Growth of Local Government in India

Local government in India is not a recent invention. It is believed that self-governing village communities, in the form of 'sabhas' or village assemblies, existed in India from the earliest times, and over time these bodies took the shape of Panchayats — literally an assembly of five persons — which resolved village-level issues, their exact role changing across different periods of history. In modern times, elected local government bodies were first created after 1882, when Lord Rippon, then Viceroy of India, took the initiative to set up what were called local boards. Progress was slow, and the Indian National Congress pressed the government to make local bodies more effective; following this, village panchayats were established in a number of provinces after the Government of India Act of 1919, and this trend continued after the Act of 1935. During the freedom movement, Mahatma Gandhi argued strongly for decentralising economic and political power, seeing strong village panchayats as the real instrument of that decentralisation — a conviction he expressed memorably: 'The independence of India should mean the independence of the whole of India...Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus every village will be a republic... It follows therefore that every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs. In this structure composed of innumerable villages, there will be ever-widening, ever-ascending circles. Life will be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom.' The national movement was, more broadly, wary of power becoming concentrated in too few hands — it had, after all, resented the enormous concentration of power in the Governor General at Delhi — so for India's leaders, independence itself carried an implicit promise of decentralised decision-making, executive, and administrative power. Yet when the Constitution was actually being drafted, local government (including panchayats) was assigned to the States' own list of subjects, and mentioned only as one advisory, non-justiciable Directive Principle of State Policy — meaning no government could be constitutionally compelled to act on it. Local government did not, in other words, receive the importance many freedom fighters had hoped for, for at least two identifiable reasons. First, the trauma of Partition pushed the Constitution toward a strong unitary bias, and Jawaharlal Nehru himself viewed extreme localism as a potential threat to the young nation's unity and integration. Second, a powerful voice in the Constituent Assembly, led by Dr B.R. Ambedkar, held that rural society's own faction-ridden and caste-ridden character would defeat the very purpose local self-government was meant to serve — a concern captured, from the other side, in Ananthasayanam Ayyangar's own words to the Constituent Assembly: '... in the interest …