By now the night halts in Karnataka’s villages by the State Chief Minister Kumaraswamy has received lot of media attention. In the past, Congress leaders like Kamaraj always preferred to stay with a village leader than in the Government Inspection Bungalows. Late Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri stayed in Amul Milk shed villages before he invited Dr Kurien to form the National Dairy Development Board to replicate Amul model all over India.
The night halts by the CM in Karnataka have been turned as emergency events for government bureaucrats to spruce up the village roads and the house of the villager and the criteria of selecting the host is not known. Recently the CM stayed in the house where the host-farmer had committed suicide and his  family had to move out of the house to make room for the Chief Minister! These night halts have been an attraction for his host in the village because that brings lot of advantage of getting their house spruced up at the government’s cost.
The Chief Minister has never used his night halts to discuss with the village sarpanch nor with the gram sabha members about how the panchayat is being governed and what pinpricks are created by his fellow MPs and village bureaucrats.
Why can’t he hold an emergency gram sabha meeting whenever he is in the village so that his government's commitment to panchayat governance, which is now at a low ebb, is visible to village panchayat members. All the 29 functions delegated to the panchayats can be reviewed in the gram sabha meetings.
The present Chief Minister and his Cabinet colleagues are out to destroy the pioneering work done by previous governments in decentralised governance through the Panchayat Raj Act of 1993. For instance rural housing scheme called  Ashraya  is now being taken away from the purview of gram panchayats.
Under the Constitutional pattern, gram sabha provides the foundation for effective Panchayat Raj.
All the Yojanas of the centre and the states converge at the village level and the buck stops there.
That was the reason why Mahatma Gandhi dreamt of a vibrant gram swaraj and Rajiv Gandhi a dynamic forum for deciding all issues affecting villagers.
In Karnataka, as in other states, gram sabhas are never held punctually because the panchayat secretaries, who have to draw up the agenda, feel nothing comes out of these gram sabhas since they do not get any cuts from the schemes.
By calling the gram sabha meeting at night the Chief Minister would know the pulse of the people in that particular village, what problems are faced by villagers with regard to water, education, health, and so many daily worries of the poor.
TFRA very specifically envisages empowering gram sabhas and village level institutions to protect wild life, forest and biodiversity. In Karnataka there are many traditional panchayats like forest panchayats, coastal panchayats and the chief Minister should learn how these function.
Finally the Chief Minister represents the people of Karnataka and to build credibility he should halt in the Village panchayat space which is like the Vidhan Soudha and not in a party worker’s house  or a household selected by the state bureaucrats.