Challenges in Implementing Intra-tier Responsibilities in Rural Panchayats

The 73rd Constitutional Amendment of 1992 was meant to be a turning point for grassroots democracy. It created a three-tier Panchayati Raj system, listed 29 subjects in the Eleventh Schedule for Panchayats to handle, and promised real power to the village, block, and district levels. More than three decades later, however, the gap between this constitutional vision and ground-level reality remains wide. The problem is not the intent; it is implementation. Specifically, the trouble lies in how responsibilities are split (or more often, not clearly split) among the three tiers of rural local government, and how they interact with the state’s own field bureaucracy.

Why intra-tier implementation is so difficult 🔗

The Eleventh Schedule reads like a promise. Twenty-nine subjects – agriculture, minor irrigation, rural housing, drinking water, primary education, health, poverty alleviation, and more – are placed within the purview of Panchayats. But the Constitution stops short of telling anyone which tier does what. Should the Gram Panchayat handle drinking water? Should the Panchayat Samiti supervise? Does the Zilla Parishad plan or only monitor? The answer was left to state legislatures, and most states have not resolved it cleanly.

The result is a tangle of shared, overlapping, and sometimes duplicated responsibilities. A single subject like sanitation may have the Gram Panchayat executing work, the block-level staff approving it, and the district administration actually controlling the funds. When things go well, nobody claims credit. When things go wrong, nobody takes the blame.

The missing principle of subsidiarity 🔗

A task force of the Union Ministry of Rural Development proposed an activity-mapping model based on the principle of subsidiarity – the simple idea that any function best performed at a lower level should be assigned there. In theory, every state was expected to complete this exercise by 2005. In practice, activity mapping has been done in only a handful of states, and even where documents exist, they often remain paper exercises rather than working frameworks. Village Panchayats end up performing most of the core functions, while intermediate and district Panchayats are largely reduced to supervisory roles or to acting as executing agents for the state government.

The three kinds of Panchayat functions – and where they collide 🔗

Broadly, the functions handled by Panchayats fall into three categories, and each one creates a different kind of friction with the state’s field administration.

Civic services 🔗

These are the bread-and-butter responsibilities of a local body: street lighting, sanitation, drinking water, village roads, drains, local markets, and burial grounds. Civic services are most clearly “local” in nature, and in principle they sit best with the Gram Panchayat. Yet even here, parallel bodies often exist. A state public health engineering department may run the water supply scheme, a district rural development agency may build the road, and a separate mission may handle toilets. The Gram Panchayat, which should be the owner, ends up being a nominal partner.

Developmental activities 🔗

This is the larger and more contested category – agriculture, minor irrigation, animal husbandry, rural housing, poverty alleviation, women and child development, primary schooling, and primary healthcare. These subjects touch the lives of villagers most directly, but they are also the areas where state line departments are strongest. The Agriculture Department, the Health Department, the Women and Child Development Department – each has its own district and block staff, its own budget, and its own reporting line to the state capital. Panchayats are expected to plan and implement, but the functionaries on the ground often continue to report upwards to their parent department rather than downwards to the elected body.

Agency functions 🔗

Panchayats also act as agents for implementing schemes designed by the central or state government – MGNREGA being the most prominent example. Here the Panchayat does not design the intervention; it only executes it. This agency role is often the most visible function of a Gram Panchayat, but it rarely builds the institution’s autonomy. When most of the work is “somebody else’s scheme”, local priorities take a back seat.

The shared space with state field administration 🔗

The overlap between Panchayats and state line departments is perhaps the single biggest source of implementation trouble. An analysis of administrative decentralisation points out that in many states, functions were transferred to Panchayati Raj Institutions through a mass of individual schemes rather than through a clean legal framework. Karnataka, for example, at one point transferred hundreds of plan and non-plan schemes along with their functionaries – but did not give Panchayats meaningful say over how the money was spent. Such scheme-based transfers fragment responsibility at the local level and undermine the autonomy that the 73rd Amendment intended to create.

The Comptroller and Auditor General has repeatedly flagged similar problems. An audit report on Odisha found that activity mapping, even when formally done at the state level, was not made fully operational in the field. Line departments continued to prepare Gram Panchayat plans separately, department by department, and obtained the Panchayat’s approval only in piecemeal fashion. No consolidated Gram Panchayat plan ever emerged.

The missing framework for expenditure assignment 🔗

Functional clarity is impossible without financial clarity, and this is where a deeper structural gap appears. A study on fiscal decentralisation to rural local governments notes that in the absence of clear activity mapping, expenditure requirements cannot be estimated in any scientific manner. That means transfers from the state to Panchayats cannot be calibrated to what the Panchayats are actually expected to do. General-purpose unconditional transfers are small, and where they exist, they are often distributed without a well-designed formula.

