- This event is over. However, time travel possible through our Audio & Video! See upcoming events
Assessing the Panchayat Raj Revolution
Three Decades of the 73rd Amendment
Speakers
The 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act (73rd CAA) was enacted by Parliament in 1992 and became law on Apr 23, 1993. A three-tier Panchayat Raj System at the village, intermediate, and district levels is provided by the amendment. The genesis of the Act has it’s roots in the novel decentralisation initiative taken by the Karnataka Government under the leadership of Abdul Nazeer Sab.
The 73rd CAA’s primary goal was to democratically decentralise authority and resources from the Centre to locally elected officials in order to increase citizen participation in governance. Its goal relates to Article 40 of the constitution, which calls for the State to set up village panchayats and give them the requisite authority and powers to function as self-governing entities.
Three decades later it’s time to assess the performance of the 73rd CAA – what’s worked, what can be improved and what comes next.
Speakers
TR Raghunandan
TR Raghunandan describes himself as a classic car and railway enthusiast, tireless driver, model scratch-builder, broken old machinery hoarder, teacher, raconteur, author, former bureaucrat and accountability / decentralised governance consultant.
Uma Mahadevan
Uma Mahadevan is a civil servant currently posted as Additional Chief Secretary, Panchayat Raj in the Government of Karnataka. She has worked in diverse sectors including women and child development. She has recently served as a member of the Taskforce on Early Childhood Care and Education. She was a member of the working group that produced Karnataka’s first Human Development Report. She has written extensively on culture and development issues.
Vijendra Rao
Vijayendra (Biju) Rao, a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, works at the intersection of scholarship and practice. He integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology and political science to study the social, cultural, and political context of extreme poverty in developing countries.
His research has spanned a variety of subjects. In his early work he pioneered empirical research in Economics on dowries, domestic violence and sex work. His 2004 edited book with Mike Walton, Culture and Public Action, was an effort to instigate a conversation between anthropologists and economists to open up (then) new questions at the intersection of culture and development including the role of aspirations, inequality traps, and cultural heritage. He has had a long standing interest in Political Economy and democratic decentralization in India. He is a proponent of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods to make economics more reflexive, and to better understand and diagnose issues in development. His recent work has focused on participatory approaches to development, deliberative democracy, and voice and agency among the poor. He has been experimenting with the use of Natural Language Processing methods to understand epistemic discrimination in Indian village meetings, and to develop tools to analyze open-ended qualitative interviews at scale. He and Ghazala Mansuri co-authored Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? which the Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson has described as “one of the most important books in development in recent years.” His most recent book, co-authored with Paromita Sanyal, is Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies (Cambridge University Press).
Dr. Rao obtained a BA in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay University, a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, was a Hewlett post-doctoral fellow at the Economics Research Center and an Associate of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan and Williams College, and was on sabbatical at Brown University, before joining the World Bank’s research department in 1999.
He is a Fellow of the International Economics Association, and the Chair of the Advisory Committee of the program on Boundaries, Membership and Belonging, at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
