Kindle Notes & Highlights
Until recently, it was not mandatory to elect office holders below the state level at district, sub-district, village or municipal levels. In other words, Indian democracy was a parliamentary system at the central and state levels with bureaucratic governance at the lower levels. The current power pyramid needs to be reversed. Everything that can be decided and implemented optimally at the local level should be kept at that level leaving the rest to be taken up at the district and thereafter the state level. Only the residual powers should belong to the centre. It is also necessary to move
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Democratic decentralization can also improve the efficiency of implementation, particularly if the development process is made participatory and transparent.
Democratic decentralization can help mobilize what some theorists call social capital: interpersonal relations or small group and community networks (Ellickson 1991).
successful decentralization requires certain pre-conditions such as an appropriate legal and administrative framework, a local information base, capacity-building programmes and civic culture.
The Ashok Mehta Committee Report (1978) found that politicians at the state level were also unwilling to transfer their power to local bodies.
In Kerala, the theoretical sequence of decentralization has been reversed. One of the first decisions made by the LDF Government elected to power in 1996 was to earmark 35 to 40 per cent of the outlay of the Ninth Five Year Plan towards projects and programmes to be drawn up by Local Self-Government Institutions (LSGIs).
Seventy-five to 80 per cent has been in the form of grant-in-aid. In the rest of India, financial devolution mainly takes the form of schemes. The grant-in-aid component is confined to a relatively small amount of the so-called untied funds. In contrast, the financial devolution in Kerala encourages maximum autonomy of the LSGIs.
Another distinctive feature of the decentralization experiment in Kerala is its insistence on mass participation and transparency.
The People’s Planning Campaign was launched to empower the elected local bodies with departmental officials, experts, volunteers and the people rallying around them.
To ensure transparency and participation without compromising technical standards, a sequence of phases each with distinctive objectives, main activities and a training programme was drawn up (SPB 1996). The First Phase consisted of mobilizing the maximum number
