Political Science · Ch 8 — Local Governments
Local Governments in Independent India
Local Governments in Independent India
Even before the 73rd and 74th Amendments gave local government constitutional backing in 1993, independent India had already made some attempts to build it up.
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Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, Constituent Assembly member, whose 1948 remarks on training villages in self-government and democratic local bodies are quoted in this section. Own-illustrated for this platform from the real NCERT page's own facts (composition, labels, and content are recreated; the specific artistic rendering of any real ph …
The first major step was the Community Development Programme of 1952, which tried to promote people's participation in a range of local development activities; out of this experience came a recommendation for a three-tier Panchayati Raj system of local government for rural areas. A few States, such as Gujarat and Maharashtra, actually adopted elected local bodies along these lines around 1960. But in many other States, these local bodies were starved of real powers and functions and remained heavily dependent on state and central government for money; many States saw no urgency in setting up elected local bodies at all, some dissolved existing local bodies and handed their work over to government officers instead, many relied on indirect rather than direct elections to most local bodies, and in many States, elections to local bodies were simply postponed again and again. It was only after 1987 that a thorough review of how local government institutions were actually functioning was carried out, and in 1989 the P.K. Thungon Committee recommended that local government bodies be given constitutional recog …