Assessing the Compliance of the Local Self-Governance Act for PESA in Jharkhand: A Policy Review After Two-and-a-Half Decades of its Inception

The ‘Panchayat Extension to the Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996’ has completed twenty-six years since its inception. Despite this, it remained dissonant in four out of 10 PESA states before 2022, affecting nearly half of the population residing in the Fifth Schedule Areas (FSA), which are predominantly inhabited by indigenous and tribal peoples with their customary laws, social norms, and traditional practices of common resources. Two states, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, implemented the state-specific PESA Guidelines in 2022, but Jharkhand and Odisha have yet to do so. This paper analyses the status of compliance with all the 13 provisions of the PESA Act under the ‘5-E approach’ model with main sections as Effectiveness, Efficiency, Ethical Considerations, Manageability or Evaluation of Alternatives and Establishment of Recommendations for positive change in a tribal-dominated Jharkhand, where 16 out of 24 districts come under the provisions of PESA comprising 32 distinct schedule tribes. The paper indicates that the morally acceptable separate PESA Rules have to be framed with the resolution to be passed in Jharkhand, which will confer a right-based approach to authority and powers essential for the indigenous and tribal people to act as an institution of self-government. Moreover, Sustainable Development Goal Target 16.7 aims to ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making at all levels, and PESA can act as a means to ensure it.