The 73rd Amendment and the Working of Panchayati Raj

What the Amendment was asked to do

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The Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992 came into force on 24 April 1993 and did what the Constituent Assembly had declined to do: it moved village self-government out of the unenforceable Directive Principles into the operative text of the Constitution. Article 40 had asked the state to organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers as would enable them to function as units of self-government — a hope with no addressee. Part IX supplied an addressee, a structure and a calendar. What it did not supply was a command.

• Four decades of experiment preceded it, and each round diagnosed the same disease and prescribed a stronger dose of the same medicine.
  • The Community Development Programme (1952) was administratively driven, and the Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) concluded that community development happens only where the community participates. It recommended three tiers — gram panchayat, panchayat samiti, zila parishad — with the block as fulcrum; Nehru inaugurated the system at Nagaur on 2 October 1959.
  • The Ashok Mehta Committee (1978) proposed a two-tier structure with the mandal panchayat as base, open participation by political parties and compulsory taxation powers; its report was never tabled in Parliament. Its central finding was that panchayats had not failed on their own — they had been made to fail, by state leaderships and by a bureaucracy unwilling to surrender resources or standing.
  • The G. V. K. Rao Committee (1985) restored the district to the centre of the design, 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) attempted a strong, centrally guaranteed system of local government and was defeated in the Rajya Sabha. States read it as an attempt by the Union to reach past them to the village.
• What passed in 1992 was therefore not the 64th Amendment revived. It was what survived a negotiation with the governments whose powers were to be reduced.

“These institutions have not been able to acquire the status and dignity of viable and responsive people’s bodies.” — Statement of Objects and Reasons, Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992

• The Statement of Objects and Reasons named the causes of stagnation, and the Amendment treated them very unequally.
  • Absence of regular elections — panchayats were dissolved and left dissolved.
  • Prolonged supersession by state executives with no obligation to reconstitute.
  • Insufficient representation of women, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
  • Inadequate devolution of powers and an absence of financial resources.
• The first three were answered with mandatory rules. The fourth was answered with an invitation. That asymmetry is the subject of everything that follows.

Part IX fixed the calendar of local democracy and left the content of local government to the discretion of the tier that had spent thirty years withholding it.

A skeleton without flesh: the compromise inside the Act

The Act is routinely called a “half-baked cake” and a “compromised document”, and both descriptions are analytical rather than rhetorical. It builds a skeleton — bones no state may now refuse to assemble — and leaves the flesh and blood, meaning powers, money and staff, to state legislatures.

• The Act contains two classes of provision: compulsory ones, almost entirely institutional, and voluntary or enabling ones, almost entirely about power.
• The sorting was not analytical. The provisions states objected to during negotiation are the provisions that ended up in the voluntary column — devolution of functions, taxation, and reservation for backward classes were exactly the demands states resisted and exactly the clauses rewritten with the word “may”.
• Local government is a State List subject under Entry 5 of List II. The Union could constitutionalise the form of local bodies; in a negotiated settlement it could not dictate their content without the states’ consent, and that consent was not on offer.

• The consequence of the table is simple. Every clause on the left binds a state legislature. Every clause on the right is a permission a state legislature may decline, dilute, delay or reverse.
• Compliance with the left column has been essentially complete; the variation between Kerala and Bihar lives entirely in the right column, and it is a difference of kind rather than degree.
• A second reading of the reform’s origins deserves stating rather than suppressing: that it was supply-driven rather than demanded from below, arriving alongside the 1991 economic reforms and the good-governance conditionalities of structural adjustment, and creating the minimum institutional form that would qualify as decentralisation.
  • The strong version is unprovable, and the domestic lineage from Balwantrai Mehta to Singhvi is genuine.
  • The weak version is hard to dispute. No popular movement demanded panchayati raj in 1992, and empowerment of panchayats has never been an electoral issue in any state. An institution nobody demands is an institution nobody defends when it is hollowed out. The Amendment created a floor beneath which no state may fall, and no ceiling towards which any state must climb.

Part IX, Article by Article

Part IX runs from Article 243 to 243-O, sixteen articles, plus the Eleventh Schedule. The distribution of mandatory and permissive language across them is the constitutional record of what was and was not conceded.

Definitions and the direct-democratic base

• Article 243 defines district, Gram Sabha, intermediate level, panchayat, panchayat area, population and village.
  • A village is one specified by the Governor by public notification, and may be a group of villages — so the unit of the gram sabha is an administrative determination, not a natural settlement.
  • Population means that of the last preceding census whose figures have been published, which is what ties reservation quantum and tier thresholds to census data.
• Article 243A — Gram Sabha. It “may exercise such powers and perform such functions at the village level as the Legislature of a State may, by law, provide.”
  • Constituting a gram sabha is mandatory. Giving it anything to do is not.
  • It is not an organ of the panchayat but a constitutionally distinct body of all registered voters in a village — the electorate assembled, not its representatives.

Structure, composition and reservation

• Article 243B requires panchayats at the village, intermediate and district levels in every state, with one exemption: a state whose population does not exceed twenty lakh need not constitute the intermediate tier. This is why smaller states run two-tier systems.
• Article 243C — composition. State law governs it, subject to two conditions that are not negotiable.
  • The ratio of population to seats must, so far as practicable, be the same throughout the state.
  • All seats shall be filled by direct election from territorial constituencies at every level. This is the Amendment’s most radical structural break: the Balwantrai Mehta design had made the upper tiers indirectly elected.
  • 243C(3) permits representation of village chairpersons in the intermediate panchayat, intermediate chairpersons in the district panchayat, and — the consequential provision — of Members of Parliament and MLAs in panchayats at intermediate and district level.
  • 243C(5): the village chairperson is elected as state law provides, whether directly by the whole village or by the elected members; chairpersons at the intermediate and district levels are elected by and from among the elected members.
• Article 243D — reservation of seats, the most fully implemented clause in Part IX.
  • 243D(1): seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in every panchayat in proportion to their population in the panchayat area, allotted by rotation.
  • 243D(2): not less than one-third of those reserved seats go to women of those groups — a reservation within a reservation.
  • 243D(3): not less than one-third of all directly elected seats, including SC and ST seats, reserved for women, by rotation.
  • 243D(4): chairperson offices at all three levels reserved for SCs, STs and women as state law provides, with not less than one-third of chairperson posts at each level reserved for women. Reserving office, not merely seats, is what converted the provision from presence into authority.
  • 243D(6): nothing prevents a state from reserving for backward classes. It is the only permissive reservation clause in the article, and the one around which the modern OBC litigation revolves.
• The architecture has produced roughly 1.4 to 1.45 million elected women in panchayats — about 44–46% of all seats depending on year and source, against a floor of one-third — with around twenty states having legislated 50% by their own panchayat laws. It is the largest body of elected women anywhere.

