The Hindu : National : Power to the people ... eroded

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Sunday, Jan 02, 2005

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National

Power to the people ... eroded

The programme of decentralisation of power in Kerala has fallen on bad days after a sunny start. R. Krishnakumar says the eclipse of the grama sabhas could see the resurgence of the politician-contractor-official nexus.

This drive-in restaurant near Kochi is managed by a team of women which has tapped panchayat funds. - Photo: K. K. Mustafah

"Local Self-Government is essentially the empowerment of the people by giving them not only the voice, but the power of choice as well in order to shape the development which they feel is appropriate to their situation."

— The Committee on Decentralisation of Powers in Kerala, 1997.

THE BANNERS are down. The managers and resource persons have disappeared. The training melas have been withdrawn. The grama sabhas and the mandatory meetings of local citizens have lost their buzz. Less than 10 years after its much-trumpeted launch, the democratic decentralisation programme in Kerala, described as "the most radical development in the State since the land reforms," has hit the rough.

The belief that decentralisation brings a government closer to citizens, makes it more democratic and, hence, more responsive to their needs is being rudely tested in the one State where it was thought to have paid rich dividends only a few years ago.

Some gains have endured, certainly. Eight years into its existence, the laws and rules that support the constitutional rights of local bodies have not been tampered with. The three tiers of local self-government institutions (LSGIs), at the village, block and district levels, have clearly demarcated powers and responsibilities and institutions under them, unlike in most other States.

Along with new powers, functions and responsibilities, provision for the regular transfer of Plan funds for their implementation also continues, though complaints are mounting about delays and frequent cuts in fund flow.

Whereas a gram panchayat used to get barely Rs.1 lakh a year for all its activities before decentralisation was implemented, the annual allocation of funds now is around Rs.70 lakhs, according to T. Kuttan, president of a grama panchayat. By law, the elected presidents of the LSGIs still control a big section of civil servants, over 30 to 40 per cent of the State's Plan funds, and nearly all development functions earlier operated by the top-down government departments.

Core principle

Institutions such as hospitals and schools that have a bearing on everyday life in rural communities, including in the agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, micro-irrigation and small-scale industrial sectors, are still under the jurisdiction of the LSGIs. Panchayats are fully responsible for poverty eradication measures, the upkeep of local roads, running schools, supplying drinking water and so on. The programme's major achievements have all been pro-poor, especially in the provisioning of basic services such as housing, sanitation, drinking water facilities, and poverty eradication.

But the core principle behind Kerala's `democratic decentralisation' experiment is that development can be equitable and effective only if people control the process themselves. Therefore, vital to the success of the programme was the "generation of a new civic culture" it envisaged, involving large-scale participation of people in the grama sabhas, the mandatory, tri-monthly village or ward-level assemblies.

Yet the number of panchayats still convening grama sabhas without compulsion, the frequency with which they are held, and the participation of people in them have all plunged. Contrary to what the programme hoped to achieve, people have again been made mere customers and benefit-seekers in a majority of LSGIs.

"Governance by the people is out of fashion. Grama sabhas are a sham in most panchayats. Attendance registers are regularly fudged," said B. Jayakumar, an elected member of a village panchayat.

"The programme was meant to give power to the people. Instead, the powers that they got through the most radical Panchayati Raj laws in the country have been undermined deftly, without a soul knowing about it," said a member of the `Committee on Decentralisation of Powers', which in 1997 provided the firm principles that led to the dramatic restructuring of the State laws on LSGIs.

He said "a grand conspiracy of the bureaucracy, the politicians and perhaps, unwittingly, those who managed the decentralisation experiment," has undermined the most exciting initiative in India to transfer real power to the people. "They have drained out the essence of democratic decentralisation. What remains is an empty bottle," he added.

Bureaucracy's stand

From the beginning, the State bureaucracy had left no one in doubt that it was against the implementation of the decentralisation programme and its goal of comprehensive changes in administrative structures, allocation of functions and powers and control of resources. Unlike MPs and MLAs who maintained a public posture of supporting Panchayati Raj, the bureaucracy was openly antagonistic about letting go of its fief. Many officials were reluctant to take orders from the elected leadership in the LSGIs, "many of whom were from the lower strata of society" or "had low educational attainments." (It is the case even now, according to R. Sivarajan, general secretary of the Kerala Grama Panchayat Association, and other elected representatives.)

During the rule of the Left Democratic Front, the onus of implementing the panchayat and municipality Acts therefore fell in the hands of people untrained in administration. They were mostly volunteers of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), the people's science movement that led the successful Total Literacy Campaign in Kerala. The KSSP had over the years experimented with several micro-projects on decentralised development and planning and its experience came in handy for the LDF Government.

Said the member of the decentralisation committee, who had a ring-side view of the gamut of legislative reforms and their implementation: "So, instead of implementing the Act, they (the campaign managers) implemented planning. Instead of teaching the newly elected representatives how to interpret the laws and run the administration in the LSGIs, the massive training programmes taught them merely the intricacies of planning for development. But only when the managers started explaining that the entire exercise was for `better planning' did the estranged bureaucracy offer its half-hearted support to the programme. The UDF Government that came to power in 2001 had no enthusiasm for supporting genuine decentralisation. What the bureaucracy wanted, it managed to get eventually: an elected leadership uninitiated in the art of administration, so that real power would continue to be in the hands of the bureaucracy."

