Implementation of 73rd and 74th Amendments

In the years since the 73rd and 74th Amendments came into force, every State has passed the legislation needed to implement them, and in the decade between 1994 and 2004, most States held at least two rounds of elections to their local bodies — States like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, among a few others, had in fact already held three rounds. The scale this has created is genuinely large: today India has more than 600 Zilla Panchayats, about 6,000 block or intermediate Panchayats, and 2,40,000 Gram Panchayats in rural India, alongside over 100 city Corporations, 1,400 town Municipalities, and over 2,000 Nagar Panchayats in urban India. More than 32 lakh members are elected to these bodies every five years — of whom at least 13 lakh are women — compared with fewer than 5,000 elected representatives across all State Assemblies and Parliament put together; local government has, in other words, increased the number of India's elected representatives many times over. Because reservation applies to Sarpanch and Adhyaksha posts and not just ordinary seats, this has translated into real positions of leadership: there are today at least 200 women Adhyakshas of Zilla Panchayats, another 2,000 women who are Presidents of block or taluka panchayats, more than 80,000 women Sarpanches of Gram Panchayats, over 30 women Mayors of Corporations, more than 500 women Adhyakshas of Town Municipalities, and nearly 650 Nagar Panchayats headed by women. Women's presence in these bodies has, in many cases, given them a genuinely greater understanding of how politics works and brought a new perspective and greater sensitivity to local discussions, though in some cases women have been unable to fully assert themselves, or have served largely as proxies for male family members who actually sponsored their election — a pattern the book itself notes is, however, becoming less common over time. A hand-lettered flag photographed for one such village, reading roughly 'we are the government here in the village', captures this changed sense of ownership directly — it is described as a symbol of what people now expect from their local governments: not merely formal laws, but the genuine, lived implementation of those laws. A separate photograph shows a village Gram Sabha meeting held entirely in the open, seated in a circle out in the sun, without any covered hall — a striking reminder that this newly empowered, constitutionally significant local institution is still, in many places, working without even basic physical infrastructure. Newspaper reports collected from around the same period illustrate both sides of this change at once: one report from Lakshadweep describes Panchayati Raj there as still being 'only in name'; another covers a contested zilla panchayat election count; and a third describes an actual violent sarpanches' rally in Andhra Pradesh, over withdrawal of financial powers — a reminder that empowerment of local leaders has also, in places, provoked real political conflict. Reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is likewise mandatory, and (given that Scheduled Castes are about 16.2 per cent and Scheduled Tribes about 8.2 per cent of India's population) has brought roughly 6.6 lakh elected members from these two communities into urban and local bodies. Together, all of this has significantly altered the social profile of local bodies, which are now considerably more representative of local social reality than they used to be — and this change has, unsurprisingly, sometimes led to real tension, since the dominant social groups that earlier controlled the village are not always willing to give up their power; but the book is careful to note that such tension and struggle, when democracy is genuinely being made more meaningful for those who did not enjoy power before, is not always something to regret. Alongside this real political success, however, sits a genuine implementation gap. The Constitution assigned as many as 29 subjects to local governments, but in practice, local governments in India enjoy only limited autonomy in actually performing the functions assigned to them, because many States have simply not transferred most of these subjects — which is one reason some observers criticise local government reform for not having changed how decisions are actually taken at the central and State level, since people at the local level still do not enjoy much real power over choosing welfare programmes or allocating resources. Bolivia's own experience, cited as one of Latin America's most successful cases of democratic decentralisation, is instructive by contrast: its 1994 Popular Participation Law decentralised power to 314 municipal governments headed by popularly elected mayors (presidente municipal) and municipal councils (cabildo), with local electi …