On Panchayat: A Study of Decentralization in India and Policy Recommendation

This paper aims to study India’s decentralization process, which focuses on the Panchayat or the village government as a demonstration of success in India’s decentralization. This paper employs documentary research with a systemic review of relevant literature, articles, and documents on India's decentralization policy after independence up to the present (during 1947-2020). This paper found that India emphasizes people participation and decentralization, primarily through the Panchayat, which the constitution has authorized. The Indian government also established the Ministry of Panchayati Raj to facilitate the process of decentralization. The key success of India’s decentralization is related to its financial decentralization that allows the local government to collect tax and financial supports. This research also suggests five recommendations to increase the level of decentralization. First, decentralization must be written in a country’s constitution. Second, decentralization could effectively work with a unitary state with a federal feature. Third, the village is the foundation of decentralization. Fourth, the state should establish or form a ministry or another form of a government body to implement a policy of decentralization. Finally, decentralization must be political, administrative, and financial.

Book review: E. Venkatesu (Ed.), Democratic Decentralization in India: Experiences, Issues and Challenges

E. Venkatesu (Ed.), Democratic Decentralization in India: Experiences, Issues and Challenges. New Delhi: Routledge, 2016, 269 + xxiv pp., ₹895.

Cultivating a Market Like the State: Rural Development and Democratic Decentralization in India

Global policy organizations, financial institutions, and national governments have emphasized high-value agriculture in the world’s semi-arid areas inhabited by the greatest proportion of its poor, stressing linking households to markets to improve their well-being. This is assumed to involve state withdrawal and the ascendance of self-evident market forces. By means of ethnographic fieldwork in semi-arid western India, this paper discusses how the market does not arise spontaneously, but is deepened through state intensification. Rural households are imbricated with new markets by the state’s rendering of development policy market-driven, and through democratic decentralization, which has emerged as an instrument to facilitate the penetration of market actors into remote rural communities.

RURAL DECENTRALIZATION IN INDIA AT THE CROSS- ROADS: THE CONTEXT, CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES

This article attempts to make a critical evaluation of the working of the institutional system of democratic decentralization in rural India against the backdrop of its historical development. It has been argued that although it is not difficult to trace the roots of decentralized government in ancient India it hardly resembles the modern model of decentralization conceived and developed by a host of the Western scholars. The colonial rulers introduced decentralized governance in India to promote colonial objectives and to help perpetuate the British rule. The post- colonial state took steps to initiate the process of rural decentralization in 1950s but it went out of steam soon. In 1990s there was a paradigm shift in India’s policy. And in 1992 the Constitution was amended to pave the road for democratic decentralization but currently it seems to be in the cross-roads. This paper seeks to capture the historical development of the journey of decentralization and identify the roadblocks and the takeaways from the experience of working of the institutions of rural decentralization in India.