The principle here is simple but often ignored: if a tier is responsible for a function, it must have a predictable source of funds to discharge that function. Without that principle, even well-intentioned devolution turns into a guessing game each year.

The case for expert groups 🔗

Because the 29 subjects are written in broad terms, translating them into specific responsibilities – who will dig the well, who will maintain it, who will levy the user charge – requires technical work. Expert groups, often at the state level, are needed to unbundle each subject. What does “minor irrigation” actually mean at the village level versus the block level? What exactly is the Gram Panchayat supposed to do under “primary education” when the teacher is appointed and paid by the state education department? These questions have no obvious answers in the constitutional text; they have to be worked out.

Resource management, auditing, and the accountability gap 🔗

Even when functions and funds are somewhat aligned, weak resource management can stall implementation. Most Panchayats have limited capacity to maintain proper accounts, run social audits, or produce asset registers. A review of panchayat devolution points out that functional devolution continues to lag even as financial transfers improve, that one secretary often juggles multiple Panchayats, and that parallel bodies and parastatal agencies routinely bypass Panchayats altogether.

Proper auditing is not only about catching fraud. It is also the mechanism by which the Gram Sabha – the village assembly – can hold its elected Panchayat accountable. The Constitution allows state governments to make provisions for audit of Panchayat accounts, and most states have done so through their Conformity Acts. However, the quality and timeliness of these audits vary widely. In several states, audit reports lag by years, so by the time a problem is flagged, the elected body that committed the lapse has already left office.

Integrating village development plans 🔗

The most ambitious attempt to bring coherence to this muddle has been the Gram Panchayat Development Plan, or GPDP. Introduced after the Fourteenth Finance Commission grants began flowing directly to Gram Panchayats in 2015, the GPDP is meant to be a participatory, bottom-up plan that converges the 29 Eleventh Schedule subjects, central ministry schemes, and state line department interventions into one document at the village level. It is prepared every year between October and December under the People’s Plan Campaign.

On paper, this is exactly what the 73rd Amendment envisioned. In practice, the implementation has been uneven. Many Panchayats still recycle templates or copy previous years’ proposals without conducting a fresh needs assessment. Convergence with other departmental schemes is weak, which dilutes the plan’s holistic intent. Capacity remains a major constraint – elected representatives often receive inadequate training in planning, budgeting, and implementation, and Gram Sabhas see low turnout, especially among women, marginalised groups, and young people. Delayed fund flows and patchy monitoring mechanisms compound the problem, and digital platforms like eGramSwaraj remain underused where literacy and infrastructure are poor.

What meaningful grassroots planning would require 🔗

For the GPDP – or any serious decentralised planning – to work, three things have to come together. First, clear activity mapping so that each tier knows its own responsibilities. Second, predictable finances tied to those responsibilities. Third, a capable set of functionaries who report to the elected Panchayat rather than only to a line department. When any one of these is missing, the other two collapse with it.

Small openings, slow progress 🔗

It is easy to read this list and conclude that decentralisation has failed. That would be unfair. The latest devolution index work by the Indian Institute of Public Administration shows uneven but real progress across states, with some states performing consistently better than others on institutional frameworks, finances, and accountability. States like Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra have long been ahead on functional devolution; several others have improved on financial transfers and capacity-building even where functions remain muddled.

The honest reading is that the intra-tier implementation problem is not a technical puzzle waiting to be solved – it is a political-administrative negotiation that has to be carried out state by state, department by department, and, in the end, village by village. The Constitution provided the scaffolding. Filling it in is slow work.

What do you think? If a Gram Panchayat in your state was asked to take full responsibility for, say, primary healthcare or minor irrigation tomorrow, what is the one capacity it would most clearly lack – and whose job should it be to build that capacity? And do you think the problem is better solved by clearer laws from above or by stronger Gram Sabhas from below?

References

1. https://panchayat.gov.in/en/document/mapping-of-29-subjects-under-eleventh-schedule-of-the-constitution-sdgs-and-lsdg-themes/
2. https://cdnbbsr.s3waas.gov.in/s316026d60ff9b54410b3435b403afd226/uploads/2024/07/20240709763096736.pdf
3. https://accountabilityindia.in/sites/default/files/policy-brief/panchayatbrief2.pdf
4. https://cag.gov.in/uploads/old_reports/local_bodies/Issued_State_Govt/Orissa/2006_2007/chap_3-pri.pdf
5. https://www.nipfp.org.in/media/medialibrary/2013/08/Fiscal_Decentralization_to_Rural_Local_Governments_in_India.pdf
6. https://www.insightsonindia.com/2025/02/14/status-of-devolution-to-panchayats-in-states/
7. https://secforuts.mha.gov.in/73rd-amendment-of-panchayati-raj-in-india/
8. https://www.impriindia.com/insights/gram-panchayat-development-plan-2015/
9. https://decentralization.net/2025/02/the-status-of-devolution-to-panchayats-in-india/