“A giant step to restore Karnataka to the prime position in the country in Panchayat,” says Mani Shankar Ayar
Posted on November 20, 2014
Mani Shankar Ayar is Former Union Minister of Panchayat Raj
A committee on amendments to the Karnataka Panchayat Raj Act, chaired by former Speaker KR Ramesh Kumar, has last week submitted its report to the state government titled The Path to Gram Swaraj in Karnataka, containing radical proposals for course corrections based on the accumulated ground-level experience of the last 20 years, indeed, the last 30 years if one takes into account, as one should, the pioneering innovations in the 80s of Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde and his unforgettable Panchayat Minister, Abdul Nazeer Sahib.
Congress government in Karnataka under Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has taken a giant step to restore Karnataka to the prime position in the country in Panchayat Raj and to take the lead over Kerala and Maharashtra who have in the past decade and a half stolen a march over Karnataka.
The proposals include giving statutory powers of supervision and control over the Panchayats to Gram Sabhas defined radically as representative assemblies of each habitation, in addition to ward-level consultations and panchayat-level consolidation. In one stroke, the biggest conundrum of effective Panchayat Raj has been solved – namely, the need to reconcile the imperative of effective staff support, possible only for larger basic units, with smaller and more homogeneous units which would facilitate effective people’s participation.
This legal empowerment of the panchayat with a careful spelling out of their duties and responsibilities is significantly reinforced by vesting in the Gram Sabhas the authorization of the issue of “utilization certificates”, which means that no payment to contractors is validated till the Gram Sabha by consensus agrees that the work has been undertaken economically and completed satisfactorily. Thus, not only is the community satisfied but the scope for corruption and malfeasance is sharply reduced.
Besides, the proposals tend in the direction of establishing a District Panchayat Service, supervised by a Panchayat Seva Pradhikar, to ensure adequate staffing at the bureaucratic, accounting and technical level for each level of Panchayat, thus compensating for the want of experience and training of panches and presidents of panchayat units.
If Karnataka takes up the offer of the Institute of Public Accountants of India for the provision of a trained chartered accountant for every 10 panchayats at a highly affordable fee, the demands of modern, computerized, on-line administration can be easily married to the indispensability of representative local government to ensure responsible local governance and, therefore, responsiveness to local demand.
The menace of Sarpanch Raj is countered by ensuring the collegiate functioning of the panchayats by statutorily ensuring that all panchayat work is done through subjects committees and decisions are taken with all panchayat members present. To mitigate money-and-muscle power in panchayat elections, the Committee has recommended State funding of elections, to the exclusion of any private or party funding, combined with statutory autonomy for the State Election Commission to decide everything election-related, from delimitation to disqualifying candidates who break the code or the law, without any interference from the political authority.
But by far the most exciting recommendation of the Report relates to the process and ambit of endowing powers and authority to the Panchayats. Resting on a detailed parsing of Article 243G of the Constitution, the Report delineates the procedure and content of the kind of devolution required for rendering the panchayats as “institutions of local self-government”. Annexed to the report are detailed Activity Maps (Responsibility Maps) for each of the 29 subjects listed in the Eleventh Schedule (plus four more) regarding the methodology for the simultaneous devolution of the 3Fs – Functions, Finances and Functionaries – which would ensure the effective empowerment of the panchayats in their legally – designated spheres to have control and supervision over the planning and implementation of plans, programmes and projects of economic development and social justice.
This is reinforced by the proposal that State Finance Commission recommendations should have the same automacity of acceptance and implementation as has been the practice for the recommendations of the (central) Finance Commission.
Read Mani Shankar Ayar’s entire article in NDTV blog
Mani Shankar Aiyar’s Press Statement on the Karnataka Panchayat Raj Act Amendment Committee Report
