The 73rd Amendment is best understood as a bargain struck between compulsion and permission. By the Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992, the Constitution of India acquired a new Part IX, titled “The Panchayats”, running from Article 243 to Article 243O, together with an Eleventh Schedule of twenty-nine subjects. What the amendment made compulsory was the existence of the institutions and the regularity of their renewal: every State must constitute panchayats, must fill their seats by direct election, must reserve seats and offices in a stated pattern, must hold elections on a stated clock, and must maintain two commissions, one for elections and one for finance. What the amendment left to permission was nearly everything that makes a local body powerful. The functions a panchayat performs, the taxes it may raise, the staff it commands, and the powers of the village assembly in whose name the whole structure is usually described, all depend on what a State Legislature chooses to give. A reader who grasps that single division, between the compulsory skeleton and the permissive substance, understands the 73rd Amendment better than a reader who has memorised its articles in sequence.

This article is the pillar treatment of the amendment: the problem it was built to solve, the committee road that produced its design, the provisions analysed in connected prose, the two sets of litigation that tested its open spaces, and an honest assessment of what the text does and does not settle. It states the design. The record of what States did with the design, the devolution of funds, functions and functionaries across three decades, belongs to the companion record and is assessed separately in the article on panchayat devolution in implementation. The field as a whole, rural and urban institutions together, is mapped in the series guide to local government law in India, and this article links across to it rather than re-covering that ground.

The namable claim of this article can be stated in one sentence. The Gram Sabha received a definition and no powers: the Constitution defines the village assembly, and then provides that it may exercise such powers as the State Legislature may by law provide, so the institution described in speech after speech as the foundation of Indian local democracy holds, as a matter of constitutional right, nothing at all. Every power a Gram Sabha exercises anywhere in the country is a gift of a State statute that another State need not make, and the series of articles in this collection has repeatedly found that the body a reform is named for is the one least empowered by it. The 73rd Amendment is the constitutional instance of that pattern, and the point matters practically, because a citizen who wants to know what the Gram Sabha in a particular village can do will find the answer in that State’s panchayat Act and nowhere else.

The village and its critics: the argument the Constitution inherited

The amendment of 1992 settled, in one direction, an argument about the Indian village that is older than the Constitution, and the text of Part IX cannot be fully understood without hearing both sides of it. On one side stood the tradition, given its most famous political form by Mohandas Gandhi, that the village was the natural unit of Indian self-government and that freedom, to mean anything, had to begin at the bottom, with every village a small republic conducting its own affairs through its panchayat. Gandhi’s village swaraj was a moral as much as an institutional idea: the panchayat of the ideal village would legislate, adjudicate and administer for a community small enough for every member to be known, and the pyramid of Indian government would rest on expanding circles of such communities rather than on commands descending from a capital. Versions of the ideal had administrative ancestors: the colonial state itself had experimented with village institutions, from the local self-government resolutions associated with Lord Ripon in 1882 to the village panchayat Acts that several provinces passed after the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms made local self-government a transferred provincial subject in 1919, and the Royal Commission on Decentralisation of 1909 had recommended building administration outward from the village. By the time the Constituent Assembly met, the panchayat carried a double inheritance, as an emblem of indigenous democracy and as a modest instrument of provincial administration.

On the other side stood the sceptics, and their spokesman in the Constituent Assembly was Dr B. R. Ambedkar. His objection was not to decentralisation but to the romanticisation of the village as it actually existed. Speaking in the Assembly in November 1948, he described the village as “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism”, and held that the village republics celebrated in nationalist rhetoric had been the ruination of India, because the village was organised by caste and its panchayat was the instrument of its dominant groups. The objection has never been answered and never gone away: it reappears, in modern dress, in every debate recorded later in this article, about whether reservation genuinely transfers power or merely re-labels it, and about whether conditions of candidature filter for competence or for social position. A reader who knows that the argument began here will recognise its structure wherever it recurs.

The Constitution of 1950 split the difference, and the split explains the next forty years. The panchayat entered the text, through an amendment moved in the Assembly by K. Santhanam and accepted by Ambedkar’s Drafting Committee’s side of the debate, but it entered as Article 40 in the Directive Principles of State Policy: an instruction to the State to organise village panchayats and endow them with powers to function as units of self-government, placed in the part of the Constitution that courts cannot enforce. The Gandhian institution was acknowledged; the Ambedkarite warning was, in effect, the reason it was not made justiciable or uniform. Everything that followed, the committee reports, the State Acts of uneven quality, the supersessions and postponed elections, and eventually the decision that only a constitutional amendment could secure the institution, is the working out of that original compromise. The 73rd Amendment did not reverse the compromise so much as re-price it: it kept the subject with the States, kept the substance permissive, and withdrew only the one freedom the Directive Principles had left untouched, the freedom of a State to let the institution lapse.

Before the amendment: Article 40, the committees, and two failed bills

Village panchayats were not a discovery of 1992. The Constitution as adopted in 1950 carried, in the Directive Principles of State Policy, Article 40, which directs the State to take steps to organise village panchayats and to endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government. A Directive Principle instructs; it does not compel. For four decades the organisation of panchayats therefore rested entirely on State legislation, and State legislation on this subject was exactly as uneven as that arrangement predicts. Some States built elaborate three-tier systems and held elections to them. Others let panchayats be superseded by administrators for years at a stretch, postponed elections indefinitely, or starved the bodies of funds and functions until the institution existed on paper and nowhere else. The defect the amendment was designed to cure was not the absence of panchayats but their insecurity: a State government that found an elected panchayat inconvenient could dissolve it, delay its replacement, and govern the village through its own officials, and nothing in the constitutional text prevented any of that.

The design that eventually entered the Constitution was assembled by committees over thirty-five years, and the lineage explains the text. The starting point was the Community Development Programme, launched in 1952, and the National Extension Service that followed it, through which the Union government attempted rural development by administrative action from above. In January 1957 the government appointed a committee under Balwant Rai Mehta to examine why those programmes were not drawing the participation they needed. The committee reported in November of the same year and recommended what it called democratic decentralisation: a three-tier structure of elected bodies, a gram panchayat for the village, a panchayat samiti for the block, and a zila parishad for the district, with genuine transfer of power and responsibility to them and the block body as the executive unit. The National Development Council accepted the recommendations in January 1958, and Rajasthan inaugurated the first panchayati raj system at Nagaur on 2 October 1959, with Andhra Pradesh close behind. The three-tier vocabulary of the 73rd Amendment is the Balwant Rai Mehta vocabulary, carried into the Constitution thirty-six years later.

The second committee changed the shape. By the middle of the nineteen seventies the first panchayati raj generation was visibly declining: elections were being postponed, bodies superseded, and the institutions bypassed by parallel development agencies. The Janata government appointed a committee under Ashok Mehta in December 1977, and it reported in August 1978 with a hundred and thirty-two recommendations. Its structural answer differed from 1957: a two-tier system, with the district as the first point of decentralisation below the State and a mandal panchayat, covering a group of villages, below it. The Ashok Mehta report is the source of the idea that the district, rather than the block, is the natural unit of rural planning, an idea that recurs throughout the later material. Its recommendations were not taken up nationally, in part because the government that appointed the committee fell, but Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal each legislated in its spirit during the following decade, and the debate it started, three tiers against two, block against district, runs underneath the text of Part IX.

The third and fourth committees set the amendment’s distinctive emphasis. The Planning Commission appointed the Committee on Administrative Arrangements for Rural Development and Poverty Alleviation Programmes under G. V. K. Rao in 1985. That committee’s concern was the relationship between the panchayats and the development administration: it found that the development process had been bureaucratised and separated from the elected bodies, warned that panchayati raj divorced from development had become grass without roots, and recommended that the zila parishad be made the principal body for managing development programmes at the district level, with the district treated as the basic unit of planning. The following year, 1986, the government appointed the Committee on Revitalisation of Panchayati Raj Institutions for Democracy and Development under L. M. Singhvi. The Singhvi Committee made the recommendation that turned a policy argument into a constitutional one: panchayati raj institutions should be constitutionally recognised, protected and sustained, so that their existence and their elections did not depend on the inclination of State governments, and it placed the Gram Sabha, the assembly of the village’s voters, at the base of the structure as the embodiment of direct democracy. A committee under P. K. Thungon, reporting in 1988, likewise recommended constitutional recognition and a fixed term for the bodies. When the amendment finally came, its two signature choices, constitutional status with a protected electoral cycle, and the Gram Sabha named in the constitutional text, were the Singhvi choices.

Constitutional status was attempted twice before it succeeded, and the failures shaped the successful bill. In 1989 the government of Rajiv Gandhi introduced the Constitution (Sixty-fourth Amendment) Bill, which passed the Lok Sabha but fell in the Rajya Sabha in October 1989, short of the special majority a constitutional amendment requires. The opposition’s case against that bill is instructive: it argued that the bill standardised panchayats from the Centre, made them answerable upward to the Union rather than outward to their States, and treated the State governments as obstacles to be bypassed rather than as the legislatures constitutionally responsible for local government, which is a State List subject. A further bill introduced by the National Front government in September 1990 never completed its passage and lapsed when the Lok Sabha was dissolved in 1991. The bill that became the 73rd Amendment was introduced in September 1991 by the government of P. V. Narasimha Rao, was examined by a joint committee of Parliament, and was passed by both Houses in December 1992 with support across parties. Because the amendment engaged provisions that required ratification, it was then ratified by the legislatures of not less than half the States, received the assent of the President on 20 April 1993, and came into force on 24 April 1993, the date on which Part IX became operating constitutional law.

One transitional provision deserves attention at the outset, because it shows the amendment’s caution. Article 243N kept the existing State panchayat laws alive even where they conflicted with Part IX, until each was amended or repealed or until one year from commencement, whichever came first, and it kept existing panchayats in office until their terms expired unless the State Legislature dissolved them sooner. Every State therefore had a year in which to rewrite its panchayat statute into conformity, and within that year the new architecture described in the sections that follow became the mandatory frame for rural local government across the country, subject to the territorial exceptions taken up later in this article.

How long did States get to bring their panchayat laws into line?

One year. Article 243N kept every pre-existing State law on panchayats in force, even where it conflicted with Part IX, until the State amended or repealed it or until one year from the commencement of the amendment, whichever came earlier. Existing panchayats continued until their term expired unless dissolved sooner by the State Legislature.

That year of grace is the reason the amendment’s arrival looks different in each State’s statute book. The constitutional text fixed the frame, but the frame had to be filled by a State Act, and the Acts were written in 1993 and 1994 by legislatures with very different intentions toward the institutions they were creating. Some States wrote conformity Acts that did little more than reproduce the constitutional minimum and schedule elections. Others used the occasion to redesign their systems, prescribing the powers of the Gram Sabha, the functions of each tier, the taxes each tier could raise, and the machinery of accountability, in detail that the Constitution nowhere demands. The variation was not a failure of the amendment’s drafting. It was the amendment’s design: Part IX is a floor and a frame, and the height of the building was left, deliberately and controversially, to the States.

The conformity Acts of 1993 and 1994, for all their differences of ambition, share a recognisable anatomy, and the anatomy is worth recording because it became the template every later State amendment works within. Each Act constitutes the tiers and fixes their territorial extent through delimitation rules; prescribes the composition of each tier, the number of seats, the reservation roster and its rotation; regulates the election of chairpersons and the no-confidence machinery against them; constitutes the State Election Commission’s field machinery and the election offences and petitions regime that Article 243O presupposes; states the functions of each tier, drawing on the Eleventh Schedule to the extent the State intends; states the taxes, fees and funds of each tier; provides for the State Finance Commission’s constitution and the laying of its report; and fixes the Gram Sabha’s meetings, quorum and functions, at whatever strength the State chooses. Two of those chapters, functions and Gram Sabha, are where the Acts diverge beyond recognition from one another; the rest converge, because the Constitution’s compulsory grammar leaves them little room to do otherwise. The first elections under the new Acts then populated the structure across the country in the middle of the nineteen nineties, on a scale without precedent in the institution’s history, and the amendment passed at that point from text to fact: the question for every later observer was no longer whether the bodies would exist, but what the bodies, existing, would be given to do.

