence motions, meeting procedure, quorum rules, the absence of a code of conduct for officials, and the absence of penalties for proxy rule. These are unfinished business, not hard problems.
  • Those that are the residue of social structure — proxy rule as a household arrangement, caste obstruction, time poverty, violence. These yield slowly, to exposure, to organisation and to enforcement of the criminal law, and the evidence says they are yielding.
• The next stage of the argument is about the power of the institution, not the identity of the people in it.
  • Thirty years of data have settled the question the reservation was introduced to answer: women and marginalised representatives govern, and they govern differently.
  • What has not been settled is whether the body they were elected to will ever be given anything to govern with.

The Amendments answered the question of who sits in the room. They left untouched the question of whether the room decides anything.