Suchergebnisse

Gender quota in democratic institutions is now widely regarded as a tested tool to promote gender justice despite limitations. In this article, an attempt has been made to capture and analyse in the light of secondary source material including my own small study in one of the Indian States, West Bengal, on the impact of reservation of seats for women as elected women representatives in rural local government in India, with special reference to the challenges experienced by them. It has been argued that, despite a number of inherent structural constraints, women elected leaders have been able to prove their competence to run the institutions of governance and to bring about positive change in the agenda of governance and development. It has also been suggested that there is a need for a much more proactive role of the state which has created space for women through an amendment of the Constitution.

In turbulent times, the state is charged with three-fold core responsibilities, namely, to reduce or arrest the impact of the crisis on the lives and property of the citizens, to ensure effective and quicker service delivery, and to maintain stateÐsociety relations. In this article, an attempt has been made to analyse how the government of Kerala, which is regarded as one of the best performing states in India, fought the battle of the first wave of Covid-19 in rural areas. An attempt is made to capture and examine the role of the local government institutions and civil society groups, more particularly Kudumbashree groups and to explore how the state government coordinated and facilitated the work of the different state and non-state actors for the convergence of the services delivered by them and for the maintenance of conducive stateÐsociety relations.

S.V. Ranganath and D. Jeevan Kumar (Eds.), Excellence in Administration: Prospects and Perspectives. Bangalore: Indian Institute of Public Administration, Karnataka Regional Branch, 2019, 214 pp., ₹300.

This article attempts to make a critical evaluation of the working of the institutional system of democratic decentralization in rural India against the backdrop of its historical development. It has been argued that although it is not difficult to trace the roots of decentralized government in ancient India it hardly resembles the modern model of decentralization conceived and developed by a host of the Western scholars. The colonial rulers introduced decentralized governance in India to promote colonial objectives and to help perpetuate the British rule. The post- colonial state took steps to initiate the process of rural decentralization in 1950s but it went out of steam soon. In 1990s there was a paradigm shift in India's policy. And in 1992 the Constitution was amended to pave the road for democratic decentralization but currently it seems to be in the cross-roads. This paper seeks to capture the historical development of the journey of decentralization and identify the roadblocks and the takeaways from the experience of working of the institutions of rural decentralization in India.

Deliberative democracy has gained considerable momentum in India in recent years in the wake of a new drive for decentralisation and democratisation to promote good governance. The constitutional amendment made in India in 1992 sought to institutionalise this concept in villages through a body called Gram Sabha (village assembly). The amendment mandates the constitution of this institution at the Gram Panchayat level (usually a cluster of villages), the functional details of which have been left to the hands of the states. The Gram Sabha is now in place in all the states though it varies from state to state in location and functions. Some states like West Bengal, have taken a step further by creating another body down the line at the level of the electoral constituency. This article presents a case study of Gram Sansads, as known in West Bengal against a general review of the working of the Gram Sabhas in India.