The architecture of Part IX: definitions, tiers and composition

Part IX opens with definitions, and the definitions carry more of the design than definitions usually do. Article 243 defines a panchayat as an institution, by whatever name called, of self-government constituted under Article 243B for the rural areas. The phrase “by whatever name called” matters: the Constitution does not prescribe the names gram panchayat, panchayat samiti and zila parishad, and a State whose bodies are called mandal parishads or anchalik panchayats is in no breach of anything. What the Constitution fixes is levels and functions in the abstract, not nomenclature. A village, for the purposes of the Part, is a village specified by the Governor by public notification, and may be a group of villages so specified. The intermediate level is the level between the village and district levels that the Governor specifies by public notification. Population means the population as ascertained at the last preceding census of which the relevant figures have been published, a definition that recurs in the reservation and constituency provisions and ties every proportion in the Part to the census.

Article 243B then states the structural command: there shall be constituted in every State panchayats at the village, intermediate and district levels, in accordance with the provisions of the Part. The command is subject to one calibrated exception in the second clause: panchayats at the intermediate level may not be constituted in a State having a population not exceeding twenty lakh. A small State may therefore run a two-tier system, village and district, without offending the Constitution, and the exception explains the otherwise puzzling fact that the universally described “three-tier system” is, in a handful of small States, a two-tier system by constitutional permission. The threshold is a population threshold, not a discretion to skip a tier for convenience: a State above twenty lakh must constitute all three levels. Note also what Article 243B does not do. It does not say how large a panchayat area should be, how many panchayats a district should contain, or what a panchayat at any level is for. Those questions are answered, if they are answered at all, by Articles 243C and 243G read with the State Act, and the second of those articles is permissive in the way this article has already flagged.

Even the identity of the intermediate level is a notified choice rather than a fixed institution. The definition in Article 243 makes the intermediate level the level between the village and district levels that the Governor specifies by public notification for the purposes of the Part, and the States’ choices track their administrative geography: the block in most States, the taluka where the taluka is the working revenue unit, the anchalik in Assam’s usage, the mandal in the system Andhra Pradesh built on the Ashok Mehta pattern. The constitutional level is constant; the institution that fills it is local, which is the Part’s method in miniature.

Composition is the subject of Article 243C, and its first two clauses repeat the pattern of command moderated by uniformity. The Legislature of a State may by law make provisions with respect to the composition of panchayats, but the ratio between the population of the territorial area of a panchayat at any level and the number of seats in that panchayat to be filled by election must, so far as practicable, be the same throughout the State. All the seats in a panchayat are to be filled by persons chosen by direct election from territorial constituencies in the panchayat area, and for that purpose each panchayat area is divided into territorial constituencies in such a manner that the ratio between the population of each constituency and the number of seats allotted to it is, so far as practicable, the same throughout the panchayat area. The direct-election command is absolute: there are no nominated members of a panchayat’s elected house, and no seats filled by indirect election or co-option under the constitutional scheme. Indirect election survives in Part IX at exactly one point, the election of chairpersons at the two upper levels, and it is dealt with below.

Around that elected core, Article 243C permits a State law to add representation of two further kinds. It may provide for the representation of the chairpersons of the village panchayats in the panchayats at the intermediate level, or where there is no intermediate level in the district panchayat, and of the chairpersons of the intermediate panchayats in the district panchayat. It may also provide for the representation of members of Parliament and of the State Legislatures whose constituencies fall wholly or partly within the panchayat area, and of members of the Council of States and of a State Legislative Council who are registered as electors within that area. A later clause confirms that the chairperson of a panchayat and its other members, whether or not chosen by direct election from territorial constituencies, have the right to vote in the meetings of the panchayat. The ex officio presence of legislators inside panchayats is one of the design’s debated features: it links the tiers of the federal structure together and gives the panchayat access to the legislator’s constituency funds and influence, and it also places the elected local representative in a room with the very officials and legislators whose dominance the institution was meant to dilute. The Constitution permits the linkage and leaves its extent to the State.

Can members of Parliament and State Legislatures sit in panchayats?

Yes, if the State law so provides. Article 243C permits a State Legislature to give representation in a panchayat to members of the Lok Sabha and the State Assembly representing constituencies within its area, and to members of the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Council registered as electors there. Such members may vote in panchayat meetings.

The chairperson provisions complete the composition scheme, and they divide by level in a way that has produced two quite different kinds of village leadership across the country. Under Article 243C, the chairperson of a panchayat at the village level is elected in such manner as the Legislature of a State may by law provide. The Constitution is agnostic between the two methods the States have chosen: election directly by the village electorate, which makes the sarpanch a popularly mandated figure with an independent base, and election by the elected members of the panchayat from among themselves, which makes the office a creature of the house. At the intermediate and district levels there is no choice: the chairperson is elected by, and from amongst, the elected members of the panchayat at that level. The drafting choice at the village level is one of the clearest examples in Part IX of the Constitution consciously declining to decide a question of democratic design, and its consequences are visible in every comparison of State systems, since a directly elected sarpanch can claim a mandate the panchayat’s members cannot override, while an indirectly chosen one serves at their pleasure under the State Act’s no-confidence machinery.

The ratio rule deserves a moment of its own, because it is the one place in the composition article where the Constitution legislates a principle of political equality rather than leaving the matter to the State. A constituency system in which one panchayat’s seat represents five hundred people and another’s represents five thousand would make the votes of the second panchayat’s electors worth a tenth of the first’s, and the uniform ratio, at the level of the State for the panchayat as a whole and at the level of the panchayat area for its constituencies, is the guard against that inequality. Its qualification, “so far as practicable”, is equally considered: panchayat areas are made of whole villages, villages are not of uniform size, and a constituency must be composed of whole settlements if its representative is to know it, so the text accepts approximation where geography and settlement patterns make exact equality unattainable, and reserves the command for the deliberate distortions, the packed and the starved constituency, at which the practicability plea would be a pretext. Delimitation under the State Acts, conducted on the census figures the definitions prescribe, is the administrative working out of this rule, and the protection Article 243O throws around the delimitation law, examined below, is what allows the working out to proceed on a five-year rhythm without being litigated to a standstill at every cycle.

Two further provisions frame the architecture before the substantive articles begin. Article 243L applies the Part to the Union territories, with the President empowered to direct that its provisions apply subject to exceptions and modifications, and with references to the State Legislature read, for a territory with a legislature, accordingly. Article 243M takes whole territories out, and is examined in the section on exclusions below. And standing behind the entire Part is the point that local government remains an entry in the State List of the Seventh Schedule: the 73rd Amendment did not move the subject to the Union or the Concurrent List. It constitutionalised a minimum structure within a subject that remains the States’ own, which is why the amendment had to be ratified by the States before it could take effect, and why everything beyond the minimum still belongs to State legislation. Readers who want the division of legislative power itself, entry by entry, will find it in the series article comparing the three Lists of the Seventh Schedule; here it is enough to hold the consequence, that Part IX is an inserted floor inside State competence, not a transfer of that competence.

Shall and may: how Part IX distributes obligation

Before the substantive articles are examined one by one, the reader should be equipped with the Part’s own grammar, because almost every question about the 73rd Amendment reduces to it. The Constitution distributes obligation through verbs, and Part IX uses two families of them with unusual consistency. Where the framers meant compulsion, the text says so in terms: panchayats “shall be constituted” in every State; all seats “shall be filled” by direct election; seats “shall be reserved” in the stated proportions; a Finance Commission is to be constituted with the Governor directed to act within one year and at every fifth year thereafter; the superintendence of elections “shall be vested” in the State Election Commission; a panchayat “shall continue” for five years. Where the framers meant discretion, the text changes its verb and its subject: the Gram Sabha “may exercise such powers” as the State Legislature provides; the State Legislature “may, by law, endow” the panchayats with powers; it “may” authorise taxes, “may” make provision for composition within the ratio rule, “may” prescribe additional disqualifications, and nothing in the Part prevents it from reserving seats for backward classes if it chooses. The division is not stylistic. It is the settlement, and a lawyer reading a State panchayat Act reads it against this map: a State Act that contradicts a “shall” is unconstitutional, and a State Act that declines a “may” is merely ungenerous.

Two refinements complete the grammar. The first is that several commands are commands about machinery rather than outcomes. The Constitution commands that a State Finance Commission exist and report; it does not command any State to accept a single recommendation the Commission makes, beyond causing the report and the action taken memorandum to be laid before the Legislature. It commands that elections be held; it does not command that the bodies elected be worth electing to, which is the work of the permissive articles. The second refinement is that some provisions are structured as prohibitions rather than commands, and they bind as tightly as any “shall”: no amendment of a State law may dissolve a functioning panchayat before its term; no election may be called in question except by election petition; no person is to be removed from the office of State Election Commissioner except on the grounds and in the manner of a High Court judge. A complete account of the compulsory content of Part IX has to count these fences alongside the commands, because in litigation it is the fences that are most often invoked: the typical Part IX case is not a claim that a State failed to achieve self-government, which no court could decree, but a claim that a State crossed a line the Part draws, by delaying an election, by dissolving a body through a legal amendment, by refusing staff to an election commission, or by letting a Finance Commission’s cycle lapse.

This grammar also explains the amendment’s durability as law and its vulnerability as policy. As law, Part IX is nearly litigation-proof in its central design, because it asks of States only things that can be specified, counted and enforced: bodies constituted, seats filled, proportions observed, dates kept, commissions appointed. A court can verify every one of those from a gazette notification. As policy, the same specification is the weakness, because the outcomes that justify the structure, a panchayat that plans, taxes, spends and answers for itself, cannot be counted from a notification, and the text commits them to the political process of each State. The sections that follow take the articles in the order of the argument rather than the order of the text: the Gram Sabha first, because its treatment is the purest case of the permissive method; then reservation, the purest case of the compulsory method; then term, disqualification, machinery, the Schedule, and the exclusions, in each of which the two methods meet.

The commands have in fact been enforced, and the manner of their enforcement shows what kind of law Part IX is. The recurring case is the delayed election: a State government, facing a local poll it would rather postpone, discovers reasons of delimitation, reservation revision, census transition or administrative unpreparedness, and the election commission or a petitioner carries the matter to court. The courts’ answer, developed most fully for the parallel municipal provisions and applied across both Parts of the Constitution, is that the election machinery provisions mean what they say. In Kishansing Tomar v. Municipal Corporation of the City of Ahmedabad, decided in 2006 on the municipal side of the same design, the Supreme Court held that the State Election Commission stands, for local elections, in the same position as the Election Commission of India stands for parliamentary and assembly elections, that the Commission’s powers in the conduct of elections are plenary within their field, and that elections to a local body must be completed before its term expires, with exercises such as delimitation or the revision of reservation forming no ground for postponement beyond the constitutional date. The reasoning transfers directly, because Articles 243K and 243E are drafted in the image of the provisions the Court was construing, and High Courts have applied the same discipline to panchayat elections. What the case law enforces, note, is the compulsory grammar and nothing else: no court has ordered a State to devolve the Eleventh Schedule, to fund a panchayat adequately, or to give a Gram Sabha a quorum, because the text gives no purchase for such an order. The enforcement record is thus the mirror image of the drafting. Everything the amendment made justiciable has been justified in court; everything it left to politics has stayed in politics; and a reader assessing any reform proposal for this field should ask, as the first question, on which side of that line the proposal falls, because the answer predicts whether the proposal, if enacted, will be a right or a hope.

