IMPROVING RURAL GOVERNANCE

The 73rd constitutional amendment transferred great amounts of governance responsibility to local governing bodies i.e. Gram Panchayats and Gram Sabhas. The amount of resources transferred to these institutions under the 14th finance commission are immense. If planned and implemented better these resources can be critical in development of rural areas of India. There are several challenges in achieving full potential of these decentralised governance institutions, some of these are:

  • Rural Governance
  • Rural Governance
  • Rural Governance
  • Rural Governance
  • Trust gap between citizens and their governing institutions
  • Lack of capacity of local governing institutions with regard to fulfilling aspirations of their citizens
  • Lack of resources
  • Inadequate transfer of powers and responsibilities to these institutions in true spirit

Overall Goal of Governance Programme

Objectives of Governance Initiative

  • Promote and strengthen good governance practices among Panchayats
  • Providing enabling assistance to panchayats towards developing and implementing long-term participatory multi-sector plans around the key development sectors
  • Enable panchayats to improve access to information and entitlements for improving the quality of lives of their citizens

Approach

The strategy of the programme is to bring three key stakeholders - citizens, Panchayats and government administration on one platform, and to establish a smooth communication's information flow, data, execution action, results etc. among all these stakeholders. Our approach is to work with both the demand side as well with the supply side for improvement in overall governance system

Major Activities

  • Capacity building of PRIs and Citizens on decentralized governance, integrated planning, budgeting etc.
  • Facilitating Mahila Sabha and Gram Sabha at village level
  • Facilitating preparation of integrated Village Development Plans (VDPs)
  • Support Gram Panchayat(GP) in accessing resources from different departments/schemes to implement VDPs.
  • Facilitate GPs to undertake pro-active disclosure
  • Setting up Nagrik Soochna Kendra (Citizen Information Center)
  • Development and distribution of different IEC material (Print, Audio, Video) on public schemes and services.
  • Conducting awareness campaign and organising camps at village/block level for citizen’s access to information and entitlements
  • Training of CBOs and volunteers on use of ICT tools and e-governance