Term, disqualification and the electoral calendar

• Article 243E — duration. A panchayat continues for five years from its first meeting and no longer, unless sooner dissolved.
  • An election must be completed before the expiry of the term.
  • Where a panchayat is dissolved early, the election must be completed within six months; the new body serves only the remainder of the original term, and no election is required if that remainder is under six months.
  • Crucially, an amendment to any law shall not cause the dissolution of a functioning panchayat before its term expires. This clause ended indefinite supersession as a constitutional matter.
• Article 243F — disqualifications. Those applying to state legislature elections apply, except that the minimum age is 21, not 25. Questions of disqualification go to the authority state law designates.
• Article 243-O — bar to interference by courts. No court may enquire into the validity of a law on delimitation or allotment of seats, and no election may be questioned except by election petition in the manner state law provides.
  • It is modelled on Article 329. It insulates the election process from mid-course judicial interruption, and has also insulated some state decisions on delimitation and ward boundaries from timely challenge.

Powers, functions, money and audit — the permissive core

Article 243G — powers, authority and responsibilities is the most important article in Part IX, and the one written in the conditional.

“…the Legislature of a State may, by law, endow the Panchayats with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as institutions of self-government…” — Article 243G, Constitution of India

• Two endowments are contemplated: preparation of plans for economic development and social justice, and implementation of schemes for the same, “including those in relation to the matters listed in the Eleventh Schedule.”
• Three drafting features decide the outcome. The verb is “may”. The subject is the state legislature, not the panchayat. And the Eleventh Schedule enters only through the word “including” — a reference list, not a transfer.
• Article 243H — taxation and financial resources, equally permissive. A state legislature may by law:
  • authorise a panchayat to levy, collect and appropriate taxes, duties, tolls and fees within limits it prescribes;
  • assign to panchayats taxes levied and collected by the state;
  • provide grants-in-aid from the Consolidated Fund of the State;
  • constitute funds for crediting and withdrawing panchayat money.
• Article 243I — State Finance Commission, mandatory, and one of the Amendment’s genuine innovations.
  • The Governor shall constitute one within a year of commencement and every fifth year thereafter.
  • It reviews panchayat finances and recommends the sharing of state taxes, duties, tolls and fees, the allocation between tiers, the taxes to be assigned, grants-in-aid, and measures to improve the financial position of panchayats.
  • 243I(4) requires the Governor to lay every recommendation before the legislature with an action-taken memorandum. The clause is mandatory and is routinely disregarded.
• Article 243J — accounts and audit. State law may provide for maintenance and audit of accounts. The Constitution names no auditing institution. Most states have brought panchayat audit under the Comptroller and Auditor General through technical guidance and supervision, but that rests on state law, not on Part IX.
• Article 243K — elections.
  • Superintendence, direction and control of electoral rolls and of all panchayat elections vests in a State Election Commission headed by a State Election Commissioner appointed by the Governor.
  • Tenure and conditions of service are such as the Governor may determine by rule.
  • The Commissioner shall not be removed except in like manner and on like grounds as a High Court judge, and conditions of service may not be varied to his disadvantage after appointment.

Geography, transition and the excluded areas

• Article 243L applies Part IX to Union territories subject to exceptions and modifications the President may notify.
• Article 243M — areas excluded, and the reason PESA exists.
  • Part IX does not apply to the Scheduled Areas and tribal areas under Article 244 — that is, to Fifth and Sixth Schedule areas.
  • It does not apply to Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram, nor to the hill areas of Manipur where district councils exist.
  • It does not apply to the hill areas of Darjeeling for which the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council exists, and nothing in Part IX affects that Council’s powers.
  • 243M(4)(b) is the enabling hinge: Parliament may extend Part IX to Scheduled and tribal areas with exceptions and modifications, and such a law is not an amendment of the Constitution for Article 368 purposes. This is the authority under which PESA 1996 was enacted.
• Article 243N — continuance of existing laws. Inconsistent state law survives until amended or repealed, or for one year from commencement, whichever is earlier — the clause that forced every state to pass a conformity Act by 24 April 1994.

The Eleventh Schedule: a menu, not a transfer

The Eleventh Schedule lists twenty-nine subjects and is the most frequently misdescribed feature of the reform. It transfers nothing. It is a list of matters in relation to which a state legislature may, if it chooses, endow panchayats with powers under Article 243G. A state may devolve all twenty-nine, or three, or devolve a function without the money and staff that make it operable — which is the common case.

• The character of the list rewards attention. It is not a list of governmental powers in the sense the Seventh Schedule lists them; it is a list of developmental sectors, drawn from the vocabulary of rural development programmes rather than of government.
  • There is no entry for law and order, none for land administration or record of rights, none for general regulatory authority. A panchayat endowed with the whole Schedule would still be a development agency.
  • This is why panchayats function as implementing agencies for schemes designed elsewhere rather than as institutions of self-government.
• The analytically important entries are those that decide whether a panchayat can shape local livelihoods and local resources.
  • Agriculture and agricultural extension, land improvement and soil conservation, minor irrigation, water management and watershed development — the productive base of a village economy, and the entries most often retained by line departments.
  • Poverty alleviation programmes and rural housing — where the largest flows of central money pass and where the panchayat’s role is usually confined to beneficiary lists.
  • Drinking water, rural electrification, roads, culverts and bridges, non-conventional energy — the visible infrastructure functions where devolution runs deepest because it is politically cheapest.
  • Education including primary and secondary schools, technical and vocational training, health and sanitation including hospitals, primary health centres and dispensaries — where devolution means control over a building rather than over a cadre.
  • Fuel and fodder, minor forest produce, social and farm forestry — entries that overlap with the Forest Rights Act and PESA, and where paper competence collides with the forest department’s real one.
  • Public distribution system, maintenance of community assets and welfare of the weaker sections — the monitoring functions where the gram sabha’s social audit was meant to bite.
  • The remainder are markets and fairs, small-scale and food processing industries, khadi and village industries, rural sanitation, libraries, cultural activities, women and child development, social welfare including welfare of the disabled, family welfare, fisheries, and animal husbandry, dairying and poultry.
• The remedy proposed by every serious review is activity mapping — a subject-by-subject, tier-by-tier allocation specifying which level performs which activity, with funds and functionaries following the activity.
  • The 2nd Administrative Reforms Commission and the Punchhi Commission both recommended it, governed by the subsidiarity principle: what can be done at a lower level should not be done at a higher one.
  • Subsidiarity is not merely an efficiency claim but a democratic one — proximity between a decision and the person it affects is the only reliable discipline on public spending.
  • Most states have produced activity maps as documents and very few as budget lines. A map that moves no post and no head of expenditure changes nothing.

