Book Extract | Unpacking Participatory Democracy: From Theory to Practice

Wajahat Habibullah

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s political odyssey had convinced him that, ‘The questions that a country puts are a measure of that country’s political development. Often the failure of that country is due to the fact that it has not put the right question to itself’ (Nehru 2004, 260–261). The Constitution, with its 73rd and 74th Amendments, sought to turn this conviction into reality through institutionalising public participation in governance, which was carried to its logical conclusion with the right to ask questions being made a statutory right with the passage of the Right to Information Act 2005.

The greatest challenge to independent India, recognised by the Congress government under Indira Gandhi, who understood the urgent need to address it and made it the pivot of her 1971 election triumph with the slogan garibi hatao, was India’s unacceptable level of poverty. Yet, despite this resolve, programmes designed to create employment that would generate income for the rural poor were delayed because funds were not released by the state governments to the districts.

Even where funds were released, implementation was poor, with complaints of underpayment of wages and leakages. These problems were typical not only of many programmes which the Central government funded, but also of those that fell in the areas reserved for the state governments, and which had to be implemented by the state and district machinery. The Central government would release funds to the state governments, but it had little control over how these funds were spent.

It was shortly after his visit to Odisha’s tribal districts of Kalahandi and Phulbani in 1985 that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi made his oft-quoted observation that out of every rupee spent by the government to help the rural poor, only 15 paise actually reached the target. But this observation rested not on Gandhi’s assessment of corruption levels in government, which many construe as the reference, but on his realisation of the massive expenses involved in servicing a bureaucratic structure to administer poverty alleviation measures. An empirical study undertaken a few years thereafter, supervised by the well-known economist Kirit Parikh, later Member of the Planning Commission, to calculate the percentage of funds spent on the Public Distribution System (PDS) that actually reached the poor, came up with 16 paise as the best estimate, remarkably close to Gandhi’s assessment.

Cutting Edge of Governance

The face of governance before the common citizen was distant and inaccessible. In his term as prime minister, Gandhi sought means to ensure public participation in governance. He turned first to the district administration and the office of the Collector, which he considered the cutting edge of the administration. He toyed with the idea of smaller districts, under the mistaken impression that this might lead to ease of access for the otherwise excluded, until he realised that the answer lay in involving the public itself in the delivery of service. In a series of meetings culminating in 1988 with District Collectors in different parts of the country, meant to elicit their views on this issue, Gandhi urged the District Collectors to speak freely and share their views on how the system could be strengthened. He also asked if Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) should be given constitutional status. Many District Collectors were in favour of such a Constitutional Amendment. A draft Constitution Amendment Bill passed by the Lok Sabha failed in the Rajya Sabha, and led to the announcement of the 1989 elections. The succeeding National Front government cobbled together after the elections was also unable to muster the necessary support, leaving it to the Congress-led government, headed by Narasimha Rao, which came to power in 1991, to bring the necessary amendments to the Constitution. The meetings with Collectors, followed by a conference of chief ministers in 1988, became the launching pad that concluded with the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, supported by a majority of chief ministers, that crowned local government with constitutional fiat.

Making Democracy Real

Rajiv Gandhi’s field visits and the feedback from the concurrent evaluation of the twenty-point programme that targeted poverty helped to convince him that the government’s rural development programmes would not eliminate poverty without much greater local partnership and ownership. It became increasingly obvious to him that robust PRIs would be the means to bring this about. The Balwant Rai Mehta Committee had made elaborate recommendations in 1957 for the creation of a three-tiered structure, with the Gram Panchayat at the village level, the Panchayat Samiti at the block level, and the Zilla Parishad at the district level. Some states had put these structures in place, but because there was no compulsion to hold regular elections, and neither was authority decentralised, the system had flagged. Article 40 of the Constitution enjoined the state to organise and empower village panchayats, but this was only a nod to Mahatma Gandhi’s commitment to the ideal of Purna Swaraj through Gram Swaraj—total freedom by local self-government—and hence was only part of the Directive Principles of State Policy, which stated: ‘The State shall take steps to organise village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government.’ Babasaheb Ambedkar, the father of the Constitution, was, while introducing the Draft Constitution for a second reading, condemnatory of village self-government: ‘What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit.’