The Gram Sabha: a definition, a name, and no powers of its own

Every account of panchayati raj begins with the Gram Sabha, and nearly every account misdescribes its legal position. The Sabha is spoken of as the foundation of the system, the village parliament, the primary body of direct democracy from which the panchayat derives its authority and to which it answers. As a description of political theory that language has a respectable lineage: the Singhvi Committee had recommended that the Gram Sabha be recognised as the base of the structure, and the rhetoric of the amendment’s passage followed it. As a description of constitutional law it is wrong, and the error is worth correcting precisely, because citizens act on it. A villager who attends a Gram Sabha meeting believing the assembly holds constitutional authority to decide the village’s affairs will discover, on reading the text, that the authority depends entirely on the accident of which State the village happens to be in.

The whole of the constitutional provision is two short texts. Article 243, in its definitions clause, provides that “Gram Sabha” means a body consisting of persons registered in the electoral rolls relating to a village comprised within the area of a panchayat at the village level. Article 243A, headed simply “Gram Sabha”, then provides that a Gram Sabha may exercise such powers and perform such functions at the village level as the Legislature of a State may, by law, provide. That is all. There is no list of functions, no quorum prescribed, no meeting required, no subject on which the Sabha must be consulted, and no consequence stated for a panchayat that ignores it. Contrast the treatment of the panchayat itself in the articles around it: constitution in every State, seats filled by direct election, a five-year term protected against dissolution by legal amendment, elections on a constitutional clock, reservation in a constitutional pattern. The panchayat is clothed in commands. The Sabha is given a name, a membership, and an enabling clause addressed to somebody else.

Who belongs to the Gram Sabha?

Every person registered in the electoral rolls of the village. Article 243 defines the Gram Sabha as a body consisting of persons registered in the electoral rolls relating to a village comprised within the area of a panchayat at the village level. Membership therefore follows the voter list, not residence alone or landholding.

The consequences of this drafting deserve to be drawn out, because they govern what reform proposals in this area can and cannot do. First, no power exercised by a Gram Sabha anywhere in India is exercised by constitutional right; it is exercised under a State panchayat Act, and it can be enlarged, reduced or withdrawn by amending that Act by ordinary majority. Second, the variation between States is correspondingly wide, and it is lawful variation. Some State Acts assign the Sabha real functions: approval of the village development plan and the annual budget, selection of beneficiaries under welfare schemes, review of works executed, and the conduct of social audit of employment and housing programmes. Others convene the Sabha rarely and give its resolutions no operative effect. A third group of powers often attributed to the Sabha in popular writing, including the power to remove the sarpanch or to veto a panchayat decision, exists only where a State Act confers it, and in most States it does not exist at all. Third, where the Sabha has acquired genuine work, the source is often not even the panchayat Act but another statute altogether: the national rural employment guarantee legislation, for instance, built its social audit machinery on Gram Sabha meetings, which gave the assembly in many villages a recurring statutory function that Part IX never gave it. The foundation, in other words, holds up the building only where a legislature has separately bolted it down.

None of this makes the Gram Sabha unimportant, and the article’s claim should not be read as a dismissal. It makes the Sabha’s importance a question of State law and of practice rather than of constitutional entitlement, which is exactly the distinction a citizen, a candidate or an examiner needs. The strongest version of the opposing view also deserves to be heard fairly: defenders of the drafting point out that a constitution which prescribed the Sabha’s functions in detail would have frozen one model of village democracy for States of very different sizes and traditions, and that the same permissive structure that lets a State neglect the Sabha also let States such as Kerala build its neighbourhood assemblies and planning process into something far more muscular than a uniform constitutional clause would have dared to prescribe. That argument is a good one as far as it goes. It does not disturb the textual point, which is the point of this section: whatever any Gram Sabha can do, it can do because a statute says so, and the first question to ask about any Sabha anywhere is which statute, and what exactly it says.

The State legislation written under Article 243A also had to solve design questions the Constitution never mentions, and the solutions show how much institutional invention the single permissive sentence had to carry. A Gram Sabha of a large panchayat may contain several thousand electors spread across several villages, since a panchayat at the village level may comprise a group of villages; an assembly of that size cannot deliberate in the manner the rhetoric imagines, and some States responded by constituting the Sabha at the level of the ward or the revenue village within the panchayat, so that the meeting a citizen attends is of a size at which speaking is possible. Kerala’s system of ward-level sabhas, built into its celebrated planning process of the later nineteen nineties, is the best-known instance, and it illustrates the article’s central point from the constructive side: nothing in Part IX required Kerala to convene its assemblies ward by ward, to put draft plans before them, or to let their priorities shape the panchayat’s budget, and everything in that design is State legislation, available to be copied and available to be repealed. Quorum, frequency of meetings, the officer who convenes the meeting, the notice required, the record to be kept, and the effect of a resolution, every one of these is likewise found, if at all, in the State Act and its rules. Where the Act fixes no quorum or a very low one, a Sabha resolution may speak in the name of a village on the strength of a thin room; where it fixes the sarpanch as convener without a default mechanism, a sarpanch who does not wish to face the assembly can simply not call it, and the remedies for that omission, where they exist, are again statutory. The practical study of the Gram Sabha is therefore the study of twenty-eight different statutory schemes wearing one constitutional name.

There is a further distinction the rhetoric habitually blurs, between the Gram Sabha and the gram panchayat. The Sabha is the electorate assembled; the panchayat is the elected executive body the electorate chooses. The Sabha elects the panchayat at the general election, in the same act by which it elects every other representative, and thereafter the two bodies coexist for five years, the panchayat administering and the Sabha, on the design of the stronger State Acts, approving plans, selecting beneficiaries and reviewing performance. Confusing them produces the common error of attributing the panchayat’s powers to the Sabha and then discovering, in a dispute, that the decision complained of was the panchayat’s to take and the Sabha’s resolution against it carries no legal force in that State. The Constitution’s definitions keep the two apart with care: the panchayat is the institution of self-government constituted under Article 243B, and the Sabha is a body of registered electors. Only one of them was given a term, a composition and a protected existence, and it was not the assembly.

Reservation under Article 243D: the compulsion with the largest consequences

If one provision of Part IX has altered the composition of Indian political society, it is Article 243D. The article works through the subject in a deliberate order. Seats are to be reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in every panchayat, and the number of seats so reserved must bear, as nearly as may be, the same proportion to the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in that panchayat as the population of the Scheduled Castes or, as the case may be, the Scheduled Tribes in the panchayat area bears to the total population of that area; such seats may be allotted by rotation to different constituencies in a panchayat. Not less than one third of the seats so reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are to be reserved for women belonging to those groups. Not less than one third, expressly including the seats reserved for women of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, of the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in every panchayat are to be reserved for women, and those seats too may be allotted by rotation. Offices of chairpersons are then dealt with in the same pattern: they are to be reserved for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women in such manner as the State Legislature may by law provide, subject to provisos that the number of chairperson offices reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes bears, as nearly as may be, the same proportion to the total number of such offices as their population bears to the State’s population, and that not less than one third of the total number of chairperson offices are reserved for women, with rotation as State law provides.

Three features of this drafting repay attention. The first is that reservation here is not an enabling power of the kind found in the employment and education articles of the Constitution; it is a command. A State has no option to decline caste reservation in panchayats or to set the women’s share below one third, and the proportionality formula ties the reserved share in each individual panchayat to that panchayat’s own population, not to a State-wide average, so the map of reserved seats follows the map of settlement. The second feature is the sunset in the fifth clause: the reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and of chairperson offices for them other than the women’s share, ceases to have effect on the expiration of the period specified in Article 334, the same constitutional clock that governs reservation in the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies. The women’s reservation carries no such sunset; it is written into Part IX without a terminal date. The third feature is the permissive tailpiece, the sixth clause, which provides that nothing in the Part prevents a State Legislature from making provision for reservation of seats in any panchayat, or of chairperson offices, in favour of backward class of citizens. What the Constitution commands for two groups and for women, it merely permits for the backward classes, and the litigation on that permission is taken up below.

The scale of what this produced is the context in which every debate about the provision has to be conducted. On the figures published by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, the three tiers together return over thirty lakh elected representatives from more than two and a half lakh panchayats, and women hold over fourteen lakh of those offices, a share well above the one-third floor precisely because many States have raised the women’s reservation by their own legislation to one half of seats and offices; Bihar was the first State to legislate one half, by its panchayat Act of 2006, and a substantial number of States have since followed it. No other provision of the Constitution places elected office, in such numbers, in the hands of women and of members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes at the level of government closest to daily life. The wider law governing women’s legal position, of which this reservation is one part, is treated in the series guide to women’s rights laws in India; the treatment here is confined to the provision and its working.

The achievement, stated at full strength, is that reservation converted a formal franchise into actual occupancy of office by groups that the older panchayat system, for all its electoral forms, had in practice kept at the margins of village power. Election by universal suffrage had coexisted for decades with panchayats dominated by the locally powerful, because the cost of contesting, the social organisation of the village, and the control of its institutions filtered who could realistically stand. A reserved seat removes the filter at the point of entry: the seat must be filled by a member of the reserved group, the constituency must choose among such candidates, and the office, with its signature, its funds and its place in the administrative chain, changes hands. The research literature on whether that change of occupancy changes policy is substantial and should be cited rather than summarised into a slogan. The best-known study, by Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, exploited the randomised rotation of reserved pradhan positions in West Bengal and Rajasthan and found that women pradhans invested more in the public goods that women in those villages raised most often, drinking water above all, which is evidence that the identity of the office holder alters the pattern of provision and not merely the photograph of the institution. Later work by the same group with Lakshmi Iyer and others on repeated exposure to women leaders found that villages which had experienced a woman pradhan became measurably less biased in their assessment of women leaders and more likely to elect women to open seats, which is evidence that reservation can work on the prejudice that made it necessary.

The criticism, also stated at full strength, has three distinct strands that are often carelessly merged. The first is rotation. Because reserved seats are allotted by rotation to different constituencies, a member elected from a reserved seat ordinarily cannot seek re-election from the same seat at the next election, and a chairperson whose office is reserved in one cycle finds it unreserved, or reserved for another group, in the next. Rotation spreads the opportunity across constituencies and prevents a reserved seat from becoming one family’s permanent property, which was its purpose. Its cost is accountability and accumulation: an incumbent who cannot be returned by the same voters has a weakened incentive to build a record for them, and a first-time office holder who is just learning the administrative system when the term ends takes the learning out of the institution with her. The second strand is proxy office holding, the widely reported pattern, popularly named for the husbands of women sarpanches, in which the functions of an elected woman are in substance exercised by a male relative who attends the meetings, deals with the officials and takes the decisions. Field studies commissioned by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj on elected women representatives have documented this pattern, alongside the countervailing finding that it diminishes with repeat terms and with training, as office holders assert the authority of the office they formally hold. The third strand is the ceiling effect: reservation guarantees a floor of representation, and its critics note that in some States parties treat the reserved share as the whole of the representation the reserved groups are to receive, rarely fielding women or Scheduled Caste candidates for unreserved seats. Each strand is an argument about how the provision works in practice. None of them is an argument that the provision failed to do the thing it was drafted to do, which was to put the offices into the specified hands, and the evidence on policy outcomes, as the Chattopadhyay and Duflo line of research shows, runs in both directions depending on the outcome measured, which is why this article records the findings instead of adopting a verdict the research does not support.