The permissive verb: the spine of every later failure

Every serious defect in three decades of panchayati raj traces back to one auxiliary verb: Articles 243G and 243H say the legislature “may” endow, where they needed to say “shall”.

• Devolution is permissive. Nothing obliges a state legislature to give panchayats a single function, a rupee of tax, or an officer. A state that devolves nothing remains in full compliance with Part IX so long as it holds elections and reserves seats.
• Devolution is uneven. Each state legislates its own conformity Act and its own orders, so the same constitutional provision produces a panchayat in Kerala that manages part of the state plan and a panchayat elsewhere that manages a handpump.
• Devolution is reversible. What was devolved by executive order can be withdrawn by executive order. There is no constitutional ratchet, and no forum in which a panchayat can resist a resumption of its functions.
• The contrast with the mandatory provisions is the strongest evidence that drafting, not political culture, is the operative variable.
  • States did create three tiers, hold elections, constitute election and finance commissions and reserve seats — because those clauses admitted no discretion.
  • States did not transfer functions, funds and functionaries at anything like the same rate — because those clauses were nothing but discretion.
  • The inference is uncomfortable for the view that Indian states are simply hostile to decentralisation. Where the Constitution commanded, states obeyed; where it invited, they declined.
• The empirical measure bears this out. The Status of Devolution to Panchayats in States 2024 found the national devolution score rising only from 39.9% in 2013-14 to 43.9% in 2021-22 — four percentage points in nine years.
  • The index covers six dimensions: framework, functions, finances, functionaries, capacity building and accountability.
  • Karnataka ranks first, then Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh; at the bottom are Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu (13.62), Puducherry (16.16) and Ladakh (16.18).
  • The functionaries score improved most, from 39.6% to 50.9% — states are readier to post staff than to part with money or authority.

The Gram Sabha: the most radical idea in the Amendment and its weakest institution

The Gram Sabha under Article 243A is the only genuinely direct-democratic institution in the Indian constitutional scheme. Every other body in the Constitution is representative; here the electorate itself is constituted as an organ of government. That is a proposition of real weight — and the Amendment then declined to say what the body may decide.

Design

• Membership is the whole electorate: all persons on the electoral rolls of a village within a panchayat area. There is no election to it, no term and no chairperson of its own — the sarpanch or an officer presides under state law.
• It is not a tier of the panchayat and not a committee of it. Treating it as an organ of the gram panchayat inverts the intended relationship: the panchayat is the executive of the gram sabha, not the reverse.
• It was L. M. Singhvi’s specific contribution to insist that the sabha, not the council, is the base of decentralised democracy — that a village should be a self-governing community before it is an elected body.

What it was meant to do

• Approve the annual plan and budget of the gram panchayat before implementation, so that the plan is the village’s and not the secretary’s.
• Select beneficiaries for housing, pension and poverty programmes — the single function with the greatest power to decide who in a village eats better next year.
• Conduct social audit of works executed and money spent, in a public forum where the executing agency must answer.
• Grant utilisation certificates, so that the next tranche depends on the village’s own attestation.
• Receive the accounts and audit report and review the panchayat’s performance.

The constitutional silence and what followed

• Article 243A gives the Gram Sabha no powers of its own. The sabha may do only what “the Legislature of a State may, by law, provide”. Everything listed above is intent, not entitlement.
• The result is radical state-by-state variation.
  • Some state Acts make sabha approval of the annual plan a legal precondition to expenditure; others make it a recommendation.
  • Some assign beneficiary selection to the sabha; others leave it with the panchayat or the block office.
  • Madhya Pradesh’s Gram Swaraj legislation of the late 1990s gave the sabha unusually wide powers, including standing committees and a measure of control over village funds — the standard illustration of what the provision permits when a state wants it to mean something.
  • Quorum requirements range from one-tenth to one-third of members, and required meetings from two to four a year, with special rules on women’s presence in some states.
• Where the sabha’s powers came from central statute rather than state discretion, they became real — under PESA, under the Forest Rights Act 2006, and, until its repeal, under the rural employment guarantee law, its functions were statutory and justiciable.

The working reality

A gram sabha that meets once a year to ratify decisions already taken is not direct democracy; it is a signature collected in public.

• Frequency. On the Mani Shankar Aiyar Committee’s assessment, the average gram sabha meets roughly once a year against a statutory requirement of two to four, and the meeting that occurs is often timed and located to minimise attendance.
• Quorum failure is widespread, and the standard response is the adjourned meeting, which under most state rules requires no quorum at all — so the second sitting is legally competent and demographically unrepresentative.
• Bogus and fabricated meetings are documented: minutes written without a meeting, attendance registers signed in advance, resolutions produced to satisfy an audit requirement. Where money moves against a resolution, the resolution acquires a market.
• Contractors’ men attend. The sabha’s most consequential functions are approving works and certifying completion, so those with a financial interest in the works have the strongest reason to be present, and they are present in force.
• Dominant-caste and landholder control of proceedings is the norm in unequal villages. Seating, the order of speaking and the informal veto held by those who control credit and employment reproduce the village hierarchy inside a body designed to dissolve it.
• Women attend but rarely speak. Quorum rules have raised presence substantially; deliberative participation has moved far less. Presence is necessary for voice and not sufficient.
• Dependence on the panchayat secretary. The sabha has no staff. The officer who convenes it, records it, drafts its resolutions and transmits them is a state employee answerable upward to the block and district. The minutes of a direct-democratic body are written by the administration it is meant to supervise.
• The information deficit is decisive. Social audit requires knowing what was sanctioned, at what rate, for what quantity; weak implementation of the Right to Information Act 2005 at panchayat level leaves that disclosure effectively discretionary.