What Ambedkar had observed was doubtless true of his time, and part of the detritus of colonial exploitation. As the executor of plans for rural development, the government had in 1952 instituted the Community Development Programme. Blocks were established as units of development administration, each with a Block Development Officer (BDO) assisted by Village Level Workers (VLW), who exercised financial authority. Among them were many who fed off this rich financial repository and satisfied the corrupt elements in an ever-hungry political structure, and then went on to become powerful political leaders. This led to the introduction of the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee. Erudite jurist L. M. Singhvi, while reviewing the possible consequences of the Committee’s report, recognised that the ‘lack of public involvement and participation began to be perceived as an impediment in the successful implementation of the Community Development and National Extension Service Programmes’.1 Yet, the post of the BDO was to persist, and this institutional framework was to become the nemesis of democracy at the grassroots. Rajiv Gandhi credited his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru with laying the foundation of parliamentary democracy. He believed that he needed to do more to make democracy a reality.

Panchayati Raj

Rajiv Gandhi often lamented that the total number of elected representatives in India, including both Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs), was about 60,000, and thus they were accessible to only a few influential members of the public. For the majority of India’s (then) 800 million, access was only through the bureaucracy. To explore alternatives, a Committee on Revitalisation of Panchayati Raj Institutions for Democracy and Development was set up in 1986, under the Chairmanship of L. M. Singhvi, the eminent jurist. Panchayat elections had not been conducted for many years, and the system had effectively been undermined by local elites. As noted by Singhvi, according to a Committee set up by the Planning Commission, which presented its report in December 1985, a three-tier system had been adopted in twelve states and one Union Territory, and a two-tier system existed in four states and two Union Territories. The electoral system also varied from state to state. In the design of structures, electoral procedures, powers, and functions, there was considerable variation in the panchayat institutions of the states. At that time, there were more than 217,300 village panchayats in the country, covering over 96 per cent of about 5.79 lakh inhabited villages and 92 per cent of the rural population. There were about 4,526 Panchayati Samitis of different nomenclatures at the block, taluka, or tehsil level, and about 330 Zilla Parishads covering about 76 per cent of the districts in the country; each Zilla Parishad had an average of 13–14 Panchayati Samitis and about 660 Gram Panchayats. The Singhvi Committee Report, after somewhat ruefully recounting the debate in the Constituent Assembly that ruled out mandatory Panchayati Raj, recommended that the PRIs be given constitutional status assuring free, fair, and regular elections overseen by the Election Commission of India, and legal protection from executive subversion through the institution of a Panchayati Raj Judicial Tribunal in each state, with access to adequate financial resources.

As the officer monitoring the PM’s Twenty-point Programme since the days of Mrs Gandhi’s government, I had, as Joint Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in 1985–1986, been assigned the task of processing the PM’s new vision of decentralised governance through the instrument of the Panchayati Raj. The PM had come to the conclusion that this was the best institutional mechanism with which to bring rural India within the ambit of governance. He was of the idea that essential to democracy in India was a third tier of elected government at the basic level of administration, which would give a voice to all sections of the people. This was to be in addition to the tiers of democracy represented by the Union and state governments. It would involve a substantial change in the system of district administration as it had evolved over the centuries, centred on the District Magistrate/District Collector, who controlled the district administration and was not accountable to any local elected body. This was in fact a legacy of the Mughal administration, adapted by the British to better serve their imperial interests and replicated across Britain’s vast empire. Although panchayats existed at the time, they were concerned with narrow, local issues (thus provoking Ambedkar’s scathing comment). The Collector was responsible only to the state government, and while he might respond to the demands of the elected MP and a few elected MLAs, he was not answerable to any other elected representative. An elected local government was designed to effectively turn the district administration into an executive responsible to a local elected legislature.

What was contemplated then was a dramatic change, both in the concept and form of governance. From being a means to perpetuate imperial rule, governance was to develop into a means of seeking and managing equitable economic growth. Yet, the bureaucratic infrastructure remained relatively constant and grounded in mistrust. The reason for this mistrust can be found in the legacy of governance in India, stemming directly at the district level from the Mughal period,2 adapted and extended with an archaic Secretariat system in the colonial period, and then becoming an elitist structure informing both systems which continues, despite Panchayati Raj, to subsist to this day.