The sunset clause carries a consequence that is easy to miss and worth stating, because it binds the future of panchayat reservation to a debate conducted about a different institution. Article 334, as originally framed, limited reservation of seats in the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies to ten years, and its period has been extended by constitutional amendment again and again, among them the Constitution (One Hundred and Fourth Amendment) Act, 2019, which carried it to 2030. Because the fifth clause of Article 243D ties the panchayat reservation for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes to “the period specified in article 334”, every one of those extensions, debated and justified in Parliament in the vocabulary of parliamentary representation, extended the panchayat reservation with it, without a separate word needing to be said about local bodies. The women’s reservation in panchayats stands outside this mechanism entirely, having no terminal date in its own text, so that if the Article 334 period were ever allowed to lapse, the caste reservation in panchayats would fall with the legislative reservation while the one-third reservation for women would continue untouched, an asymmetry between the amendment’s two great inclusionary devices that its framers built in, presumably deliberately, and that any future debate on the sunset will have to confront in terms.

The backward classes permission in the sixth clause generated the provision’s principal constitutional litigation. In K. Krishna Murthy v. Union of India, decided in 2010, the Supreme Court upheld the enabling provisions for reservation in favour of backward classes in local bodies against the objection that political reservation of this kind was impermissible, while insisting that the permission is conditioned: the State must be able to show, on quantifiable material gathered for the purpose, that the class is backward and inadequately represented, and the aggregate of reservation in a local body must respect the ceiling of one half of seats that the Court’s equality jurisprudence applies. The judgment is the bridge between the constitutional text and the later disputes about the evidentiary basis of local body quotas for backward classes, and its discipline, decide the quantum on data assembled before the election and not after, follows from the structure of Article 243D itself: the clauses that command reservation specify their own measure, population proportion, while the clause that permits it specifies none, and it was that silence the Court filled with conditions.

The mechanics of reservation repay a closer look, because two features of the machinery determine how the provision is experienced on the ground. The first is the nesting of the quotas. The women’s reservation is not a separate pool added to the caste reservation; the text builds it through the caste reservation, requiring that not less than one third of the seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes be reserved for women of the Scheduled Castes, the same for the Scheduled Tribes, and that the overall women’s share of one third of all directly elected seats be computed including those seats. A constituency may therefore be reserved on two axes at once, and the rotation that moves reservation among constituencies has to satisfy both patterns simultaneously, which is why the preparation of reservation rosters is among the most litigated administrative acts in the panchayat cycle, conducted under State rules and, after Article 243O, largely insulated from challenge to the underlying delimitation while remaining open to challenge on the roster’s fidelity to the constitutional proportions. The second feature is the difference between reserving a seat and reserving the chairperson’s office. A reserved seat changes who sits in the house; a reserved chairperson office changes who signs, who presides, who deals with the block administration as an equal, and who is answerable for the panchayat’s funds. The proxy phenomenon discussed above concentrates at exactly this point, because the office of sarpanch is the office worth capturing, and the studies of the first reserved generation found the capture most visible where a woman held the chairperson’s office in a system that had made no provision for her training, her staff support, or her independent access to the panchayat’s records. The same studies record the corrective: where the office is held for a full term, where the holder has served a prior term as a member, and where federations of elected women representatives exist to exchange practice, the formal authority of the office is progressively made real. Reservation, on this evidence, is best understood not as an event but as a ratchet, whose first turn is the hardest and whose later turns are easier, which is the strongest empirical answer to the objection that the first generation’s proxy arrangements prove the design futile.

The relationship between reservation and the rest of Part IX should also be marked, because it is frequently misstated in both directions. Reservation in panchayats does not rest on the provisions that authorise reservation in education and public employment, and it is not subject to the conditions the courts have built around those provisions: it is a free-standing constitutional command with its own proportions stated in its own text, inserted by the same amendment that created the institutions, and the Supreme Court’s treatment of the separate backward classes permission in Krishna Murthy proceeded by asking what conditions attach to the permission, not by re-opening the command. Conversely, the existence of the command says nothing about the distribution of power inside the institution once the reserved members take their seats, which is governed by the State Act’s rules on meetings, committees, no-confidence motions and the chairperson’s casting authority. A reserved seat guarantees presence. Presence, as the record of the first three decades shows in both its encouraging and its discouraging parts, is the beginning of the transfer of power and not its completion, and the distance between the two is the distance the implementation articles in this series exist to measure.

The five-year term and the protection against dissolution

Article 243E is short, and it is the provision that did more than any other to change the lived reality of panchayati raj, because it attacked the precise abuse that had hollowed the institution out: the indefinite postponement of its renewal. Every panchayat, unless sooner dissolved under any law for the time being in force, continues for five years from the date appointed for its first meeting and no longer. An election to constitute a panchayat must be completed before the expiry of its duration, and where a panchayat has been dissolved earlier, before the expiration of a period of six months from the date of its dissolution. A panchayat constituted upon a dissolution before the expiration of its duration continues only for the remainder of the period for which the dissolved panchayat would have continued had it not been dissolved. And where the remainder of the term is less than six months, it is not necessary to hold the election for the short residue at all.

Each element answers a known evasion. The five-year term runs from the first meeting, a fixed and ascertainable event, not from a date the executive can shift. The requirement that elections be completed before expiry, rather than merely set in motion, removes the device of announcing elections and letting the process drift past the term’s end. The six-month rule for dissolutions removes the second device, the dissolution that was followed by years of administrator rule: a State government may still dissolve a panchayat under its Act, but it buys itself at most six months of administration without an elected body, and the body elected in consequence does not receive a fresh five years, only the remainder of the interrupted term, which removes any incentive to dissolve a panchayat in order to reset its political clock. The remainder rule is the least noticed and the most elegant of the four: it makes premature dissolution pointless as a stratagem, since the successor body inherits the same terminal date, and it means that the electoral cycle of every panchayat in a State converges back to a common rhythm after any interruption.

The second clause of the article closes a subtler route. No amendment of any law in force is to have the effect of causing the dissolution of a panchayat at any level which is functioning immediately before the amendment, until the expiration of its duration. A legislature that wishes to be rid of inconvenient panchayats cannot accomplish the result by rewriting its panchayat Act in terms that extinguish the existing bodies; the bodies in being serve out their terms under the protection of the clause, and the amended law governs the constitution of their successors. Read together, the term provisions convert the existence of an elected panchayat from a concession a State government renews into a default the Constitution maintains. Dissolution remains possible, supersession remains possible, but both are made temporary and self-defeating in a way they were not when the institution rested on State legislation alone. When commentators describe the amendment’s real transfer of power, it is usually Article 243G they point to; Article 243E, which transferred nothing except time, and made that transfer irreversible, has the stronger claim.

Two working details of the term deserve notice because they are the points at which disputes actually arise. The first is the date of the first meeting, from which the five years run. That date is appointed under the State Act’s machinery, ordinarily in the notification constituting the panchayat after its election, and because the whole cycle is keyed to it, a delay in convening the first meeting does not extend the term by a day: the period is five years from the date appointed for the first meeting, and the election of the successor must in any event be completed before the duration expires, which is why the State Election Commission’s calendar works backward from expiry dates years in advance. The second is the position between dissolution and reconstitution. During the interval the State Act’s supersession machinery governs, ordinarily through an administrator or a committee appointed by the State government, and the constitutional text tolerates the interval only within the six-month bound and on the remainder principle. A State Act may also provide for the removal of a chairperson or members mid-term, by no-confidence motion or for stated misconduct, and that power is untouched by Article 243E, which protects the body’s duration and not the tenure of any individual office holder; the distinction matters, because the frequent political event in panchayat life is not the dissolution of the body but the capture or removal of its head, and on that event the Constitution is silent and the State Act is everything. The term provisions, read closely, thus protect the institution’s continuity while leaving its internal politics entirely to State law, which is the same division this article has found in every other part of the scheme.

Disqualifications: the open space in Article 243F and what the courts did with it

Article 243F is where the Constitution deliberately leaves a door open, and the two leading cases in this area are the story of how far State legislatures walked through it. A person is disqualified for being chosen as, and for being, a member of a panchayat if he is so disqualified by or under any law for the time being in force for the purposes of elections to the Legislature of the State, or if he is so disqualified by or under any law made by the Legislature of the State. The first limb imports the disqualifications that govern assembly elections. The second limb is an express, unqualified power in the State Legislature to add disqualifications of its own for panchayat elections. One proviso softens the imported code: no person is to be disqualified on the ground that he is less than twenty-five years of age, if he has attained the age of twenty-one years, which lowers the effective minimum age for panchayat office to twenty-one even where the incorporated law speaks of twenty-five. Where a question arises whether a member has become subject to any of these disqualifications, the question is referred for the decision of such authority and in such manner as the State Legislature may by law provide; the Constitution does not itself name the forum.

The first great test of the second limb was the two-child norm. Haryana’s panchayat Act disqualified a person who had more than two living children from being chosen as or continuing as a sarpanch, a panch, or a member of the higher tiers, and in Javed v. State of Haryana, decided in 2003, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court upheld the disqualification. The Court’s reasoning proceeded on several grounds that have structured every later case. The right to contest an election is neither a fundamental right nor a common law right but a right created by statute, and it is open to the statute that creates the right to prescribe the conditions on which it may be exercised. The classification between persons with more than two children and persons with two or fewer was not arbitrary: it served the object of popularising the small family norm, which the Court connected to the Directive Principles, to the fundamental duties, and to the national population policy, and a provision aimed at that object, operating on those who seek to lead village institutions and to set an example, had a rational relation to the purpose of the legislation. The challenge founded on religious freedom failed because the disqualification applied irrespective of religion and restrained no religious practice, and the challenge founded on personal liberty failed because the provision regulated eligibility for office and not procreation itself. The disqualification, the Court also held, operated prospectively in the manner the statute prescribed, sparing children born within the period the Act allowed after its commencement.

The second test, twelve years later, was broader and harder. By an amendment of 2015, Haryana added to its disqualifications a requirement of minimum educational qualification, matriculation for general candidates with lower thresholds for women and for Scheduled Caste candidates, disqualification for failure to pay arrears owed to cooperative banks and societies and arrears of electricity bills, disqualification where specified charges stood framed, and a requirement that the candidate have a functional toilet at the place of residence. In Rajbala v. State of Haryana, decided in December 2015, the Supreme Court upheld the amendment. The Court held that the right to vote and the right to contest, though not fundamental rights, are constitutional rights, and that it is the legislature’s province to prescribe qualifications and disqualifications for an elective office, the distinction between the two being one without a controlling difference for this purpose. It rejected the argument from arbitrariness on each head: education bears on a representative’s ability to perform the functions of the office; the arrears disqualifications attach to default in obligations owed to public and cooperative institutions; and if the legislature decides that a person who has not provided a functional toilet at home is not to administer a civic body charged among other things with sanitation, the policy cannot be called unrelated to the Act’s objects. A law, the Court held, is not to be struck down merely because the court considers the classification imperfect, and the wisdom of the conditions was for the legislature.

