Local government and the state government

What this heading covers

The two tiers of government a citizen actually meets. Local government is the one whose failures are visible from the front door — the hand pump, the drain, the street light, the birth certificate — and state government is the one that runs the police, the hospitals, the land records and the schools.

The Union government, Parliament and the Constitution are headings of their own and have a lesson of their own. So do the concept of government and the elements of democracy.

Why there is a local government at all

Because some decisions cannot sensibly be taken far away. A district office cannot know which of forty villages needs its pond deepened, and a village that is asked can. Three arguments the paper uses:

• Decentralisation. Decisions are better taken at the level nearest the problem.
• Participation. People who can reach their representative on foot are likelier to use their vote between elections as well as at them.
• Accountability. A councillor who lives in the ward is harder to avoid than a minister in the capital.

How it became constitutional

For four decades local government existed in law in the states but was not protected: a state could postpone its elections indefinitely, and many did. Three committees moved it towards the Constitution.

Committee	Year	What it recommended
Balwantrai Mehta	1957	Democratic decentralisation through a three-tier system of panchayats; Rajasthan began it at Nagaur on 2 October 1959
Ashok Mehta	1977	A two-tier system — Zila Parishad and Mandal Panchayat — and a political role for panchayats
L. M. Singhvi	1986	Constitutional status for panchayats, and Gram Sabhas as the base of democracy

The last of these is what happened, in 1992.

Rural local government: the 73rd Amendment, 1992

The 73rd Amendment Act, 1992 inserted Part IX into the Constitution and came into force on 24 April 1993, which is why that date is Panchayati Raj Day. It made the main features binding on the states rather than optional.

The three tiers

Tier	Level	Headed by
Gram Panchayat	Village	A Pradhan or Sarpanch, with elected ward members
Panchayat Samiti	Block, between village and district	Members elected from within the block
Zila Parishad	District	Elected representatives of the whole district

The three tiers are compulsory for a state with a population above twenty lakh; a smaller state may have two.

What the Amendment fixed

Feature	What it requires
Term	Five years, with an election before it expires, or within six months of a dissolution
Reservation	Seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their population, and not less than one-third for women — including among the chairpersons. Many states, West Bengal among them, have raised the share for women to a half
Who may stand	Any voter of 21 or above
Elections	Conducted by a State Election Commission, not by the state government of the day
Money	A State Finance Commission every five years, to recommend how revenue is shared with the panchayats
Subjects	The Eleventh Schedule lists 29 subjects a state may devolve — among them agriculture, drinking water, roads, primary education, health and sanitation, and poverty alleviation

The thing to notice about the list of 29 is the word may. The Amendment guarantees that panchayats exist and are elected; how much they are actually given to do still depends on the state.

The Gram Sabha, which is not a tier

The Gram Sabha is not a fourth tier and not a council. It is the meeting of all the registered voters of the village, and the Gram Panchayat is answerable to it. It approves the budget and the plan, examines the accounts, selects beneficiaries for schemes, and can ask the Pradhan to explain himself in front of his neighbours.

That is the point the paper tests most often here, and it is worth knowing why rather than only that: the Gram Sabha is the element of direct democracy inside a representative system. Everything else in the structure is people electing somebody to decide; this is the villagers deciding.

In West Bengal the terms are arranged differently, and the state's own paper can use them. Under the West Bengal Panchayat Act, 1973 the Gram Sansad is the body of all the voters of a single constituency of a Gram Panchayat — a booth — and the Gram Sabha is the body of all the voters of the whole Gram Panchayat area. The Sansad meets more often than the Sabha and is the smaller, closer forum. Elsewhere in India "Gram Sabha" alone does the work of both.

West Bengal is also the state that made the system work first in practice: it held regular panchayat elections on party lines from 1978, fifteen years before the Amendment required anyone to hold them at all.

Rural administration

The elected panchayat is not the whole of local government. Alongside it sits the permanent administration, which the NCERT book treats as a separate chapter and the paper treats as fair game.

