The Gram Sabha: Article 243A, the Four Meeting Days and What a Village Decides

What the Gram Sabha Is

• A gram sabha is the assembly of every person whose name is on the electoral roll of a village panchayat. It is not a committee, not a council and not a group of nominees, but the voters of the village themselves, meeting in one place.
• There is no election to the gram sabha. This is what separates it from the panchayat, which is the elected body, and it is why the gram sabha is described as the taproot of people's rule rather than one more tier of it.
• The three tier rural local government is made of members who win elections to the village panchayat, the panchayat union and the district panchayat. The gram sabha sits apart from that structure and supervises the first tier.
• The power and the responsibility to convene the gram sabha rest with the president of the village panchayat, so a failure to call the meeting is a failure of a named office holder and not of an anonymous department.
• Its authority is constitutional, which means a State law can add to its functions but cannot wish the body away.

The Road to Article 243A

• Village assemblies are older than the Constitution. Under the Mauryan empire villages functioned as self governing units, and Kautilya's Arthashastra discusses the spread of administration away from the centre.
• Rule under the Cholas is treated as the high point of early local administration in the Tamil country. The Uthiramerur inscription records the kudavolai method, the pot and palm leaf ballot by which a village chose the members of its administrative committees.
• In the colonial period, Lord Ripon introduced in 1882 the practice of choosing members of local bodies by election, which is why he is remembered as the father of modern local self government in India.
• After Independence the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee of 1957 recommended a three tier system of rural local government. It was put into practice first in Rajasthan in 1959.
• The Ashok Mehta Committee of 1977, and other committees after it, pressed the case that local bodies needed constitutional status rather than the goodwill of a State government of the day.
• That came with the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1992, which gave rural and urban local bodies protection of their powers and a place in the Constitution itself.
• Article 243A is the provision that creates the gram sabha in every village panchayat and leaves it to the legislature of a State to provide by law for the powers it will exercise.
• In Tamil Nadu those powers are set out in the Tamil Nadu Panchayats Act, 1994, the State law written to carry the 73rd Amendment into effect.

What the Sabha Actually Decides

• The first function is choosing beneficiaries. The names of those who will receive a house, a toilet, a pension or a loan under a local body scheme are settled in the open meeting rather than in an office.
• The second is review. The sabha considers what schemes run by other departments have actually done at the village level and records its decision, which gives a village a say in work that is not its panchayat's own.
• The third is the social audit. The sabha examines the works the local body has carried out and the money it has spent, so the audit happens in front of the people who watched the work being done.
• Taken together these make the sabha an instrument of transparent and accountable administration, and the courts have affirmed that character in a series of judgments.
• Its effectiveness is tied to the panchayat it supervises. Where the panchayat is weak, the sabha has little to audit, which is why capacity building, training and the use of technology in the panchayat are treated as part of strengthening the sabha.
• Attendance is the other half. A sabha that meets without the villagers present can pass a resolution but cannot carry the authority the Constitution intends it to have.

The 2 October Meeting in Tamil Nadu

• Under the State law the gram sabha meets on four fixed days each year: 26 January, 1 May, 15 August and 2 October. The October meeting falls on Gandhi Jayanti, the birth anniversary of the leader who held that every village should become a republic with full powers.
• Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay has appealed to people to attend in large numbers, saying the success of a scheme lies in its benefits actually reaching every eligible household in every village.
• The meetings are being held in all village panchayats except those in Chengalpattu and Tiruppur districts, where byelections are under way.
• The agenda the government has set out covers rural housing, roads, drinking water, sanitation, the rural employment guarantee, the economic activities of women's self help groups, livelihood development and the school breakfast scheme named after Perunthalaivar Kamarajar.
• For a student the meeting is the clearest illustration of a constitutional idea at work: a body that nobody is elected to, that meets on fixed days, and that decides who gets what in the village.