The old structure needed to be replaced. But while change was indeed in the offing, there was no political or even administrative consensus on the objectives to be met. Participation in governance is too often seen as a struggle for sharing power. But governance must be distinct from the exercise of power and must comprise an assurance of security of life and property, both of which are predicated on the security of the nation, as conceived not by the security forces or the bureaucracy, but very clearly by the people of India themselves, whose concerns must be addressed by these instruments of governance. If this is understood, it is easier to see that what was being sought was a new threshold in India’s form of governance.

What, then, were to be the future prospects? Gandhi certainly saw the bureaucrat of the future as a facilitator, and because of their wide-ranging field experience, as a potentially effective manager; hence his repeated outreach to field officers, which strengthened this view. For this to actually happen, however, an action plan is required to combine effective administration with a responsive administration—an action plan designed to deliver what the people, and not the bureaucracy, identified as their need. There is a general consensus that good governance must be participatory, transparent, and accountable (Morris 2002, 19). As I have sought to explain, the system, thanks to perceptions enshrined in the Official Secrets Act 1923 (not yet abrogated even as I write), was firmly grounded in mistrust. If governance was to be participatory, the public was required to be a participant. Rajiv Gandhi believed that restructuring the system of government in this way would make the administration much more responsible to the elected representatives and would increase local ownership of and participation in development programmes. The consequence was the decentralisation of governance through the 73rd and 74th Amendments of 1993 to the Constitution, making Panchayat Raj, an instrument of local self-government, a constitutional imperative, and thereby making every registered voter a legislator for their own village through the gram sabha (the village community), or township through the municipality. This was built upon to ensure accountability and transparency in India’s governance along with one of the world’s strongest laws on the subject, the Right to Information Act 2005. This Act was initiated in 2004 by the Manmohan Singh government, complying with an election pledge of the Congress-led UPA, following on the demand initiated by activists like Aruna Roy of the MKSS, who had been nurtured by Rajiv Gandhi’s legislation on citizens’ rights.

Addressing the challenge of social inclusion continues. A reproduction of a letter I received over email on Friday, 13 April 2012, will, I hope, demonstrate the access to authority that a Muslim villager, described in the Planning Commission’s report as among the excluded, enjoys today, like every Indian.

To,

The Chairman

National Commission for Minorities New Delhi

Sub: PM’s New 15-point programme is not properly inforced in Bihar state3

Sir,

I humbly submit that the PM’s New 15-point programme is not properly implimented in letter and spirit as per guidelines.

Infect there is no such committees are constituted neither in the state lavel nor in district level for the benifits of the minority communities.

As because it has been initiated by the P.M.O, the govt of Bihar is not seriously intrested to implement the same on political bias perhaps. The govt of Bihar issued a notification No.456 dated 17/07/2007 in this regard without proper and propertionate representation of the minorities. According to the Govt’s notification No 456 dt.17/07/2007 only the govt. officials of the concerning departnment are included in such committees since last 5 years.

Hence virtually there is no progress at all in this regard.

I therefor request your kind honour to look after the same as it will change the face and status of the minority people at large economically, educationaly and moraly.

Thanks,

Your’s Faithfully

Section 243(d) of the Constitution of India specifies that Panchayat means ‘an institution (by whatever name called) of self-government’, constituted under Article 243(b) for the rural areas. Drafted assiduously under supervision, first by Mani Shankar Aiyar in the PMO and thereafter by Meenakshisundaram, who like me was from the IAS batch of 1968, part of the same Andhra Pradesh cadre as Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, the objective behind the Narasimha Rao government bringing this amendment was to give voice to the voiceless in governance. Key to the effective inclusion of even the most far-flung and isolated communities in governance is the Gram Panchayat or the village council, which can prove to be the repository for scheme information, citizen surveys, fiscal information, etc. The Government of India has for decades been the world’s largest investor, in terms of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), in poverty eradication. Panchayati Raj Institutions, more than any other instrument of the State, were specially designed to include individual citizens in rural areas in aspects of governance. Gram sabhas, designed to be the font of the country’s legislative framework, transform every citizen into a legislator.

