Ever growing failures of centralised governance and increasing focus on good governance prompted the policy makers to pay more attention on decentralisation the world over for the past few decades resulting in more emphasis on local governance. But most of those attempts have resulted in half-hearted reforms, blatant reversals or partial successes. 

The State of Kerala, lying in the south west part of federal India, has been witnessing an experiment in decentralisation as part of this global phenomenon for more than a decade and that leaves an imprint of promising hope. Kerala could set a good framework in all facets of decentralisation. There is no doubt Kerala has been a very fertile land for decentralisation due to its resourcefulness, infrastructural attainments and progressive political consciousness.

Kerala launched the participative, people oriented decentralisation movement in 1996 under its much acclaimed “Peoples Plan Campaign’. Since then, the campaign passed through phases of experimentation, consolidation and ongoing institutionalisation. The Campaign took decentralised planning as an entry point into a broad spectrum of reforms in local governance such as building up governance structures, devolving finance, functions & functionaries, setting up systems for good governance and so forth. Certainly Kerala needs to go far ahead along the difficult path of decentralisation of powers. But the campaign succeeded in leaving a worthy methodology of multi-level decentralised planning, probably with no parallel in the world, for others to learn, modify and experiment elsewhere.

On Decentralisation in Kerala

The distinctiveness of Kerala decentralisation is that it has formalised a participatory framework, with built in social accountability measures, to take in citizens’ involvement in local planning and governance, in harmony with the national and regional policies. Public consultation is being done at the bottom most electoral constituency called Ward/Grama Sapha. Such consultation meetings are convened by the elected member of the constituency. The information collected from this consultation process is fed into Local Government Development Report that provides the development status and potential of the local government. Working Groups for each sector translates the ideas into draft development projects in compliance with the guidelines of the State. The local government appraises the projects, matches them with the available resources and approves with necessary refinement, before submitting them to the district Planning Committee in the form of a consolidated local plan for final sanctioning. The District Planning Committee, with the help of Technical Advisory Groups, examine the plan for technical viability and compliance with the government guidelines and sanction the plan which will be implemented by the concerned local government with the help of its officers, working Groups or Stake Holder Groups.

The framework of Kerala decentralisation has built-in features of good governance. Social accountability is integrated into the process, citizens’ consultation is possible at every state, involvement of non-governmental stake holders is possible, right to information is built-in, Ombudsman oversees public grievances, community contracting is allowed and similar possibilities are integrated in the framework. But some academics view that the celebrated ‘People’s Planning Campaign’, when pared down to substantial elements, yields a motley patchwork of reform ideas such as ‘participatory democracy’,  ‘pro-poor growth’, ‘good governance’. ‘social capital’, ‘new public management’, ‘gender mainstreaming’ etc, borrowed from the various alternative frameworks for democracy-and-development.