"Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus every village will be a republic or panchayat having full powers." Gandhiji, Harijan, 28 July 1946
Gandhiji wrote those lines thirteen months before freedom arrived. When it came, it came from the top, through a transfer of power negotiated in Delhi and London.
This week marks his 157th birth anniversary. The rituals are familiar: garlands at Rajghat, a cleanliness drive, his spectacles on a poster. What gets far less attention is the idea he held to most stubbornly, and which the Republic accepted only half-heartedly. Power, he believed, should rest first with the village and the ward, and travel upward only when the smaller body cannot do the job.
Seventy-six years after the Constitution came into force, it is worth asking whether power in India is moving towards the citizen, or away from her.
The village as the first government
Gandhiji's case for village self-rule began with suspicion, not nostalgia. In Hind Swaraj (1909) he attacked the modern parliamentary state as distant and costly, run by people who never had to face those they governed. Later he put it more bluntly: the State, he said, represents violence in a concentrated and organised form. A distant government rules through orders and police; a village panchayat has to face its neighbours.
His positive picture came in the same Harijan essay of 1946. Society, he wrote, should not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom, but "an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual." Each circle would meet its own basic needs of food, cloth, water and justice, and cooperate with wider circles for the rest. Power would flow outward by consent, never downward by command.
Three things followed. The village would be the unit of planning. Swadeshi and khadi would keep wealth circulating locally. And the panchayat would be a school of self-government, which to Gandhiji was the only training that made national democracy real.
His followers tried to give the idea legal shape. Shriman Narayan Agarwal's Gandhian Constitution for Free India (1946), which carried Gandhiji's foreword, built an indirectly elected structure on the village panchayat. Vinoba Bhave's Gramdan movement asked villages to hold land in common, Jayaprakash Narayan pressed for a "communitarian democracy", and Ram Manohar Lohia proposed a Chaukhamba Raj of four equal pillars: village, district, province and Centre.
The compromise of November 1948
The Constitution did not begin with Gandhiji's village. The Draft Constitution of February 1948 said nothing about panchayats, a gap Gandhiji had already called an omission needing immediate attention. He did not live to see the debate.
When Dr. B.R. Ambedkar moved the Draft on 4 November 1948, he defended the omission bluntly. What is the village, he asked, "but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?" Ambedkar had seen caste at close quarters. For the oppressed, distance from village power was sometimes the only protection.
The Assembly pushed back. On 22 November 1948, K. Santhanam moved the amendment that became Article 40, directing the State to organise village panchayats and give them the powers needed to function as "units of self-government." Ambedkar accepted it.
It was a compromise, and a weak one. Article 40 sits among the Directive Principles, which Article 37 keeps out of court, and local government went into Entry 5 of the State List. For four decades panchayats lived at the pleasure of State governments, which postponed polls and superseded elected bodies at will, despite the reports of the Balwantrai Mehta (1957) and Ashok Mehta (1978) committees.
1992: the promise made binding
The 73rd and 74th Amendments finally gave Article 40 teeth. Parts IX and IX-A turned panchayats and municipalities into constitutional institutions, with a three-tier rural structure (Article 243B), a fixed five-year term and elections before it ends (Articles 243E and 243U), reservation for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and at least one-third of seats for women (Article 243D), a State Election Commission (Article 243K) and a State Finance Commission every five years (Article 243-I).
The Supreme Court has read these provisions as commands. In Kishansing Tomar v. Municipal Corporation of Ahmedabad, (2006) 8 SCC 352, a Constitution Bench held that elections must be completed before a body's term expires, and that pending delimitation is no excuse. In State of Goa v. Fouziya Imtiaz Shaikh, 2021 LiveLaw (SC) 158, it set aside the appointment of Goa's Law Secretary as State Election Commissioner, calling the arrangement "a mockery of the constitutional mandate", and directed that every State Election Commissioner must be independent of the State Government.
Then came Suresh Mahajan v. State of Madhya Pradesh, 2022 LiveLaw (SC) 463. More than 23,000 local bodies in Madhya Pradesh had gone over two years without elected representatives. The Court ordered polls within two weeks and held that local government must be run by elected representatives "uninterrupted".
The weak joint is Article 243G. It says the legislature may endow panchayats with powers, and lists 29 subjects in the Eleventh Schedule (18 for municipalities in the Twelfth). That one word left the real transfer of functions, funds and functionaries, the "three Fs", to the State governments that stood to lose them.
How power is climbing back up
The pull towards the centre runs on two tracks: the Union over the States, and the States over their local bodies. The second is older, and does more damage day to day.
Start with the ballot. Maharashtra's Zilla Parishads and Panchayat Samitis lost their elected members in January 2025. Despite a May 2025 order to hold polls and a 31 January 2026 deadline, the Supreme Court had to issue notice in July 2026 on a petition counting 506 days without elections. Bengaluru has had no elected municipal council since September 2020. These are governments of different parties, united by the convenience of an administrator who answers to the State secretariat.
Then the purse. GST subsumed octroi, entry tax and local body tax in 2017, with no constitutional guarantee of compensation for municipalities of the kind given to States. The Reserve Bank's 2024 study of panchayat finances found own revenue at just 1.1 per cent of total revenue; about 95 per cent arrived as grants from above. A body that raises one rupee of every hundred it spends does not plan. It implements.
Then the parallel structures. The Smart Cities Mission routed projects through special purpose companies run by officials, with elected councils at the margins. In 2022, Parliament merged Delhi's three municipal corporations shortly before polls were due, and a Centre-appointed special officer ran the city until elections that December. In Government of NCT of Delhi v. Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, 2024 INSC 578, the Supreme Court upheld the Lieutenant Governor's power to nominate ten aldermen to the MCD without the elected government's advice.
Finally, the calendar. The Kovind Committee proposed a new Article 324A to hold municipal and panchayat polls within 100 days of the general election, and a single electoral roll prepared by the Election Commission of India in place of rolls prepared by State Election Commissions. The Constitution (129th Amendment) Bill, 2024 leaves local bodies out for now, and its Joint Parliamentary Committee's term was extended again in July 2026. The direction, though, is plain: the village vote would become an appendix to the national one, fought on national issues.
The government's case deserves a hearing. Simultaneous polls may save money and end the stop-start of the model code of conduct. And the Fifteenth Finance Commission used central leverage for local democracy, making timely elections a condition for local body grants.
What this does to the federation
India was meant to have three tiers of government. In practice it is drifting back to two, with the third reduced to an agency. When a council goes unelected for years, the citizen meets the state through an official who answers upward, not to her. The women, Dalit and Adivasi representatives who reach office through Article 243D lose the seat that was meant to answer Ambedkar's fear of village tyranny. And federalism, which S.R. Bommai v. Union of India, (1994) 3 SCC 1, counted among the Constitution's basic features, weakens at the bottom long before anyone notices at the top.
The last office, or the first
In January 1948, days before his death, Gandhiji wrote that true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre; it has to be worked from below, by the people of every village. The Republic took forty-two years and two amendments to half-accept that idea, and the Supreme Court still has to defend it case by case.
The repairs are not mysterious. Replace "may" with "shall" in Article 243G. Give local bodies an assured share of GST. Let State Election Commissions, not State cabinets, fix the calendar. On his birthday, the honest tribute is to stop treating the panchayat as Delhi's last office, and start treating it as the Republic's first.
Author is an LL.M. scholar at Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar. Views are personal.