Both sides of the criticism these decisions attracted deserve statement in their own terms, because the brief of this article is to present the reasoning and the objection fairly and to adjudicate neither. The case for the decisions, as their defenders put it, is written into the constitutional text: Article 243F confers the disqualification power in express words, without the qualifying clauses that restrain other legislative powers in Part IX, and a court that invalidated conditions because it thought them unwise would be amending the allocation the Constitution itself made. Conditions of candidature, on this view, are how legislatures professionalise an institution, and the two-child norm and the education and sanitation requirements each pursue objects, population stabilisation and capable, exemplary local leadership, that are the panchayat system’s own objects. The case against them, pressed by the petitioners who challenged the Haryana law and by a large body of commentary after Rajbala, including a public petition addressed to the Chief Justice of India within days of that judgment, is that conditions of this kind do not filter for competence in the abstract but filter by social position in fact. Educational attainment, freedom from cooperative debt, and a household toilet are each strongly correlated with wealth, caste and gender in the rural society the panchayats govern; the petitioners’ material in Rajbala asserted that the education condition alone rendered a majority of rural women, and a still larger share of rural Scheduled Caste women, ineligible to contest. The exclusion the critics identify is pointed precisely because of Article 243D: the same amendment that reserves seats so that women and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes must hold office leaves the State free, under Article 243F, to set candidature conditions that shrink the pool from which the holders of the reserved seats can be drawn. Whether that is a legitimate calibration of the institution or a quiet reversal of its inclusionary design is the live question the two cases leave open, and the honest position is that the text supports the power, the judgments uphold its exercise, and the empirical objection to its incidence stands unanswered by either.

The two Haryana cases are the peaks of the disqualification landscape, but the landscape itself is wider, and a pillar treatment should map it, because Article 243F’s second limb has been used for a recognisable family of conditions across the States. State panchayat Acts commonly disqualify a person who holds an office of profit under the government or a local authority, who has been dismissed from government service, who stands convicted of specified offences or of offences involving moral turpitude, who is an undischarged insolvent, who has been removed from panchayat office for misconduct, or who has encroached upon land belonging to the government, a municipality or a panchayat. The encroachment head reached the Supreme Court in State of Himachal Pradesh v. Surinder Singh Banolta, where the Himachal Pradesh Act’s clause disqualifying a person who has encroached upon such land, unless six years have elapsed since the encroachment ended, was considered within the framework Article 243F supplies, and the case is routinely cited for the breadth of the State’s power to attach eligibility conditions to panchayat office. The family resemblance among these provisions is instructive. Each condition connects eligibility to the candidate’s prior conduct toward public institutions, unpaid dues, encroached land, a criminal record, an unfit household balance sheet, and each rests on the same legislative theory the Supreme Court accepted in Javed and Rajbala, that the statute which creates the right to contest may grade the conditions of its exercise. What separates the litigated conditions from the unlitigated ones is not their legal structure but their incidence: a condition bites politically when it excludes a class large enough, and organised enough, to carry the question to court, which is why the education and family size conditions, and not the encroachment condition, produced the defining judgments.

One boundary of the power should be stated, because the open texture of Article 243F sometimes invites the assumption that it has none. The State’s disqualifications operate within the Constitution, not above it: a State law prescribing them remains open to challenge under the equality code and the other fundamental rights, as both Haryana cases themselves demonstrate, since each was argued as an equality challenge and decided on the merits of the classification. The State must also respect the one disqualification rule the Part itself lays down, the proviso protecting a candidate of twenty-one from a disqualification that rests only on being under twenty-five, and it must legislate within the field the Part leaves it, which does not include abolishing the direct election of seats, altering the reservation proportions, or extending the term, all of which the compulsory articles reserve. Within those limits the space is wide, deliberately wide, and the case law has treated it as such. The disqualification articles are therefore the second clearest instance, after the Gram Sabha clause, of the amendment’s method: fix the institution’s existence beyond dispute, and leave the terms on which individuals may serve in it to the ordinary politics of the State, supervised by the ordinary jurisdiction of the courts.

Elections and money: the two commissions and the audit clause

Part IX does not leave the conduct of the elections it mandates to the ordinary machinery of State government. Article 243K vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls for, and the conduct of, all elections to the panchayats in a State Election Commission, consisting of a State Election Commissioner appointed by the Governor. The drafting follows the pattern of the Election Commission of India, adapted to a single-member State body, and two protections give the office its independence in form. The State Election Commissioner is not to be removed from office except in like manner and on the like grounds as a judge of a High Court, and the conditions of service are not to be varied to disadvantage after appointment. The Governor is further bound, when the Commission so requests, to make available such staff as may be necessary for the discharge of its functions. Subject to the provisions of the Constitution, the State Legislature may by law make provision with respect to all matters relating to elections to the panchayats, which is the power under which the State Acts regulate nominations, symbols, corrupt practices, and the trial of election disputes. The institutional point of the article is the separation it enforces: the government of the day does not conduct the elections to the bodies that check it at the village level, and the five-year clock in Article 243E has an independent officer charged with keeping it. The recurring friction between State Election Commissions and State governments over the timing of local elections, a friction the courts have repeatedly been asked to mediate, is therefore not an accident of personalities but a structural feature of a design that gives the duty to one institution and the inconvenience of the duty to another.

The financial counterpart is Article 243I, and it too is a commission with a constitutional timetable. The Governor of a State is required, as soon as may be within one year from the commencement of the amendment Act, and thereafter at the expiration of every fifth year, to constitute a Finance Commission to review the financial position of the panchayats and to make recommendations to the Governor. The matters on which it recommends are the grammar of fiscal federalism applied one level down: the principles which should govern the distribution between the State and the panchayats of the net proceeds of the taxes, duties, tolls and fees leviable by the State, the allocation of shares between the panchayats at all levels, the determination of the taxes, duties, tolls and fees which may be assigned to or appropriated by the panchayats, the grants in aid to the panchayats from the Consolidated Fund of the State, the measures needed to improve the financial position of the panchayats, and any other matter the Governor refers to it. The composition of the Commission, the qualifications of its members and the manner of their selection are left to State law. The Governor is required to cause every recommendation, together with an explanatory memorandum of the action taken on it, to be laid before the Legislature of the State, which is the provision that makes the Commission’s report a public legislative event rather than a departmental file. The parallel with the Union Finance Commission under Article 280 is exact and intended, and the same institutional judgment underlies both: that the periodic, public, expert review of how money is shared between levels of government should be taken out of annual budgetary bargaining and placed on a quinquennial cycle that no single government controls.

Two shorter provisions complete the machinery. Article 243J provides that the Legislature of a State may by law make provisions with respect to the maintenance of accounts by the panchayats and the auditing of those accounts. The permissive form recurs, and it matters: there is no constitutional auditor of panchayats comparable to the Comptroller and Auditor General’s position in relation to the Union and the States, and the audit of the third tier’s accounts, the point at which the money the Finance Commission discusses meets the works the panchayats execute, rests on State legislation. Also, Article 243O closes the electoral process against judicial interruption, in terms modelled on the bar that protects parliamentary and assembly elections. Notwithstanding anything in the Constitution, the validity of any law relating to the delimitation of constituencies or the allotment of seats to such constituencies, made or purporting to be made under Article 243K, is not to be called in question in any court, and no election to any panchayat is to be called in question except by an election petition presented to such authority and in such manner as is provided for by or under any law made by the Legislature of the State. The design is the familiar one: delimitation is placed beyond challenge so that the electoral map cannot be litigated into suspension, and election disputes are channelled into a single post-election remedy before the authority the State law names, so that the five-year cycle is not consumed by interlocutory litigation. The general position described in this article is information about how that machinery is designed and is no substitute for advice on an individual dispute, where the governing State Act, its named authority and its limitation periods are decisive and unforgiving of delay.

The State Finance Commission does not stand alone in the constitutional design, and the connection the amendment built between it and its Union counterpart is one of the text’s most consequential pieces of joinery. The same amendment that inserted Article 243I also amended Article 280, the provision for the Union Finance Commission, to require that Commission to recommend the measures needed to augment the Consolidated Fund of a State to supplement the resources of the panchayats in the State, on the basis of the recommendations made by the Finance Commission of the State. The chain of reasoning is written into the two articles read together. Panchayats cannot be financed responsibly without a State-level assessment of their needs and of the State’s capacity, since the subjects, the taxes and the establishments are all State matters; the Union Commission, which distributes resources between the Union and the States, cannot assess twenty-eight different local systems for itself; so the Constitution makes the State Commission’s report the evidentiary base on which the Union Commission builds its recommendations for local body grants. The design has a practical corollary that every student of the subject learns to check: the chain is only as strong as its first link. A State that constitutes its Finance Commission late, receives its report late, or lays it before the Legislature without a serious action taken memorandum deprives the Union Commission of the very material the constitutional scheme directs it to use, and the grants that flow to panchayats through Union Finance Commission awards, which have grown into one of the largest single streams of panchayat finance, then rest on estimates assembled without the State’s own constitutional reviewer. The five-yearly rhythm of Article 243I is therefore not a bureaucratic nicety. It is synchronised, by design, with the rhythm of Article 280, so that each Union Commission inherits a fresh State report; and the persistent complaint of the Union Commissions themselves, recorded in their reports, that State Commissions are constituted late and report later, identifies a point at which the permissive habits of State governments reach into a compulsory mechanism and weaken it from inside.

A parallel point holds for the election side of the machinery. The State Election Commission’s constitutional position is modelled on the Election Commission of India, but the model is incomplete in one respect that litigation has exposed repeatedly. The Union Commission’s expenditure is charged on the Consolidated Fund of India and its secretariat’s independence is entrenched by practice as well as text; the State Commission depends on the State government for its budget, its staff under the request mechanism of Article 243K, and the subordinate election machinery of district officials who answer in their daily work to the government whose local elections they are conducting. The constitutional text gives the State Commissioner security of tenure and the right to requisition staff. It does not give the Commission an independent cadre, and the recurring disputes about the timing of panchayat elections, in which courts have had to remind State governments that the Commission’s calendar is not theirs to revise, arise from that gap between the office’s constitutional dignity and its administrative dependence. Neither weakness is hidden in the text; both are visible on a careful reading of Articles 243I and 243K, and both belong in a pillar account of the amendment because they mark the points at which its compulsory machinery relies on the cooperation of the very governments it was designed to constrain.

What a State must do and what it may not do

The whole argument of this article can be reduced to a single reference object. The table below separates the elements of Part IX that a State cannot avoid from the elements the Constitution leaves entirely to the State, and names the provision responsible for each line. It is the fastest reliable way to assess any State panchayat statute: read the Act against the compulsory column first, where a gap is a constitutional defect, and then against the permissive column, where a gap is merely a choice the State was entitled to make.

Element	Constitutional position	Provision
Panchayats at the village and district levels	Compulsory in every State	Article 243B(1)
Panchayat at the intermediate level	Compulsory unless the State population does not exceed twenty lakh	Article 243B(2)
All seats filled by direct election from territorial constituencies	Compulsory	Article 243C(2)
Elections completed before the term expires, and within six months of a dissolution	Compulsory	Article 243E(3)
Seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to population	Compulsory	Article 243D(1) and (2)
Not less than one third of seats and of chairperson offices reserved for women	Compulsory	Article 243D(3) and (4)
A State Election Commission to conduct panchayat elections	Compulsory	Article 243K
A State Finance Commission within one year, and thereafter every five years	Compulsory	Article 243I(1)
The powers and functions of the Gram Sabha	Left entirely to the State	Article 243A
Devolution of the Eleventh Schedule subjects to the panchayats	Left to the State	Article 243G
Authorising panchayats to levy taxes, and assigning State taxes to them	Left to the State	Article 243H
The manner of electing the village chairperson	Left to the State	Article 243C(5)
Additional disqualifications for candidates and members	Left to the State	Article 243F(1)
Reservation of seats and chairperson offices for backward classes	Left to the State	Article 243D(6)

Read as a whole, the table is the amendment’s own confession of priorities. Every compulsory line concerns the existence, composition and renewal of the institutions. Every permissive line concerns their power. A State that wished to comply with Part IX while keeping its panchayats weak needed to do nothing unconstitutional at all; it needed only to legislate generously down the first column and sparingly down the second, and the distance between the panchayat systems of the most and least devolving States, which the implementation record documents, was created inside that permission and not in defiance of the Constitution.