While helping to educate the public on the benefits provided by the government, Gram Panchayats can in turn educate the government on the aspirations of residents of villages by implementing these benefits in a manner best suited to their aspirations. But this can happen only with the devolution of functions, funds, and functionaries by state administrations. Although clearly enunciated in policy, such devolution has been patchy, thus making panchayats today not institutions of ‘self-government’ as envisioned in Article 243 of the Constitution, but organs of the state administration and a conduit for development finance. Nevertheless, as the third level of representative government, this body can become the service provider (that Rajiv Gandhi had dreamt of) for over-the-counter services, certificates, taxation, billing, licenses, ration cards, and a host of other such services at the grassroots. In order to keep the citizenry informed, this third tier of government can work with citizens as a group (gram sabhas) and citizens as individuals, whose concerns and questions could also be appropriately addressed with reference to the relevant authority. This would ensure efficiency and better feedback and accountability, a convenience both to the citizen and to government, thus ensuring a smooth devolution of administrative authority that will include the citizen in the process of decision-making.

Why did this new threshold, with the public leading development instead of the bureaucracy, not materialise? In the 1970s, the Union government created the Small Farmers Development Agencies (SFDAs), which were meant to channel Union budget money directly to districts, and thence to the Blocks, bypassing state budgets. The government genuinely felt that this was necessary for the efficient implementation of poverty alleviation programmes, initiated after the elections of 1971, in order to prevent delays and diversions of Union government funds by state governments, and to overcome the yearly lapsing of unspent funds channelled through state treasuries. These SFDAs, then, were special service vehicles designed for a specific purpose. As pointed out by T. R. Raghunandan, a dynamic IAS officer from the Karnataka cadre who was to serve as Joint Secretary when Mani Shankar Aiyer was Minister of Panchayati Raj and I was the Secretary, in a note of 4 August 2018, this tendency to create special purpose vehicles for ring-fencing Union government funds mushroomed in the years subsequent to the constitutional amendments, with the active encouragement of IAS officers in line departments in states, who teamed up with their counterparts in the concerned Union Ministries to create direct fiscal transfer systems that bypassed state budgets.

The SFDAs morphed into the District Rural Development Agencies (DRDAs) in 1979. As T. R. Raghunandan said,

These were powerful district-level societies that channelised funds for flagship Government of India programmes such as IRDP, JRY, and suchlike. The only state that did away with DRDAs was Karnataka; this happened because the Secretary of the RDPR department in Karnataka. Dr. S.S. Meenakshisundaram, who sent the proposal for abolishing the DRDAs and merging them with the Zilla Parishad, became the Joint Secretary in the Ministry of RD subsequently and approved his own proposal.

While serving in Narasimha Rao’s PMO, Meenakshisundaram was instrumental in finalising the Bill that brought in the 73rd and 74th Amendments.

Once the panchayats (at all three levels) were mandated through the 73rd Amendment, it quickly became clear that the DRDAs were now obstructing the growth of the former by encroaching into the constitutionally and legally devolved powers of the Zilla Parishads. Yugandhar, the then Secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development (MORD), saw much sense in the merger of DRDAs with the ZP, and moved papers to do so, which included the abolition of a scheme to fund DRDAs. However, the then Minister Sundarlal Patwa, was persuaded by his private secretary, an IAS officer, to not only continue the DRDAs, but to also enlarge the allocations to them and force states such as Karnataka (which had abolished DRDAs) to revive them, on paper at least, so that the state could be eligible to receive funds from the Union government. A letter from Sunderlal Patwa to the state ministers became a lifeline for state RD departments that wanted to wrest back the space they had so reluctantly conceded to ZPs.

The Union Ministry of Panchayati Raj, set up in 2004 under the ministership of Mani Shankar Aiyar, in which I was appointed First Secretary, did what it could to do away with the DRDAs, but the MORD, larger, more influential, and with a bigger budget, did not relent. Some of the justifications that Raghunandan heard in those days from officers in the MORD (not ministers) were blatantly in favour of protecting the domain of the District Collector. One officer from the UP cadre told him that the DRDAs were necessary in UP to enable the DCs to maintain law and order. Apart from the access that district-level IAS officers had to generous allocations from the Union government, the DRDAs also provided them with flexibility to invest these funds in banks and earn interest. Audit reports showed that these interest funds were used to build luxurious quarters and buy air-conditioners and

vehicles, which the officers would not have otherwise been able to afford, as state government rules allowed little luxury. That, Raghunandan holds, was ‘the real reason’ why DRDAs were continued. Even the raisins and cashew nuts offered in district meetings were supplied by the DRDA!

