With the flagging off of district governance in Madhya Pradesh, Digvijay Singh's experiment in decentralisation has been taken a step forward. This can only be good news at a time when the Karnataka government has succeeded in indefinitely putting off the gram panchayat elections scheduled for later this month and Bihar has not even thought of constituting panchayats.The J.H. Patel regime, which has cited problems in delimitation, is clearly wary of testing the electoral waters just a few months before it faces assembly elections, thereby giving the opposition any chance of securing a morale booster. But Patel and his ilk would do well to heed the lesson of November 1998: endorsement of grassroots democracy can pay unexpected dividends. Indeed, when the people of Madhya Pradesh defied pollsters and political pundits - with their theories about the incumbency factor and factional pitfalls - and returned Singh for a second term in the chief minister's office, hindsight immediately offered the reason: hissuccess in effecting the panchayati raj revolution coupled with grassroots development programmes like the education guarantee scheme.Singh's new plan aims at bridging the gap between elected panchayats and civic bodies through the district planning committees, which have been authorised to draw up integrated development plans. District governments -consisting of district panchayats, MLAs and MPs from the area, a minister from the state government and the district collector - will also be conferred a range of powers which have so far been the preserve of Bhopal.For instance, arms dealers can now renew their licences in their districts instead of having to troop down to Bhopal and a decision to suspend land revenue in case of calamities will no longer be taken by the state secretariat. But as often happens with the best of intentions, attention to detail is at a premium. While 45 districts are all set to commence functioning as ``units of the state government'', as the chief minister prefers to callhis vision of participatory democracy, the situation is far from clear in 16 others, which were formed on the eve of the assembly elections and have no administrative infrastructure to speak of.The key question, however, is: is this really a step towards participatory democracy? While there can be no gainsaying the imperative to involve grassroots units in decision-making and development, there is a danger that this new dispensation may remain confined to an administrative shake-up. Simply installing a new brains trust may not translate into a more responsive and participatory work culture. Besides, the collector - as the secretary of the district planning committee - would virtually be the chief executive of the district government, gaining immensely in power at the expense of divisional commissioners and other bureaucrats. Besides inviting discontent from senior civil servants, this move could also engender a babu-neta nexus. Who is to say that a minister in charge of a district will not pullstrings with the chief minister to ensure that his favourite bureaucrat is appointed collector to do his bidding? Digvijay Singh will have to dwell on these hazards if he wants to deliver the declared fruits of his participatory democracy.
