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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | How a History of Broken Promises Has Let Down India's Scheduled Areas -CR Bijoy

How a History of Broken Promises Has Let Down India's Scheduled Areas -CR Bijoy

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published Published on Nov 9, 2021   modified Modified on Nov 10, 2021

-TheWire.in

Only six states have the rules necessary to operationalise the PESA Act's provisions – yet the myth that PESA is alive and kicking prevails.

A quarter-century ago, on December 24, 1996, the Parliament enacted a law unlike any other in the country. This was India’s first law to actually recognise people’s powers, in the form of the gram sabha at the hamlet level. This path-breaking legislation was the Provisions of the Panchayat (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996, or PESA. The habitations where scheduled tribes (STs) were the preponderant social group were notified as ‘scheduled areas’ by the President of India under Article 244 of the Constitution.

For a gram sabha to be autonomous, PESA rightly insisted that “panchayats at the higher level do not assume the powers and authority of any panchayat at the lower level or of the gram sabha” (Section 4n). This is possible only if the structures above the gram sabha are autonomous in their own domains. So PESA required that these structures also have considerable political autonomy, by adopting “the pattern of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution” (Section 4o) with legislative, judicial and administrative powers.

Predictably, both state and the Union governments have worked to ensure these two crucial elements are unavailable – lest vibrant, democratic gram sabhas undermine the governments’ well-entrenched powers.

The 10 states with scheduled areas subsumed the gram sabhas in the areas under the general ‘Panchayat Raj Institutions’ (PRIs), where a gram sabha is an ornamental afterthought at best. The PRIs were already the emasculated appendages of government departments and their programmes. India’s gram sabha project was thus buried alive.

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TheWire.in, 9 November, 2021, https://thewire.in/rights/how-a-history-of-broken-promises-has-let-down-indias-scheduled-areas


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