Q.Look at this photograph. The local Sarkar is sitting out in the sun. Any other feature that strikes you?

Implementation is the record of what has actually happened since the 73rd and 74th Amendments came into force in 1993 — and it is a genuinely mixed record. On the positive side, every State has passed the legislation needed to give effect to the amendments, and by 2004 most States had already held at least two rounds of local body elections (some, like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, three). The scale created is enormous — more than 600 Zilla Panchayats, about 6,000 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 — electing more than 32 lakh representatives every five years, far more than the total strength of every State Assembly and Parliament combined. Because reservation extends to Chairperson posts and not just ordinary seats, this has produced real numbers of women, Scheduled Caste, and Scheduled Tribe leaders — tens of thousands of women Sarpanches, Adhyakshas, and Mayors, and roughly 6.6 lakh elected members from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes — genuinely changing who typically holds local leadership, and, in the process, generating real friction with social groups that previously dominated the village unchallenged. But this legal and electoral success has not been matched by an equal transfer of real functional power: although the Constitution lists 29 subjects for transfer to …