What would make it work

• Statutory specification of powers on the PESA model — enumerating approval of the plan, selection of beneficiaries, certification of utilisation and mandatory social audit in binding terms rather than leaving them to state discretion.
• Compulsory video recording of proceedings, recommended by the Aiyar Committee, placed in the public domain. It is a cheap answer to fabricated meetings and to the intimidation of speakers, and it is now technically trivial.
• Quorum rules with teeth — a minimum proportion of members, a minimum proportion of women, and a rule that no resolution affecting reserved-category beneficiaries is valid without their recorded presence. That converts attendance into leverage.
• Ward or hamlet sabhas below the gram sabha, so that deliberation happens at a scale where an individual voice carries — the insight behind Kerala’s ward-level grama sabhas and PESA’s hamlet-level village.
• Proactive disclosure of sanctions, measurement books and payments before the meeting rather than on demand at it.
• Capacity building, because the sabha’s functions are technical. Reading a measurement book is a skill, and financial literacy is the binding constraint on social audit.

PESA 1996: the Fifth Schedule exception and the strongest gram sabha in Indian law

Article 243M excluded the Scheduled Areas from Part IX entirely. The reason was caution rather than neglect: Fifth Schedule areas are governed under Article 244(1) through a distinct machinery — the Governor’s regulation-making power, the Tribes Advisory Council, and the power to direct that a law shall not apply, or apply with modifications, to a Scheduled Area. Imposing a uniform elected structure on communities with working customary institutions risked displacing self-government in the name of extending it.

• Under Article 243M(4)(b) Parliament may extend Part IX to Scheduled Areas with modifications. That is the authority for the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, enacted on the recommendations of the Bhuria Committee.
• PESA covers ten states: Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Rajasthan — together some 22,000 panchayats across about 77,500 villages in roughly 660 blocks.
• Sixth Schedule areas remain outside PESA as well as outside Part IX; the autonomous district and regional councils of the North-East hold their own legislative, executive and judicial powers, which PESA does not disturb.

What PESA provides

The whole substance is in Section 4, a short section that does more than the entire Eleventh Schedule.

• Consonance with customary law. State panchayat legislation in Scheduled Areas shall be in consonance with customary law, social and religious practices and traditional management practices of community resources. Custom is not tolerated; it is the standard against which the statute is measured.
• The hamlet is the village. A village shall ordinarily consist of a habitation, hamlet or group of hamlets comprising a community managing its affairs by tradition and custom. Where Part IX has the Governor notify a village, PESA locates the sabha at the scale at which the community actually is one.
• Every village shall have a Gram Sabha of persons on the electoral rolls for the village panchayat.

“Every Gram Sabha shall be competent to safeguard and preserve the traditions and customs of the people, their cultural identity, community resources and the customary mode of dispute resolution.” — Section 4(d), PESA 1996

• Approval and beneficiary selection are mandatory, not devolved. Every gram sabha shall approve plans, programmes and projects before they are taken up, and shall be responsible for identifying beneficiaries under poverty alleviation and other programmes.
• Utilisation certificates. Every village panchayat must obtain from the gram sabha a certification of utilisation of funds — a financial veto over the panchayat’s account of itself.
• Consultation before acquisition and resettlement. The gram sabha or panchayat shall be consulted before land acquisition in Scheduled Areas for development projects and before resettling or rehabilitating those affected; planning and implementation are to be coordinated at state level.
• Minor forest produce. Panchayats and the gram sabha are endowed with ownership of minor forest produce — the clause that gave statutory content to tendu, bamboo, mahua and honey economies long held as departmental monopolies.
• Minor water bodies. Their planning and management is entrusted to panchayats at the appropriate level.
• Minor minerals. The recommendation of the gram sabha is mandatory before the grant of a prospecting licence or mining lease, and before a concession for exploitation by auction.
• Regulatory powers over the local economy. Panchayats are to be endowed with power to regulate or prohibit intoxicants; to prevent land alienation and restore unlawfully alienated tribal land; to manage village markets; to control money-lending to Scheduled Tribes; to control institutions and functionaries in all social sectors; and to control local plans and resources, including tribal sub-plans.
• Reservation. Seats are reserved in proportion to population, provided that Scheduled Tribes get not less than one-half of the seats, and all chairperson posts at all levels are reserved for Scheduled Tribes. Unrepresented tribes may be nominated to intermediate and district panchayats up to one-tenth of elected members.
• Protection against upward absorption. State law must ensure that higher panchayats do not assume the powers of a lower panchayat or of the gram sabha — an explicit anti-centralisation clause with no equivalent in Part IX.
• The Sixth Schedule as model. The state legislature shall endeavour to follow the pattern of the Sixth Schedule in designing district administration in Scheduled Areas.

The implementation record

• State rules were the bottleneck. PESA operates through state legislation and rules, and for most of its life most PESA states had none. Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan framed rules only in 2011, Maharashtra in 2014, Gujarat in 2017, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in 2022, and Jharkhand only at the end of 2025, after sustained litigation in the High Court. Odisha, which has more Scheduled-Area villages than any other state, still has no PESA rules.
• Where rules exist they frequently narrow rather than implement the Act: consultation is defined as a meeting held; “village” is aligned to the revenue village rather than the hamlet; the sabha’s recommendation on minor minerals is treated as advisory; and conflicting state mining, excise, forest and land acquisition laws are left unamended.
• Consultation is routinely bypassed. Section 4(i) says “consulted”, not “consent”, and the gap has been exploited — consultation read as a formality satisfied by a notice, and resolutions obtained after acquisition had already begun.
• Ownership of minor forest produce collides with forest law. Transit rules, nationalised produce lists and monopoly procurement survived the vesting of ownership in the gram sabha, and in several states the two regimes remain unreconciled.
• The Act contains no penalty, no enforcement machinery and no adjudicatory forum. A gram sabha whose PESA rights are ignored has no remedy short of a writ petition — the remedy least available to it.

