POWER 50 · Day 20 — Local Self-Government in India: Rural & Urban

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POWER 50 is fifty capsules across fifty days — the whole PSIR syllabus revised once, in the order the syllabus is actually built, one topic a day. The method is plain: read the day’s capsule, write the same day, and don’t break the chain. Running alongside it are PSIR Dynamics 2026 and the PYQ Vault — 560 previous-year questions over the fifty days, roughly eleven a day — so that revision and answer-writing move together.

Day 20 — Local Self-Government in India

Today’s capsule covers the unit where the citizen meets the state most directly. We begin with the conceptual core — what local self-government and decentralisation actually mean — and the political-theory linkages that make grassroots democracy more than administrative reform. From there we trace the historical arc: ancient assemblies, Lord Ripon’s 1882 Resolution, Article 40, and the three readings of the village in Gandhi, Ambedkar and Nehru. The constitutional half is worked in full — Part IX and the Eleventh Schedule, the Gram Sabha as the direct-democratic base, PESA 1996 in the Scheduled Areas, and Part IX-A with the Twelfth Schedule for urban bodies. We close on the live debates: political–administrative–fiscal decentralisation, women’s representation, district planning, grassroots movements, and the “unfulfilled dream” of real devolution. Across 2015–2025 this unit has been asked every single year — twice in 2018 and 2022 — thirteen questions in all, in the 10-to-20-mark band, with the 73rd and 74th Amendments and women’s representation recurring most.

Write before the evening:

  1. Discuss the major provisions of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act. Do you think that the Act remains an ‘unfulfilled dream’? Argue your case. (UPSC 2023, 20m)
  2. Gram Sabha in the Panchayati Raj system is a forum which gives expression to the collective wisdom, aspirations and the will of the people. Comment. (UPSC 2024, 15m)
  3. Enunciate the impediments to women’s participation in local governance in the process of political decentralisation. (UPSC 2025, 20m)

If you go blank on a scholar, a case, or a section of PESA, it is covered in full in the Foundation and OGP class notes and handouts — revise it, then write.

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