Grounding the State: Poverty, Inequality and the Politics of Governance in India's Panchayats

Abstract

"Decentralization is commonly defended on the grounds that it will bring government closer to people, thereby creating political structures that are more transparent and accountable to poor and marginal groups in society. However, a problem that is well-recognized in the decentralization literature is that the devolution of power will not necessarily improve the performance and accountability of local government. Indeed, in many cases, decentralization simply empowers local elites to capture a larger share of public resources, often at the expense of the poor. Reflecting on these relatively long-standing problems, an important strand of scholarship has argued that central government can play a central role in counterbalancing the forces that tend to disfavour the poor. In this paper, we aim to inform this scholarship by reflecting on the interface between local government and local people in two Indian States: Andhra Pradesh (AP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP). Drawing upon 12 months of primary research, we argue that although the Government of AP has not devolved power to the extent that proponents of decentralization would have liked, its populist approach to certain forms of poverty reduction has empowered the poor in ways that the more ambitious decentralization agenda in MP has not. This, we argue, is due in part to the fact that MPs decentralization process failed to challenge the well-entrenched power of the village chiefs, the sarpanches. But the discrepancy can also be explained in terms of the historical evolution of 'development populism' in AP. In particular, we argue that the strong performance of programmes aimed at subsidizing rice for low income households and providing credit to womens 'self-help groups' (SHGs) is part of the State governments wider political strategy of enhancing and maintaining electoral support among women, scheduled castes and the poor."