Office	What it does
Police station	Keeps order and registers an FIR; every citizen has the right to have one recorded, and the station for an area is fixed by jurisdiction
Patwari — also called lekhpal, kanungo or karamchari, by state	Measures land, keeps and updates the land records, collects revenue; the person a farmer sees about a boundary or a mutation
Tehsildar or Block Development Officer	Hears disputes over land records, supervises collection, runs the block's development work
District Collector, who is also the District Magistrate	Heads the district: revenue, land records, law and order, disaster relief, elections

One substantive point the chapter makes, and it does get asked: the Hindu Succession Amendment Act, 2005 gave daughters the same right as sons in ancestral property. Land records that still show only sons are a record of what the law used to be.

Urban local government: the 74th Amendment, 1992

The 74th Amendment Act, 1992 inserted Part IXA and came into force on 1 June 1993. It does for towns and cities what the 73rd does for villages, including the five-year term, the reservations and the State Election Commission.

Body	For
Municipal Corporation	A large city
Municipal Council (municipality)	A smaller town
Nagar Panchayat	An area in transition from rural to urban

• The elected representative of a ward is a councillor.
• A corporation is headed politically by a Mayor; a council by a Chairperson.
• The permanent executive head is the Municipal Commissioner, who is appointed, not elected — the same elected-and-appointed pairing as the Pradhan and the panchayat secretary, or the Chief Minister and the Collector.
• The Twelfth Schedule lists eighteen subjects for municipalities: water supply, sanitation, solid waste, roads, street lighting, slum improvement, urban planning, fire services, burial grounds and so on.
• Money comes mainly from property tax, user charges and grants, which is why a corporation's reach depends so much on how well it can collect.

What local government does, and the point about contract work

Water, drains, rubbish, street lighting, local roads, primary schools and health centres, birth and death registration, local markets. These are the services whose absence a citizen notices first, which is why the syllabus puts local government before the Union rather than after it.

The NCERT chapter adds something a question can be built on: much of this work — sanitation above all — is done by people employed by contractors rather than by the corporation, on daily wages, without the safety equipment or the security that municipal employment carries. The chapter raises it as a question about who bears the cost of a city being clean.

The state government

The Vidhan Sabha and the MLA

• The Legislative Assembly, or Vidhan Sabha, is made of MLAs, each elected from a constituency by the voters of that constituency. An Assembly has at most 500 members and at least 60.
• The party with a majority forms the government; the rest sit in opposition, whose job is to question it and to offer an alternative.
• Six states also have a second chamber, the Legislative Council or Vidhan Parishad — Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh. Most states do not, and West Bengal abolished its Council in 1969.

Who runs it

Office	How they get there, and what they do
Chief Minister	Leader of the majority in the Assembly, appointed by the Governor; heads the government and chooses the Council of Ministers
Council of Ministers	Each holds a department; collectively answerable to the Assembly, which can remove them by a vote
Governor	Appointed by the President, for five years; the constitutional head, who acts on the advice of the Council of Ministers in the ordinary course

The contrast that gets asked: the Governor is appointed and the Chief Minister is answerable to an elected Assembly. A question offering an elected Governor is testing that.

How a decision becomes action

The NCERT chapter follows one real sequence, and it is the clearest answer to "what does a state government actually do":

1. A problem becomes public — illness from bad water, reported in the press and raised in the villages.
2. MLAs raise it in the Assembly, in the question hour and in debate, and the opposition presses.
3. The minister answers for the department and announces what will be done.
4. The department and the district administration carry it out, under the Collector.
5. The government is judged on it — in the press, in the Assembly and at the next election.

The point for a question: the pressure runs both ways. People reach the government through their MLA and through public opinion; the government reaches people through its departments.

Who is responsible for what

The Seventh Schedule divides subjects into three lists, and the division is examinable.

List	Examples
Union	Defence, foreign affairs, railways, currency, citizenship
State	Police, public health and hospitals, agriculture, land, local government
Concurrent	Education, forests, marriage, criminal law — both may legislate, and Union law prevails in a conflict

Education sits on the Concurrent List, and it did not begin there: it was moved from the State List by the 42nd Amendment in 1976. That one fact explains why both a Union body and a state board set the examinations a teacher sits.