The tiers in relation: what connects the three levels

A question the text answers less completely than any other is how the three tiers are meant to relate to one another, and the incompleteness is itself a design fact worth recording. Part IX constitutes the tiers side by side. It does not create a hierarchy among them in the manner of a civil service, gives no tier a power to direct, supersede or approve the acts of another, and prescribes no planning machinery through which their work is to be integrated. The gram panchayat is not the subordinate of the panchayat samiti, nor the samiti of the zila parishad; each is a body constituted under the same Part, elected by its own electorate, holding office for its own five-year term, and endowed, if at all, by the same State Act. The connective tissue that does exist is of three kinds. The first is representational: Article 243C permits the State to seat the chairpersons of the lower tier inside the tier above, so that the village’s leadership is physically present in the block body and the block’s in the district body, carrying information and grievances upward in person. The second is electoral and territorial: the constituencies of the higher tiers are composed of the areas of the lower ones, so the same voter elects all three bodies and the tiers map onto nested territories. The third is functional, and it exists only where the State Act creates it: the distribution of the Eleventh Schedule subjects among the tiers, the assignment of schemes to one tier for execution and another for supervision, and the routing of funds through the tiers, are all arrangements of State law and State executive orders, varying from a genuinely tiered division of labour to a pattern in which one tier holds nearly everything and the others are ornamental.

The district illustrates the consequence. The committee tradition, from Ashok Mehta through G. V. K. Rao, treated the district as the keystone, the level at which planning becomes possible and administration is headquartered. The constitutional text does not enact that preference: the zila parishad under Part IX is simply the panchayat at the district level, with no planning function assigned to it by the Constitution and no authority over the district administration, whose head remains the State-appointed collector or deputy commissioner, an officer outside the Part altogether. The one planning institution the 1992 settlement did create, the District Planning Committee charged with consolidating the plans of panchayats and municipalities into a draft district development plan, was placed not in Part IX but in Part IXA, in Article 243ZD, by the companion amendment for municipalities, because district planning spans the rural and urban divide. Its composition, four fifths of its members elected by and from the elected members of the district panchayats and municipalities in proportion to the rural and urban populations, makes it the single place in the constitutional scheme where the two local government Parts are bolted together. A reader tracing the design of the 73rd Amendment alone will miss it, and a reader of the two amendments together will see the whole intention: Part IX builds the rural institutions, Part IXA the urban ones and the bridge between them, and the machinery of integration sits on the bridge rather than in either tower. What the bridge carries in practice is, once again, a matter of State law and State habit, and so belongs to the record rather than to this text.

A related silence concerns staff, and it connects the tiers question to the oldest inheritance in the subject. Part IX creates elected bodies and says nothing about the officials who will serve them: no panchayat service is constituted, no cadre is prescribed, and the appointment, discipline and transfer of the secretaries, engineers, accountants and extension workers through whom a panchayat actually acts are left to the State Act and to the State’s service rules. The arrangement most States inherited was the one built for the Community Development era, in which the block-level body works through a Block Development Officer who is a member of the State’s civil service, answerable upward through the district administration, and the gram panchayat works through a secretary who is commonly a State or panchayat-service employee serving several villages. The elected tier and its administration therefore have different masters from the first day: the sarpanch holds a constitutional office with a five-year term, and the secretary who keeps the records, operates the accounts and drafts the proceedings holds a bureaucratic office under a government the sarpanch does not control. Whether the functionaries follow the functions when subjects are devolved, the third of the three transfers the implementation debate counts alongside funds and functions, is decided inside that arrangement, State by State and department by department. The constitutional text neither secures it nor obstructs it, and the omission is of a piece with the amendment’s method throughout: it built the elected house and left the house’s servants to be supplied, or withheld, by the same State legislation that supplies or withholds everything else the house needs.

Article 243G and the Eleventh Schedule: the permissive heart of the 73rd Amendment

Article 243G is the provision on which the amendment’s reputation stands, and it is the provision whose verb does the most work in the whole Part. The Legislature of a State may, by law, endow the panchayats with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as institutions of self-government, and such law may contain provisions for the devolution of powers and responsibilities upon panchayats at the appropriate level, subject to such conditions as may be specified in the law, with respect to two things: the preparation of plans for economic development and social justice, and the implementation of schemes for economic development and social justice as may be entrusted to them, including those in relation to the matters listed in the Eleventh Schedule. Every element of the sentence is chosen. The endowment is by State law. The standard, functioning as institutions of self-government, is stated as the purpose of the endowment and not as a result the Constitution itself produces. The devolution is of powers and responsibilities at the appropriate level, leaving the distribution among the three tiers to the State. And the matters in the Eleventh Schedule enter the article through the phrase “including those in relation to”, which makes the Schedule illustrative of the field of entrustment rather than a list of subjects transferred. The Schedule does not devolve a single subject by its own force. It names the territory across which a State law may devolve, and a State law that devolves none of it violates nothing in Article 243G.

A distinction follows that examination answers and public commentary alike routinely miss, and it is the distinction on which the Schedule’s legal character turns. The Eleventh Schedule is not a fourth legislative list. The three lists of the Seventh Schedule distribute legislative competence between Parliament and the State Legislatures under Article 246, and an entry in a list is a field of legislation. The Eleventh Schedule distributes nothing. Legislative competence over its subjects, land, water, agriculture, education, health, continues to flow from the State List exactly as it did before 1992, and a State law on minor irrigation or primary education derives its validity from the corresponding entry of List II and not from the Schedule. What the Schedule does is different in kind: it identifies the matters in relation to which the State, exercising its own legislative and executive authority, may entrust functions to the panchayats and may direct them to prepare plans. A panchayat that maintains a village water supply is not exercising a legislative entry; it is performing a function the State has devolved, under a State statute, within a field the Constitution marks out as suitable for devolution. Confusing the two produces the standard error that the amendment “transferred twenty-nine subjects to the panchayats”, a transfer that never occurred and that the text, read with Article 246 beside it, nowhere attempts. The confusion matters beyond examinations, because reform proposals framed as enforcing the transfer argue from a premise the Constitution does not contain, while the real question, why the devolution the Schedule contemplates remains incomplete in most States, is a question about State legislation and State administration that the Schedule’s existence does not answer.

What is the difference between endowment under Article 243G and assignment under Article 243H?

Endowment is about functions; assignment is about money. Under Article 243G a State may give panchayats responsibility for plans and schemes, including the Eleventh Schedule subjects. Under Article 243H it may assign to them taxes it has itself levied, authorise them to levy their own, and give grants from the State’s Consolidated Fund.

The twenty-nine matters in the Eleventh Schedule are best understood in the functional groups into which they naturally fall, since the Schedule itself is a list and a list is not an analysis. The first group is the productive base of the village economy: agriculture, including agricultural extension; land improvement, implementation of land reforms, land consolidation and soil conservation; minor irrigation, water management and watershed development; animal husbandry, dairying and poultry; fisheries; social forestry and farm forestry; and minor forest produce. The second group is enterprise and work: small scale industries, including food processing industries; khadi, village and cottage industries; and the poverty alleviation programme. The third group is the physical fabric: rural housing; drinking water; fuel and fodder; roads, culverts, bridges, ferries, waterways and other means of communication; rural electrification, including distribution of electricity; and non-conventional energy sources. The fourth group is education and culture: education, including primary and secondary schools; technical training and vocational education; adult and non-formal education; libraries; and cultural activities. The fifth group is health and welfare: health and sanitation, including hospitals, primary health centres and dispensaries; family welfare; women and child development; social welfare, including welfare of the handicapped and mentally retarded; and welfare of the weaker sections, and in particular of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. The last group is the commons: markets and fairs; the public distribution system; and maintenance of community assets. Read in this order the Schedule describes almost the whole of what a rural household needs from the state, which is precisely why its permissive character is the amendment’s central controversy. The subjects it lists are not peripheral municipal chores; they are the substance of rural governance, and the Constitution assembled them into a Schedule and then declined to assign them.

Article 243H, the taxing provision, completes the picture and repeats the structure. The Legislature of a State may by law authorise a panchayat to levy, collect and appropriate such taxes, duties, tolls and fees in accordance with such procedure and subject to such limits as may be specified in the law; may assign to a panchayat such taxes, duties, tolls and fees levied and collected by the State government for such purposes and subject to such conditions and limits as may be specified; may provide for making grants in aid to the panchayats from the Consolidated Fund of the State; and may provide for the constitution of such funds for crediting all moneys received by or on behalf of the panchayats and for the withdrawal of moneys from them. A panchayat therefore has no taxing power of its own under the Constitution, no share of State revenue by right, and no fund except as State law provides. Its fiscal existence, like the Gram Sabha’s powers and the Schedule’s devolution, is statutory from beginning to end. This is why the serious debate about the amendment has never really been about its text: the text is clear, and its clarity is the criticism. The question the text leaves behind, what a State in fact devolved of functions, funds and functionaries, and with what results, is the subject of the article on panchayat devolution and its implementation record, which owns that record in this series.

One proposal returns to this article in every discussion of reform, and it belongs here because it is a proposal about the text: to make the Eleventh Schedule binding, by converting the “may” of Article 243G into a command, or by transferring the listed subjects in the manner of a legislative list, so that devolution ceases to depend on State discretion. The proposal’s logic is the logic of the amendment itself, extended one step further than 1992 was willing to go: the framers of Part IX constitutionalised existence because experience had shown that what is left to discretion is withheld, and the proponent of a binding Schedule simply applies the same lesson to functions. The objection is equally structural. A uniform constitutional devolution would impose one distribution of functions on States whose administrative geographies differ enormously, would federalise by amendment a subject the Constitution leaves to the States, and would require the very ratification politics that shaped the permissive text in the first place. The proposal is therefore not a drafting improvement available to any legislature; it is a further constitutional amendment, and the debate about it is a debate about whether the bargain of 1992 should be reopened. This article’s verdict on the text as it stands is narrower and is stated in the closing section.

Where Part IX does not run: the exclusions of Article 243M

The Part’s territorial reach is not universal, and the exclusions are deliberate constitutional settlements rather than oversights. Article 243M provides that nothing in the Part applies to the States of Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram. It further provides that the Part does not apply to the hill areas in the State of Manipur for which District Councils exist, nor, in the manner specified, to the Darjeeling district of West Bengal in relation to the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, whose functions and powers the Part is not to be construed as affecting. Each excluded area had its own institutional settlement, tribal councils and hill councils resting on other provisions of the Constitution and on political agreements of their own, and the framers of the amendment chose not to override those settlements with a uniform panchayat code.

Why were Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram left outside Part IX?

Because those States govern their hill and tribal areas through their own arrangements, which the Constitution already protects elsewhere. Article 243M kept Part IX out of Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram, while allowing each State Legislature to extend it by a special resolution, and Parliament later applied the Part to the Scheduled Areas on modified terms through a separate law.

