The other half

KUDUMBASHREE MEMBERS AT a rally ahead of the inauguration of the neighbourhood group's 12th anniversay celebrations, in Kochi in May.-VIPIN CHANDRAN

Kerala: The outcome of the local body elections will be important for the decentralisation process and women's political empowerment.

THE elections to the local bodies in Kerala on October 23 and 25 are sure to be a politically important rehearsal for the two coalitions that have been ruling the State alternately, coming as they do a few months before the voting to the State Assembly, which is due early next year. They will anyway be a landmark, with 50 per cent of the seats in the 978 grama panchayats, 152 block panchayats, 14 district panchayats, 60 municipalities and five corporations being reserved for women for the first time in the history of the State. Moreover, after the elections, at least 50 per cent of all the local bodies in Kerala will be headed by women, with half the posts of president, chairman and mayor (in three of the five corporations), as the case may be, being set aside for them. In the other 50 per cent of panchayats, municipalities and corporations, the posts of vice-president, vice-chairperson and deputy mayor (in two of the five corporations), respectively, are to be filled from among the elected women candidates.

But eventually, despite the attempt to raise the quota for women from the existing 33 per cent to 50 per cent and to provide for a larger political space for women to participate in development and governance at the grass roots, what the October elections will highlight is the state of the once-celebrated decentralisation programme in Kerala, which was launched as an experiment 14 years ago by another coalition government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

The aim of the experiment, indeed, was to find a solution to the persisting economic backwardness of the State despite its well-known achievements in key areas of human development. The problem had become a challenge to the two coalitions since the late 1980s, from when remittances from Malayalis in the Gulf, which had sustained the State's economy until then, began to dwindle. The new initiative, launched in 1996 soon after a Left Democratic Front (LDF) government took over, sought a sharp break from the social service-oriented approach to planning and development practised until then to one that put the focus on increasing industrial and agricultural production and boosting economic growth.

This it sought to achieve by further strengthening the State laws on decentralisation (enacted in 1994 by a United Democratic Front government incorporating the provisions of the 73rd and 74th Constitution Amendment Acts in them) in order to ensure the participation of the people in local governance, and through a greater devolution of power and resources in order to make local bodies more democratic and responsive to people's needs.

The highlights of the LDF government programme were its comprehensive overhauling of the State laws and rules to protect the constitutional rights of local bodies, clear demarcation of powers of the three tiers of local self-government institutions and legal sanction for the regular transfer of (initially 35 per cent) Plan funds to the local bodies for their exclusive use.

In the 14 years that followed, a long list of factors, among them competitive policies and politics of the rival coalitions; inner-party struggles within the ruling CPI(M); resistance from political parties, politicians, officials and contractors hand in glove with one another; and other vested interests led to decreasing government commitment, dwindling mass participation and a drop in the funds that was being made available to the panchayats.

Power to the people'

No one would today claim that Power to the People, the slogan of the People's Campaign for Democratic Decentralisation' launched in 1996, ever became a reality throughout Kerala in its original sense, sincere attempts notwithstanding. Key to the success of the campaign was the involvement of the people in the development process and the generation of a new civic culture with the participation of the people in decision-making on local development, through the grama sabhas. (Grama sabhas', the mandatory tri-monthly village or ward-level assemblies, were originally intended as the basic units of local-level decision-making in which elected representatives and government officials were, by law, meant to be accountable to the voters directly.)

However, almost from the very beginning of the campaign, except on the first few occasions, very few panchayats convened grama sabhas without compulsion even though they were required to do so by the new law. People soon lost interest and failed to take these crucial bodies seriously.

Meanwhile, an amazing conspiracy of government officials and politicians, irrespective of their politics, was in evidence, ensuring that the vast resources and powers offered under the new law remained in their own hands for disposal as per tradition, instead of genuinely being transferred to the people. The radically pro-people provisions of the Kerala Panchayat Raj Act, 1994, and the Kerala Municipality Act, 1994, and the rules framed under them were deftly kept away from popular understanding. The changes brought in by the mass movement launched in connection with the programme were never fully institutionalised.

Moreover, with the reins of government passing on to the UDF in 2001, the State government's enthusiasm for real decentralisation, too, dwindled, with most UDF leaders seeing the programme itself as a vestige of the policies of a rival coalition fit only to be scrapped. The victory of the vested interests was complete with the uncooperative bureaucracy making certain that the representatives elected to these new-generation local bodies, many of them novices, never really understood the provisions of the law or how to use the newly devolved powers and funds properly. The decentralisation initiative never really recovered from this, even after the LDF returned to power in 2006, and was soon reduced to just another government programme.

The devolved powers and resources (for example, whereas a grama panchayat used to get barely Rs.1 lakh a year for all its activities before decentralisation, the annual allocation came to around Rs.70 lakh after the programme was implemented) continued to be handled exclusively by the bureaucracy and a few politicians. Strange as it may seem, though public interest could never be really sustained, the new powers and resources (minus the public scrutiny) by themselves became a major source of attraction for political parties, individual politicians and public works contractors.

There were exceptions to this general rule, though. In the local bodies that stood against the tide (though small in number), the decentralisation programme resulted in impressive achievements at the grass roots initially, especially in the provisioning of basic services such as housing, sanitation, drinking water facilities and poverty eradication. And by 1998, even while grama sabhas were proving to be a failure as a mobilisation strategy for decentralised development, a microfinance-linked poverty alleviation programme launched by the LDF government through local self-governments was proving its potential as an alternative.