Health, as a worked case

The chapter on the government's role in health is a good illustration of a state subject in practice: public hospitals and health centres paid for out of taxes and meant to be free or nearly free, alongside a large private sector that is paid for by the patient. The argument the book makes is that where the public system is weak, the cost does not disappear — it moves onto the household, and borrowing for treatment is one of the ordinary routes into debt. Kerala's transfer of a large part of its health budget to panchayat-level planning is the Indian example used, and Costa Rica the foreign one.

Questions of the kind the paper sets

Which body is the Gram Panchayat accountable to?

The distractors are the Panchayat Samiti, the Zila Parishad and the district collector — all of which exist, and none of which is the answer.

The Gram Panchayat is accountable to the Gram Sabha, the assembly of all the adult voters of the village. The upper tiers are not its supervisors in this sense, and the collector is an official rather than an elected body.

The question works because the three wrong options are all plausible chains of command, and the right one is not a chain of command at all. It is the villagers themselves.

The 73rd Amendment came into force in — (a) 1959 (b) 1977 (c) 1993 (d) 2005

The minimum age for contesting a panchayat election is — (a) 18 (b) 21 (c) 25 (d) 30

Panchayat elections are conducted by — (a) the state government (b) the Election Commission of India (c) the State Election Commission (d) the District Collector

The Eleventh Schedule of the Constitution contains — (a) 18 subjects for municipalities (b) 29 subjects that may be devolved to panchayats (c) the languages of India (d) the division of powers between Union and states

Three-tier panchayati raj was first recommended by the — (a) Ashok Mehta Committee (b) Balwantrai Mehta Committee (c) L. M. Singhvi Committee (d) Sarkaria Commission

A Nagar Panchayat is set up for — (a) a large city (b) a village (c) an area in transition from rural to urban (d) a district

The appointed executive head of a municipal corporation is the — (a) Mayor (b) Municipal Commissioner (c) Councillor (d) Collector

The Governor of a state is — (a) elected by the people of the state (b) elected by the MLAs (c) appointed by the President (d) nominated by the Chief Minister

Which of these is a State List subject? (a) Defence (b) Railways (c) Police (d) Currency

Education is on the — (a) Union List (b) State List (c) Concurrent List (d) Eleventh Schedule

The officer who keeps the land records of a village is the — (a) tehsildar (b) patwari (c) sarpanch (d) collector

In West Bengal, the body consisting of all the voters of a single constituency of a Gram Panchayat is the — (a) Gram Sabha (b) Gram Sansad (c) Gram Panchayat (d) Panchayat Samiti

Mistakes that cost marks here

• Treating the Gram Sabha as a tier of Panchayati Raj. It is the assembly of voters, not a council.
• Making the Gram Panchayat answerable to the Panchayat Samiti or the collector. It answers to the Gram Sabha.
• Swapping the 73rd and 74th Amendments. 73rd is rural, 74th is urban. Both were passed in 1992 and came into force in 1993.
• Mixing up the Eleventh Schedule (29 subjects, panchayats) with the Twelfth (18 subjects, municipalities).
• Saying panchayat elections are held by the Election Commission of India. They are held by the State Election Commission.
• Saying the Governor is elected. The Governor is appointed by the President; the Chief Minister is answerable to an elected Assembly.
• Assuming every state has a Legislative Council. Six do; West Bengal abolished its own in 1969.
• Putting education on the State List. It was moved to the Concurrent List in 1976.
• Confusing the elected head with the appointed one — Mayor against Municipal Commissioner, Pradhan against panchayat secretary.
• Reading the 29 subjects as powers already transferred. The Amendment guarantees elected panchayats; what they actually run is up to the state.

In one line

The 73rd Amendment made elected panchayats compulsory in three tiers with reserved seats, money through a Finance Commission and a Gram Sabha of all the voters to answer to; the 74th did the same for towns; and above them the state government runs police, health, land and — with the Union — education, through an Assembly of MLAs, a Chief Minister answerable to it, and a Governor who is appointed rather than elected.

In the classroom

Teach the local before the national. A visit to the panchayat or ward office, the actual names of the local representatives, and one real local problem traced to the body responsible for it — the structure of the state means far more to a class that has already found out where a complaint about a broken hand pump actually goes.

The Gram Sabha is worth acting out. A class that has held a meeting in which everybody present votes on how a small budget is spent has met direct democracy, and will not afterwards confuse it with a council that decides on their behalf.