There is therefore an evident mismatch between what the two laws prescribed and the way the local self-governments have functioned (see box), according to him. The "silent compromise" with the bureaucracy has in effect sabotaged the implementation of the two Acts, especially their core provisions that guarantee a powerful role for the people in local governance.

A former Minister in the LDF Government says that what is striking today is the way, knowingly or unknowingly, "a veil of secrecy and silence" has been spread over the most crucial sections of the panchayat and municipality Acts, mainly those describing the enlarged powers and functions of the fourth tier of Government in Kerala, the grama sabhas (ward sabhas in urban local bodies).

The former Minister said: "Nobody wants the people to know about the grama sabha, and the vast powers vested in the people who participate in it or about the exciting new provisions in the two Acts offering support structures for the progress of genuine direct democracy. I would say that the managers of the campaign, the local politicians and the all-knowing bureaucracy destroyed the decentralisation experiment by torpedoing the grama sabha and the legal support structures (see box) meant for its efficient functioning."

Performance audits

For example, he pointed out, the Acts provide for a performance audit in all panchayats every three months as a mechanism of correction from below. A team of officials is required by law to assess and audit the performance of every panchayat in Kerala. They are to monitor, among other things, whether grama sabhas are convened on time, the panchayat samitis are meeting regularly and functioning in a transparent manner, public works are being undertaken as per the prescribed rates. In short, everything about a panchayat, including whether corruption is taking place. They were to then report to the grama sabha, among other agencies.

The former Minister said: "The concept was that if grama sabhas are convened regularly and the performance audit reports are discussed there as required, every citizen would be aware of the activities of the panchayat and be able to intervene effectively in governance. But in eight years, the officials and the elected representatives have made a sham out of this requirement, by making it a mere `audit of accounts'. Through the scuttling of the grama sabhas and the performance audit alone, the decentralisation process has been literally done to death."

Similarly, all the important legal support structures for genuine people's participation have either been torpedoed or thoroughly weakened in their infancy, before the people woke up to their existence.

The objective of the experiment was to install genuine governance by the people through the grama sabhas, where they were expected to participate actively in making decisions about local development and in their implementation. It was meant to check corruption and excessive control by the bureaucracy and politicians in the local bodies. But, strangely, among the various features the democratic decentralisation programme sought to introduce, `ensuring genuine governance by the people' alone has failed to materialise in the panchayats.

It would be imprudent to blame only the bureaucracy for such an outcome. A majority of Ministers and MLAs too have been nervous about losing powers. A senior Opposition MLA said that even within the LDF, only the top leadership under E.M.S. Namboodiripad was "genuinely enthused by the programme." Once the UDF came to power and an all-encompassing controversy broke out over politically targeted allegations that democratic decentralisation was "a cleverly-masked imperialist plot to sabotage third world countries," the half-baked system was literally left to fend for itself even by the former campaign leaders.

The bureaucracy and the elected politicians in the LSGIs put this interlude to good use to gather more powers and functions to themselves. "People's participation is literally non-existent, except in a minority of LSGIs, according to G. Placid, director of the NGO, `Sahayi'. Curiously, not one of the elected representatives in the local bodies interviewed by The Hindu listed the withering away of the grama sabhas and inquorate participation in them as issues of debilitating significance to the decentralisation experiment in the State.

Thus after spreading a shroud of secrecy over all the imposing legal accountability mechanisms, the bureaucracy, the local elected representatives and the political parties seem to have left the grama sabhas to starve, perhaps to die on their own. If the people learn the importance of participating in the grama sabhas, power and resources would be more equitably shared.

"The elected representatives are not interested in building up a participatory culture at the local level. This is undermining the whole philosophy of decentralisation. We are at a loss as to what to do about it," a senior Government Secretary told The Hindu .

No doubt the dwindling numbers in the grama sabhas has led to a resurgence of the profiteers in the LSGIs, with the notoriously corrupt politician-contractor-official nexus usurping the place of absentee citizens and their new powers in a majority of panchayats and urban civic bodies. The thorn in their flesh, the legal requirement that beneficiaries of all government welfare schemes and development programmes should be selected only through the grama sabhas, is being shrewdly eased out. Politicians and officials once again hold the reins, most of them riding roughshod over the idealistic principles of the new laws.

As a result, a reverse trend towards centralisation of powers is evident in the LSGIs in the State. With the training programmes being discarded by the UDF Government, elected representatives are forced to depend on the bureaucracy for day-to-day administrative requirements. Government officials are working overtime to reclaim their power over the people. Elected members in a majority of LSGIs have once again started seeing themselves as the all-powerful dispensers of "favours" to the people.

Kerala may well have to start rewriting the slogan of power to the people that launched the decentralisation initiative.

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