Due to this duplication of development planning and implementation, both of which were originally intended as part of the province of the panchayats, Raghunandan recalls that the Ministry of Panchayati Raj worked with the then Planning Commission, headed at the time by Montek Singh Ahluwalia, to ensure that district development plans were based on the plans initiated by, and at the level of, panchayats. A direct transfer of funds targeting development under the poverty alleviation programmes was instituted. The Ministry of Rural Development had in the meantime set up a Committee headed by V. Ramachandran, to look into the role and relevance of the DRDAs following the enactment of the 73rd Amendment. The Committee recommended the abolition and merger of DRDAs with the ZPs. The then Minister. Jairam Ramesh, passed the orders. But the file was held up in the Ministry, which steadfastly resisted implementing the order till the government changed.

This should answer the question as to what became of Rajiv Gandhi’s vision of instituting local self-government. The Father of our Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, had this dream for India upon winning freedom:

Independence must begin at the bottom. Thus, every village will be a republic or Panchayat having full powers. It follows therefore, that every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world. (Gandhi 1959, 8–9)

But as I write, the DRDAs are alive and kicking. Chairpersons of ZPs have been co-opted to chair or participate in DRDA meetings, but their accounts are separate from the ZP accounts. The PRIs have no independent structure of authority or finance, or indeed an executive accountable to it that would enable them to be the institutions of self-government that the Constitution mandates.

Raghunandan concludes,

The Union Government has now started a movement called the Gram Swaraj Abhiyan. The idea is to inject directly to the Gram Panchayats, programme thrusts and funds of the Union Government. More than 800 Officers of the Union Government, which include a large number of IAS officers, have been allocated to districts, to deal directly with district collectors and implement schemes directly. There is also plenty of pressure on these officers to promote amongst people the impression that these schemes are all directly due to the munificence of the Prime Minister. The DRDA is a vital link in this direct stream of programme management. This approach is a travesty of federalism. While there are political motives behind such approaches, IAS officers have responded to moves towards such centralisation with enthusiasm and have filled in the detail.

The Right to Information

As mentioned earlier, the natural corollary to placing the people’s needs at the centre of governance is the right to information, a reality today in our country, constituting as it does a major leap in evolving towards full democracy. As the Right to Information Act, 2005 celebrated its fifteenth year, there was much heated discussion, often emotional, of the benefits it has brought, as well as the challenges it has forced the government, and indeed the nation, to confront. ‘Scams’ centering on government initiatives had agitated both the government and the public in the opening years of the past decade, leading to a universal clamour for an effective ombudsman, a ‘Lokpal’. This can be said to have been among the causes for the discomfiture in the national elections of 2014 of the very government that piloted the Act. The government that succeeded it avowedly retained the credo of transparency and accountability and sought to distinguish governance from government. The prime minister’s promise in the 2014 campaign was maximum governance with minimum government, and thus a promise of increased participation of the people in governance through the slogan, ‘Sabka saath, sabka vikas’ (‘Together with all, development for all’).

Yet there is a growing feeling that governments have been tardy in promoting transparency and accountability, a feeling exacerbated by the restrictions necessitated by COVID-19. This has been accompanied by positions in Information Commissions being left vacant, with some states being reduced to having single Information Commissioners or none at all, and the Central Information Commission being repeatedly left headless. This is despite the PM announcing, in the 2014 Annual Convention of Information Commissions, that his government intended to use this law to monitor its own functioning. In the words of Barack Hussein Obama, who spoke of his ‘profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government’ on assuming charge of the Presidency of the United States, in his inaugural speech in the East Room of the White House on 28 January 2009, ‘At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike’ (emphasis mine). It is for the citizenry to decide how true the government has been to its promise through the use of the innovative concept of social audit.

It is universally accepted that the essence of government in a democracy must be transparency, with every organ of government, be it executive, judiciary, or legislature, being answerable to the citizen. Hence the Father of the Nation, when describing his vision of self-governance for India, described it as follows: ‘The real Swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of capacity by all to resist authority when abused’ (Gandhi 1925, 41).

