Panchayati Raj: A Legacy of Indian Political System

Abstract

Panchayati Raj Institutions have been playing a pivotal role for rural development in general and socio-economic upliftment of downtrodden section of the rural society in particular. The Panchayati Raj system is not a new concept and therefore is considered as one of the best ways of governance of the rural India. This work will be the narrative of a Panchayati Raj system. It will be the narrative of the inception and evolution of Panchayati Raj from the formative years of the Indian State and the consolidating years of the Indian Nation to the troublesome times in which the 72nd Amendment Bill became the 73rd Amendment Act of 1992. The study portrays how the present Panchayati Raj Institutions have the ancestral root in the historic past. It appears that the Panchayati raj with effective local autonomy continued to exist even during the period of Maurya’s and Gupta’s, to which we call as the period of centralized sovereignty. Panchayati raj institutions existed all the way in one form or the other. Britishers gave these local bodies a new political touch. This philosophy later acted and reacted on the minds of the wise founding fathers of constitution. Mahatma Gandhi advocated Panchayati Raj as the foundation of India's political system, it would have been a decentralized form of government where each village would be responsible for its own affairs. The term for such a vision was Gram Swaraj (village with self-governance). Panchayati Raj was thought to be adopted as a measure to concretion the dream of decentralization. 73rd Constitution Amendment Act 1992 are the ambitious efforts made in the post-independence era to accomplish the goal of decentralization. Panchayati Raj Institutions – the grass-roots units of self-government – have been proclaimed as the vehicles of socio-economic transformation in rural India.