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Functioning of Panchayati Raj Institutions: Status, Issues and Options THE government wanted a status report on the working of the Panchayati raj system in five states, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Punjab and Uttarakhand. What it got is a regurgitation of its own widely-available reports, plus some statements from elected representatives on how difficult it is to exist for the panchayats without adequate powers of taxation and with so much oversight by the government. No wonder "beaurocrates"(sic)consider that think tanks in India cannot think and have nothing to offer which is not already known to them.
The ministry, it seems even provided the questions to be asked of each state in order to examine the status of officially-ponsored grass-roots democracy in India. The foreword refers to "18 dimensional matrixes identified by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj for mapping the devolution status", but nowhere in the following 400 and odd pages is it explained what these were or what questions the surveyors asked. Shortage of space could not be a cause since almost a quarter of the book reproduces repeated excerpts from government Acts and orders and lengthy instructional embellishments from the Constitution of India and reports of the World Bank and the UN. The book reproduces data from published official reports though the authors fail to mention that much of this data and many of these reports are also available on the Internet. The authors have used some data from Internet websites but have not identified its location or the date when the datum had been retrieved, leaving doubts about the veracity of their datum. The field surveys to elicit various opinions from the personnel involved in the Panchayati Raj institutions were carried out in four districts in each state. In Punjab 45 Gram Panchayats were examined, 40 in Haryana, 34 in Himachal Pradesh, 33 in Uttarakhand and "nearly 35" (sic) in Manipur. The names of the villages studied in the first three states are given while the villages from Uttarakhand and Manipur are not. In addition, some 300 villages were studied in Punjab to examine the equity benefits of the Panchayati Raj for the people without coming to any stated conclusion. The other results are explained with the help of 409 tables and 45 charts. Some tables (No. 27 referred on p.354) do not exist. What others refer to (11 tables in all, pp.362-375) is not clear. Not all tables are numbered sequentially and no list is provided for tables and charts making it difficult for the curious reader to track down a specific piece of information. The absence of an index makes the text even more opaque. The glossary explains some 17 abbreviations like SC, a word with which virtually every Indian is familiar but does not explain arcane officialese like 243ZD or some abbreviations like IRYSEM (sic). The boxed descriptions of "model Gram Panchayat" never explain why this one was deemed to be a model and others not. Numerous bulleted lists prescribe on what the government should do but no explanation regarding why it should do the recommended. For example, more financial devolution is recommended even when the data presented says that there is an adequate amount of devolution. Then no action is recommended on curbing corruption even when their field data says corruption is a major problem. Bad proofreading and wrong information should have no place in a serious book. Just when the reader is left aghast with a reference that "these babies had been dissolved", the Montagu-Chelmsford duo is credited for Panchayati Raj in India!
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Half the book is about
Punjab; about a tenth of it is devoted to Manipur. There is no
explanation for this curious choice of incomparable states other than
that this book is based on research project reports funded by and
submitted to the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Government of India.