Planning from Below. Marta Harnecker
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that receive resources express their solidarity with those non-organized. As soon as a community expresses their desire to organize themselves, they should receive external support to help them carry out their project (volunteers, activists, workshops, etc.).
2) THE EXPERIENCE OF DECENTRALIZED PARTICIPATORY PLANNING IN KERALA
a) Three levels of local rural self-government
122. In India, there exists legislation regarding participatory decentralized planning.16
123. Article 40 of the 1950 Constitution into practice establishes the need to organize “Grama Panchayats” (village or rural town governments) with as much power as is necessary to allow them to function as units of self-government. En 1992, amendments 73 and 74 were introduced into the Indian Constitution, giving the Panchayats constitutional status and laying the national basis for a process of decentralization. These amendments proposed the decentralization of administration via the creation of three levels of local rural self-government: the lowest level of self-government is the Grama Panchayats, that is, the village government, this is followed by the Block Panchayats, groups of villages organized into “blocks” or administrative units to carry out certain nationally funded development projects and lastly, the District Panchayats.
124. This legislation was strengthened due to the vision of certain political leaders such as the Prime Minister Rajiv Ratna Gandhi17, who said that rather than using intellectuals that are not aware of the needs of the people to design development plans in capital cities and reducing citizens to mere beneficiaries of development, it was necessary to involve people in the process.18
125. However, this legislation has been applied in very few states. One of them is Kerala, one of India’s most populous states. In Kerala, after much thought and research it was decided that the geographic and demographic unit for self-government most closely tied to the people in Kerala would be the rural village or town called “Grama”, which is why the rural government is called Grama Panchayat (government of the town or village). Alongside the three levels of self-government in more rural zones, urban municipalities and municipal corporations exist in the big cities. Later on we will deal with how competencies, financial resources, equipment and personnel were transferred to these levels of self-governments.
b) Transfer of resources and competencies
126. In 1994, the government of Kerala passed the Panchayat Raj Act, thereby providing a solid legal basis for the system of local government and unifying the transference of institutions and personnel to local self-governments along the lines of the principle that everything that could be carried out at a lower level should be decentralized to that level, leaving for higher-up levels only those competencies that cannot be carried out at a lower level. This meant that the Grama Panchayats, the lowest level of self-government, had to assume many of the functions that were previously carried out at a higher level. This constituted an attempt to implement the concept of subsidiarity that we briefly described in paragraph 40 and that is considered in greater detail below in paragraph 148.
127. In the Kerala experiment a third of all financial resources dedicated to development, as well as a large number of competencies, were transferred from that state level to the Grama Panchayats (governments in rural villages with an average of 25 thousand inhabitants), the lowest level governments.
128. A similar Kerala Municipalities Act was also passed in 1994 to cover the smaller cities.
129. This led to the emergence of two different administrative structures of local self-government: those in rural zones and those in urban areas. Currently, in the rural area there are 14 District Panchayats (the largest unit below the state level), 152 Block Panchayats (groups of Grama Panchayats set up by the central government for administration of centrally sponsored development programs) and 941 Grama Panchayats (rural villages) and in urban areas there are 87 Municipalities and 6 Municipal Corporations. Below is a diagram illustrating this situation.19
130. In 1996 the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M) led a coalition of progressive forces that won a majority in the statewide assembly elections and that year launched the “People's Campaign” for decentralized planning. This campaign brought a fundamental change in the roles that the different levels of local and regional government would play from then on.
c) From the rural village to meetings in smaller areas: wards and neighborhood areas
131. The starting point for the People’s Campaign was a full afternoon assembly of citizens charged with expressing the felt needs of their communities. During the entire afternoon, residents expressed their most deeply felt needs.
132. Once the lowest level of self-government had been decided upon, those responsible for the planning process in Kerala realized that convening an assembly of all residents in a densely-populated territory or town, implied having to hold assemblies of more than 1000 people, something that did not facilitate meaningful participation.
133. That is why they decided to hold popular assemblies (grama sabhas) not at the level of the village but instead at the lower level of the electoral wards they were divided into. Urban municipalities and municipal corporations (6 big cities in the state of Kerala in those years) also conducted assemblies in wards or electoral circumscriptions.
134. Meetings in the wards involved plenaries in which all those present and the smaller working groups dedicated to discussing different issues contributed, with the aim of ensuring the best possible level of participation. However, even these spaces turned out to be too large; accordingly in the third and fourth years of the campaign for some tasks they set up neighborhood areass (40-50 families) that began to carry out many of the functions of the grama sabha or ward assembly, such as discussing the local plan, revising the plan’s implementation and selecting which people or entities should receive resources.20
135. Throughout the process it is made clear to people that they were making decisions about real investments in their communities and not just approving decisions already taken from above.21[5]
136. Subsequent stages of the campaign included additional assemblies, election of delegates to various specialized seminars, recruitment of volunteer technical staff from among retirees, prioritization of projects by the elected village or urban councils, and public monitoring and evaluation procedures.
137. Higher levels of administration were instructed in ways to fit local projects into regional plans and a massive education and experience sharing program was launched for activists at all levels. It was a very ambitious initiative that demanded the mobilization of the energies and resources of large sections of the society.
138. One of the strongest points of the PP process in Kerala was precisely the emphasis the organizers placed on training various participants: residents, technicians, representatives and volunteers. Different levels of training programs were created, each with its own respective manual, training camps, meetings and, later on, seminars where participants could exchange experiences.
139. There is a Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA) where, twice a year, elected representatives from different parts of the state come to participate in training sessions that last several days. One piece of information demonstrates the emphasis they have placed on training cadres: in just one year (2004-2005), 249 programs were run with 29,000 participants.
140. A lot of importance has also been placed on what they call “training trainers”, that is, those people that go on to train residents in their own communities,22 and training through practical experience. KILA also publishes a journal on local decentralized administration in English. It can be accessed at: http://kila.ac.in/node/61.
d) Decentralization of important financial resources to the lower levels
141. To