Recently the Karnataka Legislature hurriedly passed an amendment to the Karnataka Panchayat Raj Act, 1993, virtually divesting the Ward Sabhas and Gram Sabhas of their powers of selecting the beneficiaries under the government funded rural welfare schemes and vesting them in a committee headed by the members of the legislative assembly. There were spontaneous protests by the Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs) and several NGOs and people committed to democratic decentralisation.

Speaking at the national convention recently organised by the Institute of Social Sciences in Bangalore to celebrate two decades of Panchayat Raj in Karnataka, Union Minister for Panchayat Raj Manishankar Aiyar had said that the MLAs were not only unwilling to share power with the PRIs but were even afraid of them. Karnataka’s MLAs have given ample evidence of this by repeatedly demanding that a committee headed by the MLAs be empowered to select the beneficiaries, particularly under “Ashraya” housing scheme.

Resentment
There is a lot of resentment among the elected representatives of the PRIs against the very participation of the MLAs in the meetings of the PRIs. MLAs dominate the proceedings of the PRIs and at times even dictate the proceedings. The local MLAs dictate the names of the beneficiaries and compel the presidents of the Grama Panchayats (GPs) to forward the lists to the government as the lists recommended by the Gram Sabhas.

A workshop was organised recently for the presidents of the three tiers of the PRIs with the objective of drafting a charter of demands. One of the demands said that as the Members of Parliament are not ex-officio members of legislative assemblies, there is no need for members of the legislative assemblies, to be the members of the PRIs as in Maharashtra.

Speaking on the demand, one of the Zilla Panchayat (ZP) presidents said that if, under Section 120 and 159 of the 1993 Act, some presidents of the GPs are made members of the Taluk Panchayats (TP) and the presidents of the TPs are made members of the ZPs, why not extend the same logic and make the ZP presidents ex-officio members of the legislative assembly.

The practice of making the legislators members of the PRIs started with the Mysore Village Panchayats and Local Boards Act, 1959 modelled on the D H Chandrasekharaiah Committee, 1954 and continued under the 1983 Act. A very interesting argument advanced was that since the legislators feel threatened by the emergence of the PRIs it is better to co-opt them into the system rather than provoke them into hostility by keeping them out of it.

Demarcation
Time has come to demarcate the functions and jurisdictions of the MLAs on the one hand and the elected representatives of the PRIs on the other. In the national convention cited above, Manishankar Aiyar had further said that the job of the MLAs is to legislate and that of the PRIs is to execute and that if the MLAs are interested in the execution they should contest elections to the PRIs and not to the assembly.

In the absence of PRIs, the MLAs had come to believe that they were responsible for execution of development works in their constituencies. This job had left them with little time for performing their legitimate function of legislation. With the PRIs taking over the function of execution of works in the rural areas, the MLAs are finding it difficult to confine themselves to their legitimate function of legislation. Keeping the MLAs away from the PRIs may, over a period of time, make the MLAs realise their legitimate role.