Need For Nyaya Panchayats
The main check on the bureaucracy or technocracy is what Shakespeare called the aweful majesty of the law. The main check on elected politicians, however, is fear of losing the next elections. A paternalistic administration draws its inspiration from the instruction it receives from above. A participative administration draws it inspiration from the pressures it is subjected to from below. The former is responsible to a higher authority the state or central secretariat. A participative administration is responsible to the authority at whose pleasure it enjoys office the people.
Where, therefore, checks and balances are built into a paternalistic administration by the relationship between the government and the officials it has sent into the field, a participative administration requires that these checks and balances be built into the relationship between the panchayats and the officials, on the one hand, and the panchayats and the people, on the other.
The most effective of all checks and balances would, therefore, be the gram sabha, provided for in the law. Most of the villagers most pressing needs are those that are to be met at the village panchayat level.
The implementation of programmes to meet their needs is also most visible and most transparent at this level. A villager needs no newspapers, no TV, no election campaign, no agonised debates in a panchayat ghar to know whether a road has been laid, a well dug, a school built. The evidence of his eyes is overwhelming. A vigorous gram sabha, with the active participation of most of its public-spirited citizens is, thus, the most effective check on a participative administration. It amounts to a return to the roots of democracy in the ancient Greek city-states, where elected representatives had to directly answer to the enfranchised citizens questions.
However, life has regrettably become so much more complex since then, that under one present failed system of paternalistic administration, the bureaucracy has become such a law unto itself that, in the field, the people feed only the cutting edge of its oppressiveness and callousness while, for state-level politicians, particularly ministers, these officials have become the instrument of patronage and, therefore, for the people the cutting edge of nepotism.
The combination of the district administrative service reporting to the elected office-bearers of the panchayats, and the elected office-bearers of the panchayats reporting to the gram sabha, should, over time, restore in rural India a measure of checks and balances which has now virtually vanished owing to the baleful combination of paternalistic administration in the field.
There are three ways in which the desired level of independence of the bureaucracy might be reconciled with the required level of participative administration. First, as suggested in these columns several months ago, disagreement between panchayats and officials should be settled not, as at present, by reference to the next higher level of the panchayats. Thus, a dispute between a village panchayat and a gram sevak should be settled by decision of the intermediate panchayats, a dispute between an intermediate panchayat and a block development officer (BDO) should be settled in the zila parishad (i.e the district panchayat); and a dispute between the zila parishad and its CEO (usually, the district magistrate/collector in the district committee of the legislative assembly before being sent to the government for final disposal. I had called this system peer group correctives.
Second, independent panchayat tribunals should be established in each district headed by a judicial authority (say a former district/sessions judge and selected jointly by the zila parishad president, the leader of the opposition in a zila parishad, and the minister concerned.
While peer group correctives could sort out most disputes of an administrative or personal nature, the panchayat tribunals might be approached by either the panchayats of officialdom to settle matters of law. Therefore, third, the panchayat tribunal should be integrated into a system of nyaya panchayats extending from the village through the intermediate to the district level.
Rajiv Gandhi had intended to revolutionise the system of justice (more accurately speaking, the system of injustice) in this country by establishing a network of peoples courts (the nyaya panchayats) which would have supplemented the existing over-burdened legal system, where 2.5 crore cases are pending for disposal.