The exclusion is not a wall. The Legislature of an excluded State may extend the Part to that State, other than to the areas separately protected, if its Legislative Assembly passes a resolution to that effect by a majority of the total membership of the House and by a majority of not less than two thirds of the members present and voting, a deliberate echo of the special majority required for constitutional amendment, placed around a decision to opt into a constitutional regime. More consequentially, Parliament may by law extend the provisions of the Part to the Scheduled Areas and the tribal areas referred to in the Fifth and Sixth Schedule framework, subject to such exceptions and modifications as may be specified in the law, and no such law is to be deemed an amendment of the Constitution for the purposes of Article 368. Parliament used that power in 1996 to carry Part IX into the Fifth Schedule areas with modifications that strengthened the Gram Sabha in precisely the respects in which the base text is silent, a statute whose design and working are analysed in the article on the PESA Act 1996 and panchayats in the Scheduled Areas. The contrast is one of the most instructive in the whole subject: where Parliament legislated for the Scheduled Areas, it wrote the Gram Sabha’s authority over plans, resources and beneficiary selection into the statute, demonstrating that the silence of Article 243A was a choice and not an oversight, since the same generation of lawmakers, legislating for a different territory, chose the opposite.

A worked illustration: one panchayat under the rules

The provisions are easiest to hold together when they are run once, end to end, over a single illustrative case. Take a gram panchayat, invented for the purpose and therefore carrying no statistics about any real place, with a population of ten thousand recorded at the last census and twenty seats to be filled by direct election under the State Act. The population ratio rule of Article 243C means each constituency of the panchayat should hold, as nearly as practicable, five hundred people per seat, and the same ratio, so far as practicable, should hold for village panchayats across the State, so that a seat represents roughly the same number of people wherever in the State it is. Suppose the census records twelve hundred of the ten thousand as members of the Scheduled Castes and eight hundred as members of the Scheduled Tribes. Article 243D then reserves seats in proportion, as nearly as may be: two or three of the twenty seats for the Scheduled Castes, their share being twelve per cent, and one or two for the Scheduled Tribes at eight per cent, the precise rounding being a matter for the State’s reservation rules. Not less than one third of those reserved seats are reserved for women of the same groups, and not less than one third of all twenty seats, seven seats when rounded to a whole number above the floor, are reserved for women overall, counting the women of the reserved groups within that total. The chairperson’s office, the sarpanch, is subject to reservation across the State on the same proportions and to rotation under the State Act, so in a given cycle the office in this panchayat may stand reserved for a woman, or for a member of the Scheduled Castes, or open, according to the roster.

Run the clock and the machinery over the same panchayat. Its term is five years from the date fixed for its first meeting. Its election, and the next, are conducted by the State Election Commission on the electoral rolls the Commission controls, and the delimitation of its twenty constituencies cannot be challenged in court, though a defeated candidate may file an election petition before the authority the State Act names. Its sarpanch is either elected by the ten thousand directly or chosen by the twenty members, as the State Act provides, and a candidate of twenty-one may stand, though she could not stand for the Assembly. If the panchayat is dissolved in its third year for default under the State Act, an election must follow within six months, and the successor body sits for the remaining two years only. During its life the panchayat may prepare plans for economic development and social justice and implement the schemes entrusted to it, including schemes touching any of the twenty-nine Eleventh Schedule subjects, but only to the extent the State Act and the government’s entrustment orders actually devolve them; it may levy only the taxes the State Act authorises; its accounts are kept and audited as the State Act provides; and at the village meeting, the Gram Sabha of its electors meets with whatever powers the State Act has given it, which in the illustration cannot be stated, because the whole point of the illustration is that the Constitution does not say. Every figure in the preceding sentences that carries constitutional force, the proportions, the one third, the five years, the six months, the twenty-one years, comes from Part IX. Everything that would decide how powerful the panchayat feels to the ten thousand people in it comes from somewhere else, and the illustration, run honestly, shows the reader exactly where the boundary runs, which is the single most useful thing a pillar article on this amendment can do.

Two further territorial points complete the map. The Union territories take the Part through Article 243L, which applies its provisions to them with the President empowered to direct exceptions and modifications, and with the references to a State Legislature read, in a territory that has one, as references to that legislature; the small territories are among the natural users of the twenty lakh exemption from the intermediate tier. The erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir stood for most of the period since 1993 in a position of its own: its panchayats were governed by its own Panchayati Raj Act of 1989 rather than by a conformity Act framed under Part IX, a consequence of the State’s then special constitutional position, and the arrangements there were recast when the State was reorganised into Union territories in 2019. The exclusions and special positions share a common logic with the rest of the Part. The 1992 settlement was negotiated State by State and settlement by settlement, and its framers preferred a Part that ran almost everywhere, with its edges tailored to prior constitutional commitments, to a uniform code that might have failed ratification in the attempt. Uniformity was the price of enactment, and the exclusions are where the price is itemised.

Assessment: a constitutional floor, honestly drawn

The fairest judgment on the 73rd Amendment begins by refusing the two standard misjudgments. The first misjudgment is celebration by description: the amendment is praised as having established three-tier self-government across India, when what it established was three tiers of elected bodies whose governing powers await State legislation, a different and lesser thing. The second misjudgment is dismissal by the same route: the amendment is condemned as a shell because its devolution article is permissive, when the shell it built, guaranteed existence, guaranteed elections, guaranteed reservation, a protected term, an election commission and a finance commission in every State, ended abuses that four decades of State legislation had entrenched, and ended them permanently. Both misjudgments treat the amendment as one thing. It is two things, a compulsory constitution of institutions and a permissive charter of powers, and it should be marked separately on each.

On the compulsory side, the amendment has no serious failure to answer for. The pathology it targeted was discontinuity: panchayats dissolved and not replaced, elections postponed without limit, institutions superseded into irrelevance. That pathology is gone, and it is gone for the structural reason the Singhvi Committee identified, that what the Constitution commands, no State government can quietly discontinue. Elections to some thirty lakh local offices recur on a constitutional cycle, the composition of those offices is constitutionally patterned so that women and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes hold a guaranteed and very large share of them, and two commissions in every State exist to keep the electoral and fiscal machinery under periodic independent review. A reader who doubts the value of that achievement should compare it with the condition the committees documented, in which the institutions existed at pleasure and were treated accordingly.

On the permissive side, the honest description is that the amendment trusted the States with everything that makes the institutions worth having, and the States’ use of that trust varies so widely that no national verdict on devolution is available at the level of the constitutional text. The text itself supplies the standard by which the trust is to be judged: panchayats are to be endowed with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as institutions of self-government. That phrase, placed inside a permissive article, functions as the amendment’s own measure of its unfinished business. A State whose panchayats prepare no plans, implement only the schemes handed to them as agents, command none of the staff who work in their areas and raise negligible revenue of their own has complied with every command in Part IX while falling visibly short of the standard Part IX names. The constitutional achievement and the constitutional shortfall are the same document read at two depths, and serious writing on panchayati raj has to hold both.

The design also had a twin. The urban half of the 1992 settlement, inserted by the Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992 as Part IXA with its own Twelfth Schedule of eighteen municipal functions, reproduces the same architecture for municipalities, compulsory constitution and elections, permissive devolution, and it is treated in the article on the 74th Amendment and urban local bodies. Reading the two Parts together is the quickest way to see that the pattern this article has described was not an accident of the panchayat bill but the considered template of the period for constitutionalising local government without federalising it.

The reform proposals that recur in official discussion can be sorted, using this article’s grammar, into those that would work within the permissive field and those that require the compulsory field to be enlarged. Within the field, everything remains open to any State at any time by ordinary legislation: fuller devolution by activity mapping that assigns each activity within a subject to a named tier, own-revenue measures that give panchayats taxes worth collecting, staff arrangements that place functionaries under the panchayat’s disciplinary control for the functions devolved, Gram Sabha powers of the kind the Scheduled Areas statute models, training and support systems for first-time office holders, and the synchronisation of the State Finance Commission’s cycle with the Union Commission’s that Article 280’s design presupposes. Official reviews, among them the Second Administrative Reforms Commission’s report on local governance, have recommended measures across this whole range, and none of it needs a constitutional amendment, which is precisely why its absence in a given State is a political fact about that State and not a defect of Part IX. Beyond the field, the proposals that would change the settlement itself are equally identifiable: writing the Gram Sabha’s core functions into the Constitution, making a minimum devolution compulsory, giving the State Election Commission an independent cadre and charged expenditure, and prescribing a uniform method for electing the village chairperson. Each of those is a further amendment, requiring the special majority and, on the pattern of 1992, the consent of the States whose discretion it would curtail. The debate between the two lists is the live debate about panchayati raj, and it is clarifying to notice that the first list has been available, unexhausted, for the whole life of the amendment: the settlement’s defenders and its critics agree on little, but both proceed as if the binding constraint were the constitutional text, when for most of the outcomes either side wants, the constraint is a State legislature that has not used the powers the text already gives it.

One skill this article is meant to leave behind is a way of reading any State panchayat Act, since the State Act is where the operative law of any actual panchayat lives. Read such an Act in four passes against the constitutional text. The first pass checks conformity: does the Act constitute the tiers Article 243B requires for a State of that population, fill every seat by direct election, observe the reservation proportions and the one-third floors of Article 243D, provide elections on the Article 243E clock with the remainder rule intact, and maintain the two commissions on their constitutional cycles? A failure on this pass is a constitutional defect, and it is the pass the courts can enforce. The second pass reads the devolution chapters: which of the twenty-nine Schedule subjects the Act assigns to which tier, in what words, with what conditions, and whether the assignment transfers the staff and the budget line along with the function or the function alone. The third pass reads the money: which taxes the Act authorises each tier to levy, which State taxes it assigns, what funds it constitutes, and how it provides for audit, since the distance between a panchayat that can raise and keep revenue and one that merely spends grants is the distance between a government and an agency. The fourth pass reads the Gram Sabha chapter and the disqualification chapter together, the two places where the State’s own democratic choices are most legible: what the assembly of electors may do, and who is permitted to ask for their votes. An Act generous on the first pass and empty on the other three is a compliant shell; an Act strong on all four is the institution the amendment’s speeches described. Most State Acts fall between, in patterns that differ enough from State to State to repay the comparison, and the comparison itself, conducted on these four passes, is the substance of the implementation record this series treats elsewhere.

For the readers this series serves, the usable residue of the article can be stated plainly. The elected representative and the citizen should take away the location of power: the questions a village actually argues about, the plan, the works, the beneficiaries, the Sabha’s authority, are governed by the State panchayat Act, and the amendment tells them where in that Act to look and which parts of it the State had no choice about. The researcher should take away the constitutional minimum as a fixed point: constitution, composition, reservation, term, commissions, and against that minimum the permissive field in which all the interesting variation lives. The aspirant should take away the distinctions the examiners test: command against permission, the twenty lakh threshold, the remainder rule on dissolution, the twenty-one year proviso on disqualification, the one provision about the Gram Sabha and the fact that it confers nothing. Teachers and students who organise this material for revision will find the provisions hold together best when grouped by that same division, and those who keep their polity notes as slide decks can check the files before a class through an online PowerPoint viewer rather than relying on a single machine’s software. The amendment, on the view this article has defended, is neither the revolution of the speeches nor the nullity of the cynics. It is a floor, honestly drawn and permanently laid, with the building above it left, for better and worse, to the States.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What did the 73rd Amendment establish?

The Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992 inserted Part IX, titled “The Panchayats”, into the Constitution, running from Article 243 to Article 243O, and added the Eleventh Schedule of twenty-nine subjects. It established panchayats as constitutional institutions rather than creatures of State legislation alone: every State must constitute panchayats at the village, intermediate and district levels, fill all seats by direct election, reserve seats and chairperson offices for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women in a fixed pattern, renew the bodies every five years under an independent State Election Commission, and appoint a State Finance Commission every five years to review their finances. It also recognised the Gram Sabha in the constitutional text, while leaving its powers to State law.

Q: What is the three tier structure of panchayats?

