Devolution of Financial Power to Local Self-Governments

The article notes that though it was an early starter in decentralisation programmes, West Bengal seems to have failed to keep pace with the resurgence of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) in India during the 1990s and is now lagging behind other states. The Mukarji and Bandyopadhyay Committee found in their evaluation report in 1993 that the PRIs of West Bengal were suffer-ing from conceptual and programmatic constraints. Inability of the state to perceive the PRIs as self-government institutions was denoted as a conceptual constraint which, the Committee felt, eventually led to a programmatic constraint. The present study demonstrates that the conceptual limitation originally identified by the 1993 Committee appears to be legitimised in the very con-ceptualisation of the ‘feasibility frontier’ offered by the Left Front Government of West Bengal.