The Forest Rights Act 2006 and the Niyamgiri direction

• The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 gave the gram sabha real power by making it the authority of first instance.
  • The gram sabha initiates determination of individual and community forest rights, receives and verifies claims and passes a resolution, which then goes to a Sub-Divisional and a District Level Committee.
  • Individual rights recognise cultivation as on 13 December 2005, up to four hectares.
  • Community forest rights and community forest resource rights cover minor forest produce, grazing and water bodies, and the right to protect, regenerate, conserve and manage the community forest resource — the strongest instrument of community control over land in Indian law.
  • No forest dweller may be evicted until recognition and verification are complete.
• Implementation mirrors PESA’s. Recognition has been skewed towards individual titles and against community rights, which are the rights that carry authority over resources; claims are rejected without reasons; distress migration produces exclusion errors; and land classified as degraded has been used to defeat community claims.
• Niyamgiri is the case in which both statutes were made to work.
  • The Dongria Kondh opposed bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills of Odisha, organising through the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti; the Saxena Committee in 2010 found violations of both the Forest Rights Act and PESA.
  • In Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment & Forests (2013) the Supreme Court held that whether the project affected the community’s religious and cultural rights and its community forest rights was a question for the gram sabhas to decide, and directed that they be convened.
  • Twelve gram sabhas met in 2013 and all twelve rejected the project, and the clearance was not granted. It remains the closest thing in Indian practice to a referendum on a development project, and the clearest demonstration that the sabha becomes a real institution the moment a statute gives it a decision to take.
  • Its limits instruct equally: it took a Supreme Court direction, national attention and a decade of mobilisation to make an existing statutory right operate once.

Governance failure and Left Wing Extremism

• The districts where PESA applies most and works least overlap almost exactly with those affected by Left Wing Extremism, and the overlap is not coincidence.
• The mechanism is direct. In Scheduled Areas the state’s most visible acts are land acquisition, mining leases, forest regulation and displacement — precisely the four decisions on which PESA promised a voice and delivered a formality. A statute that raises an expectation of consultation and then denies it produces a sharper grievance than no statute at all.
• Insecure tenure, unrecognised community forest rights, land alienation and dependence on money-lenders are the standing conditions PESA was written to address, and the failure to frame rules for a quarter century left them addressed only on paper.
• The Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions both treated grassroots democracy as an element of internal security: an institution through which grievance can be voiced and redressed is the cheapest security instrument a state has.
• Virginius Xaxa’s work makes the corresponding policy argument — that the sabha’s role in land acquisition should move from consultation to consent, that mining rights in Scheduled Areas should vest in tribal cooperatives, and that acquired but unused land should be returned for rehabilitation.

Elections and the State Election Commission

The Amendment’s one unambiguous success is that panchayat elections now happen. Before 1992 the characteristic pathology was supersession — a state dissolved a panchayat and simply did not reconstitute it, sometimes for a decade. Articles 243E and 243K together made that constitutionally impossible. What the Amendment did not do was make the machinery conducting those elections independent in the way the Election Commission of India is independent.

• What changed: a fixed five-year term, polls before expiry, re-election within six months of a mid-term dissolution, protection against a law amendment cutting short a sitting panchayat, and a dedicated State Election Commission with superintendence over rolls and polls.
• What did not. Article 243K protects the Commissioner’s removal on High Court judge terms but leaves appointment, tenure and conditions of service to the Governor’s rules — that is, to the state executive whose own elections he will conduct.
  • Appointment is typically of a serving or retired state civil servant, without a selection committee, a fixed qualification or a bar on post-retirement office.
  • Tenure sits in a rule the executive can amend. Andhra Pradesh cut its Commissioner’s tenure from five years to three by ordinance in 2020, in the middle of a dispute over local polls; the Allahabad High Court in Aparmita Prasad Singh (2007) had already accepted that a Governor may alter tenure rules by executive action.
  • The dependence is administrative as well as legal: most commissions have no permanent secretariat, borrow staff for each election and depend on the state for their budget.
• Kishansing Tomar v. Municipal Corporation of Ahmedabad (2006) is the corrective the Supreme Court supplied. State Election Commissions must be treated on a par with the Election Commission under Article 324; states must give them the manpower they require; and elections must be completed before the five-year term expires, with neither shortage of funds nor administrative difficulty a ground for postponement.
• The Act is also silent on the grounds for dissolution. Article 243E assumes dissolution may happen and regulates only what follows. State laws fill the gap with broad formulae — abuse of power, persistent default, incompetence — exercised by the state executive. The result is an arbitrary and politically usable power to remove an elected local body, used with particular frequency, alongside the no-confidence motion, against chairpersons from reserved categories.

The triple test and the modern instrument of delay

• Reservation litigation has replaced supersession as the respectable way to postpone a local election.
• Reservation for backward classes under 243D(6) is enabling, and states legislated it — commonly at 27% — without the empirical foundation reservation jurisprudence requires.
• In Vikas Krishnarao Gawali v. State of Maharashtra (2021) the Supreme Court upheld OBC reservation in local bodies but subjected it to the triple test:
  • a dedicated commission must conduct a rigorous empirical inquiry into backwardness specifically in relation to local bodies in that state;
  • the proportion of reservation must be specified in the light of that inquiry rather than carried over as a uniform figure;
  • reservation in aggregate — SC, ST and OBC together — must not exceed 50% of total seats.
• The test is legally sound and administratively demanding, and it became the standard reason for not holding an election. A state that has not finished its inquiry cannot notify OBC seats, and rather than poll without them it postpones the poll.
• The Maharashtra sequence shows the mechanism entire.
  • After the 2021 ruling the state introduced 27% reservation by ordinance before the commission’s work was done; the ordinance was challenged in Rahul Ramesh Wagh v. State of Maharashtra.
  • The Banthia Commission reported in July 2022 supporting 27% within the ceiling, and the Court directed re-notification of pending elections.
  • Litigation continued regardless, and all 27 municipal corporations sat without an elected council through 2023, run by state-appointed administrators.
  • In May 2025 the Court directed polls on the pre-2022 position within four weeks; in September 2025 it set hard deadlines — delimitation by 31 October 2025 and elections concluded by 31 January 2026, with no further extension.
  • The polls followed: municipal councils and nagar panchayats on 2 December 2025, and 29 municipal corporations including Mumbai on 15 January 2026, ending a gap of roughly five years in the Brihanmumbai corporation’s case.
• The pattern is national. More than 60% of urban local government elections have run late; Bengaluru’s corporation went years without a council; and in February 2026 the Supreme Court directed Himachal Pradesh to hold local body polls by 31 May. The stated reasons are delimitation, ward boundaries and reservation litigation. The operative reason is often that an administrator is easier for a state government to work with than an elected council.

