Letter of the new law

The contest was between a blazer, a gas stove and a balloon, among other things. In the Panchayat elections at village Bajawa, Jhunjhunu district, Rajasthan, symbols included everything from sporting goods and household appliances to items of vanity. While voters filed into the local school to cast their ballot, clusters of young and old men stood around the village square awaiting the counting of votes. Anticipation simmered alongside pans of tea and pots of rice. Yet this was no ordinary election.

Last month, the Rajasthan government disqualified thousands of villagers from contesting in the ongoing Panchayat elections. An ordinance stipulated that anyone contesting the Zila Parishad or Panchayat Samiti polls should have passed Class X; for the post of sarpanch, candidates should have completed Class VIII, and Class V in reserved areas.

Among those disqualified is Norti Bai, 69, former sarpanch of Harmara Gram Panchayat, Ajmer district, who never went to school and has no formal education. According to the 2011 Census, the rural literacy rate — a basic ability to read and write — for Rajasthan’s male population is 76.16 per cent; for women, it is 45.8 per cent. The ordinance has drawn criticism from several political and social quarters, which have termed it undemocratic, unconstitutional and biased against the least privileged such as the SC, ST communities and women. In Panchayat elections, villagers elect leaders or the decision-makers for Gram Panchayat operations, who will manage large development projects, public service delivery and complex financial records.

The state government has defended its ordinance by asserting that since the sarpanches deliver key employment, watershed and rural development schemes, it is necessary for them to have basic education. Such qualifications, however, are not mandated for MPs or MLAs, who deal with much larger constituencies. Despite the lack of formal education, Norti knows how to use computers, work MNREGA excel sheets as well as use Right to Information. As the first dalit woman sarpanch of her village, she also pushed for higher literacy and computer education for women in her village.

Norti, who challenged the ordinance in the High Court, which subsequently refused to grant a stay order, says such legislation is completely unwarranted. “An illiterate sarpanch is also competent to discharge his/her duties. There is a Gram Sabha, a collective that discusses all issues and policies. There are educated people in that. We get their opinions. And that of gram sevaks and engineers and Block Development Officers (BDOs) — who are all literate. So they helped me understand issues and carry out my responsibilities. I was never alone. For a sarpanch, experience is most important — it’s a much better teacher than school,” she says.

If the ordinance had been in existence during the Panchayat election in 2010, 9.17 per cent of the sarpanches now in office — elected from 9,166 Gram Panchayats — would have been ineligible. In the general category, the percentage of illiterate sarpanches stands at 6.1 per cent; 11.9 per cent in the SC category; 11.06 in the ST category; and 8.4 per cent under OBCs. The effect across districts is even more disparate: in Karauli, one of the most backward districts in India, out of the 57 sarpanches in Panchayats reserved for SC candidates, 45 are illiterate, or 78.9 per cent; in Nagaur, only 7.8 per cent of incumbent SC sarpanches are unlettered.

But what difference does an educated sarpanch make to a village? A paper by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government from 2014 has quantified the effects of a sarpanch’s education on the Gram Panchayat’s own progress in education, the quality of management of government programmes and the misuse of political influence for private gain. It shows, for instance, that education erases the ‘winner’s effect’ in terms of the locations of new MNREGA projects: nearly 50 per cent more MNREGA projects are started in winners’ neighbourhoods than in the losers’ if the sarpanch is uneducated; this difference disappears if he or she has a high-school degree.

Jeffrey McManus, the author of the paper, is a senior technical manager at IDinsight, a US-based non-profit that helps policymakers generate evidence to improve social impact. “There is good causal evidence that electing an educated sarpanch leads to a fall in leakages from public programmes, on average,” McManus says over email. “I think the ordinance is well-intentioned: educated sarpanches bring many benefits to their Panchayats in terms of better management of public programmes, stronger governance institutions and, ultimately, better development outcomes. But I’m not sure the ordinance is the best way to improve the pool of candidates for local elections, especially if it leaves behind candidates from marginalised communities.”

An educated sarpanch furthers education too. McManus’ paper shows that Rajasthani Gram Panchayats that elected an educated sarpanch in 2005 had a 7.5 per cent higher growth in literacy rates than those that elected an uneducated candidate. The paper also points to a more vicious cycle: Gram Panchayats with lower average education levels are more likely to elect less educated sarpanches, who then go on to invest less in education, thus ensuring a shallower future pool of educated candidates.

In Bajawa, which is in one of the most literate districts of Rajasthan, all nine candidates are male and literate. But that is not what makes them most eligible. Villager Rajendra Singh, an Indian Army soldier, says, “The last sarpanch was a jat (majority community), so this time the other castes got together to vote a non-jat. Voters will first look at candidates within their caste and then everything else, because people will only want to work for their own caste.”

Singh is not far from the truth. The discriminatory effects of this ordinance get even more complex as it gets entwined in such matters of caste and tribe. Research by Rohini Pande, a Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, on SC/ST sarpanches and placement of public goods within the village, points to one such nuance. “We saw a very particular preference for geographical clustering of public goods where they live. So, if you have a non-SC/ST sarpanch, chances are that delivery of these goods will be placed away from SC/ST communities as their hamlets tend to be located separately from villages,” says Pande.

She points out another effect, in a cross-section of caste, gender and education. “There are considerable restrictions on mobility and decision-making among upper-caste women who might be educated, while tribal women, who might be illiterate, can have more autonomy in their operations. So, with this ordinance, you may actually get administrators who may be more educated but less efficient,” she says, adding, “even if education matters, this ordinance cannot be the only response. One of the first responses, for instance, needs to be about increasing voters’ interest in electing educated candidates.”

And what do voters want? In a survey of 10,008 voters by McManus, honesty and education emerged as the most important qualities of a sarpanch. Shubh Karan, 56, a candidate from Bajawa, also believes honesty is most important — except, he says, “to tell you the truth, honesty has nothing to do with education. It comes from within.”

(Padmaparna Ghosh is a Delhi-based writer)

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