( Published on Monday,
July 2, 2007)
Promote gram swaraj
By Manohar
N Kulkarni
By now the night halts in Karnatakas villages by the State Chief Minister Kumaraswamy has received lot of media attention.
By now the night halts in
Karnataka’s villages by the State Chief Minister Kumaraswamy
has received lot of media attention. In the past, Congress leaders like Kamaraj always preferred to stay with a village leader than
in the Government Inspection Bungalows. Late Prime Minister Lal
Bahadur Shastri stayed in Amul Milk shed villages before he invited Dr Kurien to form the National Dairy Development Board to
replicate Amul model all over
The night halts by the CM in Karnataka have been turned as emergency events for
government bureaucrats to spruce up the village roads and the house of the
villager and the criteria of selecting the host is not
known. Recently the CM stayed in the house where the host-farmer had committed
suicide and his family had to move out of the
house to make room for the Chief Minister! These night halts have been an
attraction for his host in the village because that brings lot of advantage of
getting their house spruced up at the government’s cost.
The Chief Minister has never used his night halts to discuss with the village sarpanch nor with the gram sabha
members about how the panchayat is being governed and
what pinpricks are created by his fellow MPs and village bureaucrats.
Why can’t he hold an emergency gram sabha meeting
whenever he is in the village so that his government's commitment to panchayat governance, which is now at a
low ebb, is visible to village panchayat
members. All the 29 functions delegated to the panchayats can be reviewed in
the gram sabha meetings.
The present Chief Minister and his Cabinet colleagues are out to destroy the
pioneering work done by previous governments in decentralised
governance through the Panchayat Raj Act of 1993. For instance rural housing
scheme called Ashraya
is now being taken away from the purview of gram panchayats.
Under the Constitutional pattern, gram sabha provides
the foundation for effective Panchayat Raj.
All the Yojanas of the centre and the states converge
at the village level and the buck stops there.
That was the reason why Mahatma Gandhi dreamt of a vibrant gram swaraj and Rajiv Gandhi a dynamic
forum for deciding all issues affecting villagers.
In Karnataka, as in other states, gram sabhas are
never held punctually because
the panchayat secretaries, who
have to draw up the agenda, feel nothing comes
out of these gram sabhas since
they do not get any cuts from the schemes.
By calling the gram sabha meeting at night the Chief
Minister would know the pulse of the people in that particular village, what
problems are faced by villagers with regard to water, education, health, and so
many daily worries of the poor.
TFRA very specifically envisages empowering gram sabhas
and village level institutions to protect wild life, forest and biodiversity.
In Karnataka there are many traditional panchayats like forest panchayats,
coastal panchayats and the chief Minister should learn how these function.
Finally the Chief Minister represents the people of Karnataka and to build
credibility he should halt in the Village panchayat
space which is like the Vidhan Soudha
and not in a party worker’s house or a household
selected by the state bureaucrats