Bringing State Election Commissions under the Election Commission

• The reform most often proposed is to place SECs under the superintendence of the Election Commission of India, on the ground that a commission appointed by, funded by and staffed from the state executive cannot credibly umpire that executive’s elections.
• The federal objection is substantial rather than obstructive. Local government is a State List subject; conducting local elections is an incident of that competence; and transferring it would convert the third tier into an area of Union administration by the back door. States resisting devolution downward resist centralisation upward with the same argument panchayats use against them.
• The middle course attracts wider support: a collegium appointment — Chief Minister, Speaker and Leader of the Opposition — a statutory tenure that executive rule cannot vary, a permanent independent secretariat, a charge on the Consolidated Fund of the State, and a formal coordination mechanism with the Election Commission for rolls, training and technology.

The money: two commissions and a low equilibrium trap

• The Amendment made two structural provisions for panchayat finance, one at each level.
  • Article 280(3)(bb), inserted by the 73rd Amendment, added to the Finance Commission’s mandate the duty to recommend measures to augment a state’s Consolidated Fund to supplement panchayat resources, on the basis of the State Finance Commission’s recommendations.
  • Article 243I requires a State Finance Commission every five years to determine tax sharing, allocation between tiers, taxes to be assigned and grants-in-aid.
• The design is coherent: the state commission does the analytical work and the Union commission builds on it. In practice the second link works and the first does not.

Why State Finance Commissions underperform

• Late constitution. States have missed the five-year cycle repeatedly, breaking the intended synchronisation with the Union Finance Commission’s award period.
• Reports not tabled. Article 243I(4) requires the report and an action-taken memorandum before the legislature. Reports have been submitted and never tabled, tabled without the memorandum, or tabled years late — a point on which the Fourteenth Finance Commission was explicit.
• No autonomy. Commissions are frequently chaired by serving officials, staffed on deputation from the finance department, and given terms of reference that pre-decide the answer.
• No expertise and no data. Determining tax shares requires local fiscal data most states do not maintain, and methodologies vary so widely that the Sixteenth Finance Commission recorded that the state reports available to it were not comparable enough to build national recommendations on.
• Recommendations ignored. Because the recommendation does not bind and the memorandum is not enforced, the whole exercise can be absorbed without consequence.

The low equilibrium trap

• Panchayats occupy what the Economic Survey called a “low equilibrium trap”: they do not tax because they have no functions worth taxing for, and they are given no functions because they cannot finance them. Each half sustains the other.
• The figures are stark. Panchayats raise about 1% of their revenue from their own taxes; roughly 80% is central transfer and 15% state grant; average own-tax revenue is about ₹21,000 a panchayat a year and non-tax revenue about ₹73,000 — sums that cannot maintain an asset, let alone create one.
• The political economy is straightforward. A sarpanch who taxes neighbours she meets daily, to fund a scheme she did not design, bears all the cost of taxation and none of its benefit. Fiscal responsibility follows functional responsibility and cannot precede it.
• The third tier is missing from fiscal federalism as an institution, not merely as a claimant. Local bodies have no representation in the GST Council, and GST subsumed entry tax and octroi, historically among the most buoyant local levies. Autonomy shrank with no corresponding share in the shared rule that replaced it.

The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Finance Commission awards

• The Fifteenth Finance Commission (2021-26) recommended ₹4.36 lakh crore for local bodies, extended grants to all three panchayat tiers, distributed them among states by population and area weighted 90:10, and imposed entry conditions — publication of provisional and audited accounts, and for urban bodies floor rates for property tax. It also provided that no grants would flow after March 2024 to a state that had not constituted its State Finance Commission and acted on its recommendations.
• The Sixteenth Finance Commission’s report for 2026-31, tabled in Parliament on 1 February 2026, is the most consequential development in local finance since the Amendment itself.

• The award reads in both directions.
  • In its favour: the largest absolute transfer ever made to local bodies; an entry condition that elections must actually have been held, which turns a constitutional obligation into a fiscal one and is a far stronger sanction than Article 243E has ever exercised; and conditions attacking the exact failure that cripples state-level local finance, namely late commissions and missing action-taken reports.
  • Against it: the increase is not inflation-indexed, so the real gain is modest; heavy tying leaves almost no discretionary money, which reproduces the panchayat’s status as an implementing agency; and an own-source-revenue benchmark near ₹1,200 per household is unrealistic in Bihar and Jharkhand, so performance grants will flow disproportionately to states that already perform.
  • There is a conceptual objection too: panchayats are constitutional governments, not “local bodies” to be grant-funded, and an architecture that reaches them almost wholly through conditional transfers treats them as the last link in an implementation chain rather than the first unit of a federation.

Ombudsman and social audit

• A panchayat ombudsman on the Kerala model is the standing recommendation for redress — an independent authority receiving complaints of misappropriation, favouritism and maladministration against local bodies and their officials, with powers of inquiry and of recommendation for prosecution. Where corruption is decentralised, the remedy must be decentralised with it; a vigilance commission in the state capital is not a remedy for a village.
• Social audit is the check intended by Article 243J read with the gram sabha’s functions, and most states have brought panchayat audit under the CAG’s technical guidance and supervision, with social audit standards and, in several states, independent Social Audit Units.
• It remains weak for three compounding reasons: financial literacy inadequate to interrogate a muster roll or measurement book; bureaucratic non-cooperation, so records arrive late, incomplete or not at all; and weak RTI implementation at panchayat level, which leaves disclosure discretionary.
• Where social audit works, it works because a statute made it mandatory, funded it, and made the auditors independent of the implementing agency — a design principle, not good fortune.

Decentralised planning: the heart of the Amendment and its weakest limb

Article 243G speaks first of preparing “plans for economic development and social justice” and only then of implementing schemes. Planning, not implementation, is what the Amendment meant by self-government — the power to decide what a village needs before deciding how to build it. It is the function least devolved anywhere in India.