Article 243B requires panchayats to be constituted at three levels in every State: the village level, the intermediate level between village and district, usually the block, and the district level. The bodies are commonly called the gram panchayat, the panchayat samiti and the zila parishad, but the Constitution prescribes levels rather than names, and a panchayat is defined as an institution of self-government by whatever name called. The three-tier command carries one exception. A State whose population does not exceed twenty lakh may choose not to constitute the intermediate level at all, and such States lawfully run a two-tier system of village and district panchayats under the same Part IX.

Q: What powers does a Gram Sabha have?

Under the Constitution itself, none are specified. Article 243 defines the Gram Sabha as the body of persons registered in the electoral rolls of a village within a village-level panchayat’s area, and Article 243A provides only that a Gram Sabha may exercise such powers and perform such functions at the village level as the Legislature of a State may by law provide. Every power a Gram Sabha actually exercises, approving village plans and budgets, selecting beneficiaries under welfare schemes, reviewing works, conducting social audits, comes from the panchayat Act of that State or from another statute, and the powers differ from State to State. The same assembly may be a decision-making body in one State and a merely consultative meeting in another, without either position breaching the Constitution.

Q: What reservation applies in panchayat seats?

Article 243D reserves seats in every panchayat for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in proportion, as nearly as may be, to their share of the panchayat area’s population, allotted by rotation among constituencies. Not less than one third of those reserved seats are reserved for women of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and not less than one third of all seats filled by direct election, including the reserved women’s seats, are reserved for women, again with rotation. Chairperson offices are reserved on the same pattern, with not less than one third for women. Reservation for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is tied to the period in Article 334; the women’s reservation has no sunset. States may additionally reserve seats and offices for backward classes, and many have raised the women’s share to one half.

Q: How long is a panchayat term and what if it is dissolved early?

A panchayat continues for five years from the date appointed for its first meeting and no longer, under Article 243E. Elections to constitute a panchayat must be completed before that term expires. If a panchayat is dissolved earlier under the State law, the election to replace it must be completed before six months run from the date of dissolution, unless the remainder of the original term is less than six months, in which case no election for the short residue is required. The body elected after a premature dissolution does not begin a fresh five years; it continues only for the remainder of the period the dissolved panchayat would itself have served, which keeps every panchayat on the same electoral rhythm.

Q: Which committees led to the 73rd Amendment?

Four committees mark the road. The Balwant Rai Mehta Committee, appointed in 1957 to review the Community Development Programme, recommended democratic decentralisation through a three-tier structure of village, block and district bodies, and its scheme was first implemented in Rajasthan in 1959. The Ashok Mehta Committee of 1978 recommended instead a two-tier system with the district as the first point of decentralisation. The G. V. K. Rao Committee of 1985, examining administrative arrangements for rural development, urged that the zila parishad be made the principal body and the district the basic unit of planning. The L. M. Singhvi Committee of 1986 then recommended that panchayati raj institutions be constitutionally recognised and protected, the direct antecedent of the amendment enacted six years later.

Q: Can a state disqualify candidates on education or family size?

Yes. Article 243F expressly empowers a State Legislature to prescribe disqualifications for membership of a panchayat by its own law, in addition to the disqualifications that apply to State Legislature elections. The Supreme Court upheld a Haryana law disqualifying persons with more than two living children in Javed v. State of Haryana in 2003, holding that the classification served the object of popularising the small family norm and was not arbitrary. In Rajbala v. State of Haryana in 2015 it upheld further Haryana disqualifications based on minimum educational qualifications, unpaid cooperative and electricity dues, and the absence of a functional toilet at the candidate’s residence, holding that prescribing such conditions is the legislature’s province. Both decisions have attracted sustained criticism for excluding the very groups reservation was designed to include.

Q: What subjects are listed in the Eleventh Schedule?

The Eleventh Schedule, read with Article 243G, lists twenty-nine matters in relation to which State law may entrust panchayats with plans and schemes for economic development and social justice. They cover agriculture and agricultural extension, land improvement and land reforms, minor irrigation and watershed development, animal husbandry, dairying, poultry and fisheries, social and farm forestry and minor forest produce, small scale and khadi and village industries, rural housing, drinking water, fuel and fodder, roads and bridges, rural electrification, non-conventional energy, poverty alleviation, education including primary and secondary schools, technical training, adult education, libraries, cultural activities, markets and fairs, health and sanitation, family welfare, women and child development, social welfare and welfare of the weaker sections, the public distribution system, and maintenance of community assets.

Q: When did the 73rd Amendment come into force?

The Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992 came into force on 24 April 1993. Parliament passed the bill in December 1992, after a joint committee had examined the version introduced in September 1991; because the amendment required ratification, the legislatures of not less than half the States ratified it, and the President gave assent on 20 April 1993, four days before commencement. The date of commencement, rather than the year in the Act’s short title, is the one that governs the Part’s operation: the first State Finance Commissions were due within one year of it under Article 243I, and Article 243N gave the States one year from it to bring their existing panchayat laws into conformity with Part IX.

Q: What is the role of the State Election Commission in panchayat elections?

Article 243K vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls for, and the conduct of, all elections to the panchayats in a State Election Commission for the State, consisting of a State Election Commissioner appointed by the Governor. The Commission, and not the State government of the day, therefore runs panchayat elections, a separation designed to keep the five-year electoral cycle in Article 243E out of executive hands. The Commissioner’s tenure is protected: removal is possible only in the manner and on the grounds applicable to a judge of a High Court, and service conditions cannot be varied to the Commissioner’s disadvantage after appointment. The Governor must also provide the Commission with staff when it requests them for the discharge of its functions.

Q: How often must a State Finance Commission be constituted?

Article 243I requires the Governor of a State to constitute a Finance Commission for the panchayats as soon as may be within one year from the commencement of the 73rd Amendment Act, and thereafter at the expiration of every fifth year. The cycle is therefore quinquennial and continuing: each Commission reviews the financial position of the panchayats and recommends the principles for sharing the State’s taxes with them, the taxes that may be assigned to or appropriated by them, and the grants in aid payable from the State’s Consolidated Fund. The Governor must lay the Commission’s recommendations, with a memorandum of the action taken on them, before the State Legislature, which makes the five-yearly report a public event in the State’s fiscal calendar.

Q: Can a panchayat levy taxes of its own?

Not by force of the Constitution alone. Article 243H leaves the entire fiscal endowment of panchayats to State law: a State Legislature may authorise a panchayat to levy, collect and appropriate taxes, duties, tolls and fees, subject to the procedure and limits the law specifies; it may assign to panchayats taxes the State government itself levies and collects; it may provide grants in aid from the Consolidated Fund of the State; and it may provide for panchayat funds into which receipts are credited. A panchayat in a State whose Act authorises no tax of its own therefore has no taxing power at all, and the wide variation in panchayats’ own revenue across States is a product of these State choices rather than of any constitutional entitlement.

Q: Can courts interfere in panchayat elections?

Article 243O bars judicial interference in two respects. The validity of any law relating to the delimitation of constituencies or the allotment of seats, made or purporting to be made under Article 243K, cannot be called in question in any court. And no election to any panchayat can be called in question except by an election petition presented to such authority, and in such manner, as the law made by the State Legislature provides. The pattern follows the protection given to parliamentary and assembly elections: the electoral process is not to be interrupted by litigation while it runs, delimitation stands outside challenge, and a person aggrieved by a result must use the single post-election remedy the State Act creates, before the authority that Act names.

Q: Who elects the chairperson of a panchayat?

It depends on the level. At the intermediate and district levels the Constitution is uniform: Article 243C provides that the chairperson is elected by, and from amongst, the elected members of the panchayat at that level. At the village level the Constitution deliberately leaves the method open, providing that the chairperson is elected in such manner as the Legislature of the State may by law provide. States divide on the choice. Some provide for direct election of the sarpanch by the village electorate, which gives the office holder an independent popular mandate; others provide for election by the panchayat’s members from among themselves, which ties the office to the confidence of the house. The difference shapes how village leadership works in practice.

Q: What is the minimum age to contest a panchayat election?

Twenty-one years. Article 243F imports into panchayat elections the disqualifications that apply under the law governing elections to the State Legislature, and that body of law ordinarily speaks in terms of twenty-five years for candidature. A proviso to Article 243F cuts the importation down for this purpose: no person is to be disqualified on the ground that he is less than twenty-five years of age, if he has attained the age of twenty-one years. A candidate of twenty-one who meets the other qualifications and is free of disqualification under the State law is therefore eligible for panchayat office, even though the same candidate would be too young to contest an election to the State Assembly for four more years.

Q: How are panchayat constituencies divided for elections?

Article 243C supplies the governing rule at two levels. The State law makes provisions for the composition of panchayats, but the ratio between the population of a panchayat’s territorial area and the number of its seats to be filled by election must, so far as practicable, be the same throughout the State. Within each panchayat, all seats are filled by direct election from territorial constituencies into which the panchayat area is divided, and the division must be made so that the ratio between the population of each constituency and the number of seats allotted to it is, so far as practicable, the same throughout the panchayat area. Constituencies within a panchayat are therefore meant to be of broadly equal population, and population for this purpose means the figures of the last preceding census published.

Q: Can a State reserve panchayat seats for backward classes?

Yes, but as permission, not command. The sixth clause of Article 243D provides that nothing in Part IX prevents a State Legislature from making provision for reservation of seats in any panchayat, or of offices of chairpersons, in favour of backward class of citizens. When the enabling provisions were challenged, the Supreme Court in K. Krishna Murthy v. Union of India in 2010 upheld the power while conditioning its exercise: the State must proceed on quantifiable material, gathered through a dedicated enquiry, showing the backwardness of the class and its inadequate representation in local bodies, and the total reservation in a local body must respect the ceiling of one half of the seats. Reservation for backward classes therefore stands on a different footing from the constitutionally mandated reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women.

Q: Why do some States have only two tiers of panchayats?

Because the Constitution permits it for small States. Article 243B lays down the general rule that panchayats are constituted at the village, intermediate and district levels in every State, and then qualifies it: notwithstanding that rule, panchayats at the intermediate level may not be constituted in a State having a population not exceeding twenty lakh. Population here means the population as ascertained at the last preceding census of which the figures have been published. The exception exists because a full intermediate tier, with its own elected body, staff and elections, is a heavy apparatus for a very small State, and the framers allowed such States to run the system on two levels, village and district, while every larger State must maintain all three.

Q: Who decides whether a panchayat member is disqualified?

The authority the State law names. Article 243F states the grounds of disqualification, drawing them from the law governing State Legislature elections and from any law the State Legislature itself makes for panchayats, and then provides that if any question arises as to whether a member of a panchayat has become subject to any of the disqualifications, the question is to be referred for the decision of such authority, and in such manner, as the Legislature of the State may by law provide. The Constitution therefore does not designate the forum. State Acts variously assign the question to the State Election Commission, to a prescribed administrative authority, or to a judicial forum, and the route, the procedure and the remedies differ accordingly from State to State.

Q: Why did the panchayat amendment bills of 1989 and 1990 fail?

Each failed for a different reason, and the difference instructed the bill that succeeded. The Constitution (Sixty-fourth Amendment) Bill of 1989, introduced by Rajiv Gandhi’s government, passed the Lok Sabha but fell in the Rajya Sabha in October 1989, short of the two thirds special majority a constitutional amendment needs in each House. The opposition’s objection was federal: the bill was attacked as standardising panchayats from the Centre and reaching past the State governments to the local bodies on a subject, local government, that belongs to the State List. The bill introduced by the National Front government in September 1990 met the other classic fate of Indian legislation: it was still in passage when the Lok Sabha was dissolved in 1991, and it lapsed with the House.