India’s Right to Information Act, 2005 therefore declares that democracy requires an informed citizenry and transparency of information, both of which are vital to a government’s functioning and also crucial to containing corruption and holding governments and their instrumentalities accountable to the governed. This is a universal truth of particular relevance to India. Seen in this light, the RTI is an instrument that has the potential to strengthen governance immeasurably. In the words of Kofi Annan, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations,

The great democratizing power of information has given us all the chance to effect change and alleviate poverty in ways we cannot even imagine today. Our task, your task

… is to make that change real for those in need, wherever they may be. With information on our side, with knowledge of a potential for all, the path to poverty can be reversed. 4

Democracy has indeed been challenged by what can only be described as a violent insurrection by those we know as Maoists, and then by sections within the government itself in an effort to promote authoritarianism. But it is my conviction that this has happened because the pace of economic progress in India, spectacular though it might have been before descending into its present regression, has been anything but uniform, either amongst different sections of the Indian community, or even region-wise within states. Those who have felt deprived will feel even more so when they see before their own eyes the fruits of prosperity in their own neighbourhoods, which are not theirs to share or to enjoy. This will come from among those citizens who have never had the opportunity to hold the government accountable.

In conclusion, any commentary on the enforcement of the RTI Act, 2005 must place such a review in perspective, bearing in mind the remarks of Justice Mathew on behalf of the Bench, oft quoted in judicial circles while debating the law:

In a government of responsibility like ours, where all agents of the public must be responsible for their conduct, there can be but few secrets. The people of this country have a right to know every public act, everything that is done in a public way, by their public functionaries … to cover with veil of secrecy the common routine business, is not in the interest of public. (State of UP vs Raj Narain [1975] 4 SCC 428)

This mirrors the observation of that great American apostle of democracy, Justice Brandeis, when he observed that ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’. It is only when that sunlight shines into every crevice of governance that we can finally declare our RTI Act to have been a success. Till that day, we must persevere in our quest to make governance ever more participative, and more inclusive, which is the essence of democratic governance.

Notes

1. L.  M.  Singhvi  Committee  Report  1986,  under  the  head ‘Integrated Vision of Democracy’. Available at https://unacademy. com/content/railway-exam/study-material/polity/characteristics-of-the-l-m-singhvi-committee/ (accessed February 2025).


2. The position of Collector, as the name implies, was instituted under the title Amal Guzar by Raja Todar Mal, head of Mughal imperial finance in the sixteenth century, to collect land revenue, the mainstay of the Empire’s finance.


3. The spellings and syntax used in the email have been preserved verbatim and not corrected in order to uphold the original voice of the letter’s author.


4. UN Press Release SG/SM/6268, 23 June 1997.

Aruna Roy and Suchi Pande (Eds.), Unpacking Participatory Democracy: From Theory to Practice,‎ Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd., 2025. Pb. Pp. 352

Democracy is hailed around the world as the highest form of political organisation. However, transparency, accountability, and participation, key to a functioning democracy, has globally come under increasing threat. With rising statelessness across the world, the concept of citizenship itself is now under question. Unpacking Participatory Democracy offers some ‘inclusive’ approaches to the ideas of development and democracy. Pitted against increasing global intolerance and exclusion, this volume asks: What is participatory democracy? Why is it important? What are the implications of participation within cultural, political, social, economic, religious, and secular contexts? The authors come from diverse fields: academia, media, politics, and social activism. Together, they extend the concept of democracy to encompass multiple ideologues, ideologies, and philosophies, all centred on the engagement of people. They emphasise the need to ensure that all voices—especially the poor and the marginalised—are heard in the process of decision-making.

Wajahat Habibullah, a former civil servant of the J&K IAS cadre, was also India’s first Chief Information Commissioner and Chair, National Commission for Minorities. He has served in different parts of the country and in Washington D.C. He is the author of My Kashmir: The Dying of the Light (2011) and My Years with Rajiv: triumph and Tragedy (2020). He works with NGOs on human rights, democratic functioning, and the need for bureaucratic accountability in democracy. 

Magsaysay Award winner Aruna Roy is a social activist, professor, union organiser and former civil servant, has been living and working with people. She was the president of the National Federation of Indian Women and founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan. Suchi Pande is Scholar in Residence, Accountability Research Center at American University in Washington DC.