• The machinery exists. The District Planning Committee under Article 243ZD is mandatory in every state and is the intended hinge between rural and urban planning.
  • It consolidates the plans of panchayats and municipalities into a draft development plan for the district.
  • Four-fifths of its members are elected by and from the elected members of the district panchayat and the municipalities, in proportion to rural and urban population.
  • It must have regard to matters of common interest — spatial planning, sharing of water and other resources, integrated infrastructure and environmental conservation.
  • Metropolitan Planning Committees under Article 243ZE do the same for areas above ten lakh population.
• Why it fails.
  • Many states constituted DPCs years late; where they exist, the chair is frequently a minister rather than the district panchayat president, which converts the body into an extension of the state government.
  • Most DPCs have never prepared a plan. Where a draft exists it is usually an aggregation of departmental proposals rather than a consolidation of local plans, and it is rarely integrated with the state budget. A plan with no expenditure attached is a document, not a plan.
  • Panchayats lack the capacity to plan. Planning demands survey data, costing, sequencing and technical appraisal; it cannot be done by an untrained secretary in addition to his existing duties, and the Amendment created no planning support structure.
  • States were initially reluctant to create the machinery at all, because a functioning district plan subordinates departmental schemes to locally determined priorities — which is what departments exist to prevent.
• Kerala’s People’s Plan Campaign, launched in 1996, is the standing demonstration that the design works when a state operates it.
  • The state devolved roughly 35–40% of its plan outlay to local governments as untied funds allocated against locally prepared plans. Untied money is the variable that makes planning consequential.
  • The campaign was built on mass participation: ward-level grama sabhas to identify needs, development seminars, task forces to convert needs into projects, and a large corps of trained voluntary resource persons — retired officials, teachers, professionals — supporting plan formulation at every tier.
  • Plans moved upward from ward to panchayat to block to district, were appraised by expert committees and funded from the devolved share, while institutions and staff — schools, health centres and their personnel — were transferred so that the plan had something to plan for.
  • Its results deserve honest reporting: measurable gains in local infrastructure, housing, sanitation and women’s participation, alongside project proliferation, uneven technical quality and an early phase of administrative confusion. What is not contested is that it is the only sustained instance of an Indian state deliberately surrendering plan discretion downward.
• Madhya Pradesh’s Gram Swaraj experiment approached the same end through the gram sabha rather than the plan, vesting extensive statutory powers in the sabha and its standing committees. Its trajectory illustrates the reversibility problem: what one state government confers by legislation, the next can retract by legislation.

Bureaucracy and the missing third F

Political decentralisation was legislated in 1992; administrative decentralisation was not legislated at all.

• Part IX is entirely silent on functionaries. It creates elected representatives and says nothing about who works for them: no separate panchayat cadre, no minimum staffing, and no obligation whatever on state officials towards elected local representatives.
• The consequence is the sarpanch–BDO–secretary triangle, which decides how a panchayat actually functions.
  • The panchayat secretary — often the only full-time official a gram panchayat has — is a state employee whose posting, promotion, transfer and confidential report lie with the administration. He convenes the sabha, writes its minutes, keeps the accounts and operates the bank account, and he answers upward.
  • The Block Development Officer controls scheme allocation, technical sanction, measurement and payment. In most states the sarpanch cannot release payment without his countersignature, so the elected head of a constitutional body depends on an official of another tier.
  • Line staff at village level — teacher, ANM, extension worker — report to their own departmental hierarchies. Devolving a subject without devolving the cadre transfers a building, not a service.
• The historical continuity matters. Every review from Balwantrai Mehta onward identified bureaucratic resistance as the principal obstacle, on the plainest of motives: devolution moves resources and discretion out of departmental hands.
• Kerala’s model code of conduct governing relations between elected representatives and officials is the standard corrective — a code specifying duties in both directions: what officials owe the elected body in information, attendance, advice and execution, and what representatives owe officials in non-interference with recruitment, procedure and personal conduct.
• The structural remedies are known and unimplemented: a dedicated local government service; transfer of village and block line staff to panchayat supervision; a role for the elected head in the annual appraisal of officials working for the panchayat; and statutory time limits within which an official must act on a panchayat resolution.

Parallel bodies and the hollowing out of the third tier

• The Amendment created a constitutional third tier and the machinery of government then routed around it. The most effective way to weaken a local body is not to abolish its powers but to fund another agency to do its work.
• District Rural Development Agencies and district societies. Registered societies chaired by the Collector, with their own staff and funds, implemented rural development in parallel to the zila parishad for decades; where they were merged with district panchayats the merger was frequently administrative rather than real.
• Direct transfers to NGOs and self-help groups. Several schemes route funds to voluntary organisations and community groups, bypassing the panchayat. Community institutions are valuable; the objection is to their being funded instead of the elected body rather than through it, which substitutes an unelected implementer for an accountable one.
• Centrally sponsored schemes with their own structures. The large missions arrive with their own committees, registers, bank accounts and reporting lines to a state mission director, reducing the panchayat’s role to certification. A tier that spends other people’s money on other people’s designs is an agency, not a government.
• MPLADS and MLALADS. Constituency development schemes give legislators discretionary funds to select and sanction local works — the function Article 243G assigns to panchayats. The paradox is undisguised: legislators whose function is to legislate and hold the executive to account are performing local executive work, while the constitutional local executive waits for a sanction.
• MPs and MLAs inside panchayat bodies. Article 243C(3) permits their representation in intermediate and district panchayats, placing inside a deliberative body of village and block representatives members who command far greater political weight, patronage and access. These are not bodies of equals, and free deliberation is the first casualty.
• The absence of a fiscal third tier. Local bodies sit outside the GST Council; the taxes GST subsumed included the local ones; and the Finance Commission reaches panchayats only through the Consolidated Fund of the State. Structurally India still has two orders of government that raise revenue and a third that receives grants.

Three decades on: the assessment

The Mani Shankar Aiyar Committee (2012-13), assessing twenty years of panchayati raj, returned the harshest verdict any official body has delivered on the Amendment.

