Elections

Under the 73rd Amendment, all three tiers of Panchayati Raj institutions — Gram Panchayat, intermediate Panchayat, and Zilla Panchayat — must be elected directly by the people, and each elected Panchayat body holds office for a fixed term of five years. If a State government dissolves a Panchayat before its five-year term is over, fresh elections to that Panchayat must be held within six months of the dissolution. This guarantee matters because, before the 73rd Amendment, many States relied on indirect elections to fill their district-level local bodies, and there was no requirement at all that fresh elections be held promptly after a local body was dissolved — a State could simply leave a dissolved Panchayat unreplaced for as long as it wished. The fixed five-year term and the mandatory …