MUMBAI: Maharashtra has been ranked fourth in the country by an index that measures how effectively states have transferred power to panchayats, more than two decades after the Constitution was amended to empower the institution.
The rankings are part of a report titled ‘How Effective is Devolution across Indian states’ compiled by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) for the Panchayati Raj ministry. "The novelty of the index is that it used official data on the devolution of policy as well as field data collected from a sample of panchayats across the country to see how well the devolution actually worked in practice," says TISS assistant professor Aparajita Bakshi, who co-authored the report.
The two indices were combined to produce the final ranking. The report has sobering insights on the "sheer reluctance" of states to decentralize power to panchayats. It examined the extent to which states parted with their own functions and control over finances and staff to panchayats to allow them to function as independent local governments. Without exception, states resisted allowing panchayats any control over the large tranche of funds received under schemes like the Sarva Shikha Abhiyan that are sponsored by the Centre, the TISS report said.
"The complete centrality of the panchayat in central government sponsored schemes is yet to emerge anywhere in the country," the report said. While most states transferred functions to panchayats through legislatures, but this was not supported by executive orders or legal amendments. As a result, the actual functional domain of the panchayats was limited in most states, the report mentioned.
Besides, panchayats have to make do with very little staff, the report pointed out. At the village level, the average number of functionaries was merely 1.6 people per thousand population. Even worse, elected panchayat members had little control over these functionaries.