“Bad panchayati raj is worse than no panchayati raj.” — Mani Shankar Aiyar Committee

• Its finding was of prevailing disillusionment: after two decades panchayats had produced no qualitative improvement in people’s lives, and the failure of a constitutionally guaranteed decentralisation discredits the idea of decentralisation itself.
• What had been achieved, in its formulation, was the “decentralisation of corruption” — a nexus of panchayat chairpersons, local bureaucracy and politicians, in which scheme money flowing to the village created new rents without creating new accountability.
• Hence the term its assessment popularised: what exists in much of India is “Sarpanch Raj” rather than Panchayati Raj — the panchayat’s authority concentrated in a single office dealing bilaterally with the block administration, with the gram sabha and the general body as spectators.
• Its remedies were structural: statutory powers for the gram sabha, compulsory video recording, a panchayat ombudsman, activity mapping, and real devolution of the three Fs.
• The verdict must be balanced honestly, because the same three decades produced an achievement nothing else in Indian public life approaches.
  • There are roughly 2.5 lakh local governments and over three million elected representatives — the largest experiment in representative local government anywhere.
  • Roughly 1.4 million of them are women, about 44–46% of panchayat seats against a floor of one-third, with some twenty states at 50%.
  • Indefinite supersession ended. A state can no longer keep an elected local body dissolved at pleasure, and the Supreme Court has proved willing to enforce the calendar.
  • Who gets elected changes what gets built. The research on reserved panchayats — most influentially Chattopadhyay and Duflo on West Bengal and Rajasthan — found that panchayats headed by women invested more in the goods women identified as priorities, notably drinking water, and that voter bias against women leaders fell with exposure to them. Descriptive representation was not merely symbolic.
  • The social composition of local leadership has changed permanently, and the experience of office is itself a political resource that compounds across generations.
• The honest formulation separates two questions. As an instrument of political inclusion the Amendment succeeded beyond any comparable measure; as an instrument of decentralised government it is incomplete by design. The incompleteness is not an implementation failure better administration could cure — it is written into Articles 243G and 243H.
• The reform agenda that follows is narrow and has been recommended repeatedly.
  • Amend “may” to “shall” in 243G and 243H, making devolution of a defined minimum core of Eleventh Schedule subjects a constitutional obligation rather than a state’s option.
  • Activity mapping under the subsidiarity principle, recommended by the 2nd ARC and the Punchhi Commission, assigning each activity to a tier with funds and functionaries attached.
  • The Punchhi Commission’s further proposals: restructuring state legislative councils to represent local bodies, so the third tier has a voice inside the legislature that decides its powers, and a National Commission for Panchayats with counterpart state commissions as a watchdog on devolution.
  • Statutory gram sabha powers, a panchayat ombudsman, an independent State Election Commission and a local government service.
• One observation frames all of them. A state government that is itself under-empowered will not empower the tier below it. So long as Indian states behave as claimants against the Union, they will treat panchayats as claimants against themselves. Decentralisation is a chain, and it fails at whichever link is unwilling.

Where it stands now

• Devolution has barely moved. The Status of Devolution to Panchayats in States 2024 records a national score of 43.9% against 39.9% nine years earlier, with the strongest gains on functionaries and the weakest on finances.
• Performance is now measured. The Panchayat Advancement Index, launched on 24 April 2025, scores gram panchayats against local indicators mapped to nine localised SDG themes — poverty-free and enhanced livelihoods, healthy panchayat, child-friendly panchayat, water-sufficient panchayat, clean and green panchayat, self-sufficient infrastructure, socially just and secured panchayat, panchayat with good governance, and women-friendly panchayat.
  • The baseline was sobering: of about 2.16 lakh validated gram panchayats, not one reached “Achiever”; only 0.3% were Front Runners, 35.8% Performers, 61.2% Aspirants and 2.7% Beginners.
  • PAI 2.0, for reference year 2023-24, assessed 2,59,867 gram panchayats across 33 states and Union territories — a 97.3% participation rate — on 150 indicators and 230 data points. Still no panchayat reached “Achiever”; 3,635 were Front Runners, 1,18,824 Performers, 1,23,719 Aspirants and 13,689 Beginners. The distribution improved; the ceiling was not touched.
• Digital infrastructure has been built. e-GramSwaraj carries panchayat planning, budgeting, accounting and asset management on one platform, and its integration with the Public Financial Management System routes panchayat payments electronically, making expenditure traceable in a way audit never achieved. Gram Panchayat Development Plans are now prepared and uploaded annually.
• SVAMITVA has surveyed inhabited village land by drone and issued property cards — drone survey completed in about 3.29 lakh of a targeted 3.44 lakh villages, with over 3 crore cards prepared and around 2.65 crore distributed. Its significance for panchayats is fiscal as much as legal: a record of rights is the precondition for a property tax, and therefore for any escape from the low equilibrium trap.
• The Rashtriya Gram Swaraj Abhiyan remains the principal capacity-building programme, funding training of elected representatives and functionaries, panchayat buildings and computerisation, and the preparation of development plans against the localised SDG themes.
• The rural employment guarantee has been replaced, and this changes the gram panchayat’s role. The Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025, passed on 18–19 December 2025 and assented on 21 December 2025, repeals MGNREGA 2005 and subsumes its programmes and structures.
  • It guarantees 125 days of employment, up from 100, on 60:40 Centre–State sharing — 90:10 for the North-East and Union territories — and permits states to suspend employment for up to 60 days during sowing and harvesting.
  • It mandates Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans prepared with spatial technology and aggregated at block, district and state level, which formally strengthens the panchayat’s planning function.
  • It retains technology-based monitoring, social audit and public disclosure at gram panchayat level, so the sabha’s audit function survives the repeal in form.
  • The substantive concern is the shift from a demand-driven legal guarantee, under which a household could demand work and claim an unemployment allowance if none came, to a normatively allocated programme planned from above. For the gram sabha this is a real loss: its leverage came from auditing an enforceable individual entitlement, and auditing a plan allocation is a weaker instrument. The cost shift to states also risks compressing the very expenditure the panchayat plans against.

The thirty-year record is best stated without either available exaggeration. The Amendment did not fail: two and a half lakh elected bodies, three million representatives, a million and a half elected women and the end of supersession are not nothing, and they are irreversible. Nor did it succeed: a tier that raises one per cent of its own income, plans almost nothing and employs almost nobody is not a government.

• What 1992 created was the constitutional form of local self-government, on the assumption that the substance would follow.
  • Three decades later that substance is still discretionary, and the discretion sits with precisely the governments that stood to lose by exercising it.