Kudumbashree', as it came to be known, quickly developed into a strong network of highly motivated and efficient neighbourhood groups of women, with microcredit, entrepreneurship and empowerment as its key components, and, uniquely, unlike other microfinance self-help groups, functioning under respective local self-governments.

Within a short time, the Kudumbashree neighbourhood groups (NHGs), working well within the panchayati raj system, became a basic unit of the community structure in Kerala, and almost took up the role originally meant for the grama sabhas instead of remaining as a mere microfinance initiative. It created an empowering unity of poor women, who often substituted for the non-existent grama sabhas, as key links in the process of democratisation and decentralisation that had taken place in the State in the last 12 years.

Kudumbashree was also able to make its mark in agriculture, trade and small-scale industries and in the service sector.

Through its various empowerment initiatives, Kudumbashree offered women who confined themselves to their homes an opportunity to become bold entrants in the public sphere. The significance was not lost on anyone when nearly 1,400 members of the Kudumbashree NHGs became winning candidates in elections to the local bodies held in 2000, just two years after the programme was launched, and began to hold various positions in grama panchayats to district panchayats.

Though Kudumbashree units thrived throughout Kerala in all the local bodies ruled by both the UDF and the LDF, very soon an impression gained ground that the CPI(M) and other Left parties, with a wider grass-roots network, would eventually gain politically from these women's NHGs, for instance when it came to finding efficient candidates or winning votes in elections.

In February 2008, in a strange move, the Congress gave its blessings to some of the leading members of its State unit to launch an alternative to the State government-supported Kudumbashree. Over two years, the Janasree Sustainable Development Mission, which is now identified generally as an initiative of the Congress, has launched units in several localities in the State. Though it is nowhere near offering competition to Kudumbashree NHGs, the activities of the Janasree Mission have given rise to genuine fears of an increasing politicisation of Kudumbashree one of the largest women's empowerment and poverty reduction programmes in India with 37 lakh members covering 50 per cent of Kerala's households and its eventual destruction as a key instrument of local self-government institutions.

Surely, it is in this election-eve local body milieu in Kerala that over 30,000 women, a majority of them newcomers in politics, are competing for nearly 11,200 seats reserved for them in the various local body institutions, thus heralding a major change in the political landscape and traditional social and political power structures.

The 14-year experiment

It is interesting to see how the 14-year experiment with decentralisation had influenced the fortunes of the two coalitions in the successive elections held since its launch in 1996. The first local body elections in Kerala after the implementation of the decentralisation programme were held in 2000, but the results belied the expectation that the LDF, which was instrumental in launching it, would win the majority of seats. Surprisingly, then, more than half of the local bodies opted for a change of leadership, from the LDF to the UDF and vice versa, and the UDF won a marginally higher percentage of seats in the grama panchayats and block panchayats.

The results of the local body elections of 2000 were but the harbinger of the change of mood of the people favouring the UDF in the Assembly elections held a few months later in 2001. The UDF formed a new government, riding on the wave of vicious criticism it had launched focussing entirely on the shortcomings of the LDF's decentralisation programme. Subsequently, the UDF literally neglected the half-baked decentralisation experiment, starved the local bodies of funds, and instead tried to implement unsuccessful mega projects under the premise that privatisation and liberalisation (and not decentralisation) should really be the engine of economic growth in the State.

In the four years that followed, amidst an unseemly factional war in the Congresss, several mega projects announced by the UDF failed to bring in the investments that it had promised or to spur economic growth.

The Opposition LDF's reward, as it were, came towards the fag end of UDF rule when, with just seven months to go before the 2006 Assembly elections, it scored a near-total victory at the grass roots, winning 721 of the (then) 999 grama panchayats, 123 of the 152 block panchayats, 12 of the 14 district panchayats, 33 of the 53 municipalities and all five city corporations in Kerala. It is anybody's guess whether the State was punishing the UDF for its unseemly factional feuds and neglect of State affairs or for the way in which it scuttled the decentralisation process and local development.

In the last year of its term, though, when it could no longer ignore the pressures of newly empowered local bodies, the UDF announced it was re-launching the decentralisation programme with a new name, the Kerala Development Programme'. But it too ended up as an attempt to restructure the local bodies in such a way as to aid the ruling Front's philosophy of privatisation and liberalisation as engines of growth, to allow private investors and voluntary agencies to replace governments in development, and to re-impose the primacy of the bureaucracy in running local governments.

At the time of the 2006 Assembly elections, both the Congress and the CPI(M) were struggling to contain inner-party feuds. Despite that, the LDF triumphed in the elections, winning 99 of the 140 seats in the State Assembly. But this change of guard did very little to put the decentralisation programme back on its tracks; instead, as the factional feud in the CPI(M) and struggles among coalition partners reached new levels, the LDF government remained paralysed and began to taste defeat in all the elections held in the State subsequently. The worst blow was the result of the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, in which the LDF lost 16 of the 20 seats, and the byelections held later on to the Alappuzha, Ernakulam and Kannur seats in the State Assembly. It also failed to win the majority of the byelections held to the local bodies after 2006.

This is what makes the October elections to the local self-government institutions so much more important for the ruling LDF than it is, perhaps, for the Opposition Front. The results will also be keenly analysed for the impact they would have on the future of the democratic decentralisation process and for women's political empowerment in Kerala.