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Towards Holistic
Panchayat Raj
Panchayat Raj
Arguing that “bad
Panchayat Raj is perhaps worse then no Panchayat Raj”, the report stresses that
Panchayat Raj must not deteriorate into sarpanch raj. To this end, the Report
urges that PRIs be structured legally and administratively to function as
collegiate bodies, with all elected members being involved in preparing
programmes, key decisions being taken by the Panchayat as a whole and not at
the whim and fancy of the President, and implementation being under the
effective supervision of the Panchayat members concerned and not just the
sarpanch
It is not by coincidence that this article carries the same
title as our Report1, for this is by way of an introduction to a Report that we
believe should be essential reading for all those who would like to see the
fulfillment of Gandhiji’s dream for independent India. Replying to a query on
his “Dream for Independent India”, he wrote in his journal, Young
India, 10 September 1930:
“I shall work for an India in which the poorest will feel it is
his country, in whose making he has an effective voice”
This vision is inscribed on the cover of the Report and
constitutes its leitmotif.
There is no way in which the aam admi, let alone
the poorest Indian, can have a sense of belonging in a Parliament in which his
MP represents 15-20 lakh others, or an effective voice in decisions are taken
in remote State capitals or Delhi, let alone even in the inaccessible reaches
of the Collector’s office. 65 years after Independence, almost every Indian
feels alienated from the political and administrative process, the sense of
alienation being the greater the lower down the economic scale and social
hierarchy that person finds himself or herself in, and also the more distanced
he or she is geographically from the imposing Bhawans where his or her
future is decided. Six and a half decades of democracy leave most individuals
as distant from having an “effective voice” in the making of their country as
their parents and grandparents were under colonial rule.
