Paper short abstract:

Public participation and public accountability in welfare schemes has been diminishing perceptibly owing to a strong tendency towards centralisation of government. This can be reversed by acknowledging and assigning the role of local government in policy-making and implementation.

Paper long abstract:

The growing centralisation of governance has resulted in diminishing public expression of democratic dissent even in fairly robust democracies like India. Consequently public participation in welfare schemes has also suffered. The state has been perceptibly moving away from genuine concern for people's welfare towards a greater pre-occupation with populism for the perpetuation of the political party in power at the Centre or in States.

Democratic decentralisation with local governments being given earmarked funds, functions and functionaries is the answer to restore the concept of welfare to centerstage in policy formulation and implementation. Community participation is crucial to identifying needs and prevailing inequities for programme formulation. For welfare to be socially enabling, policy-making must reflect people's perception of their issues and suggested remedial measures which uphold their dignity and are conducive to enhanced social mobility and access to opportunities of economic growth. This has to be a continual process of delineating distribution of decision-making power among central, provincial and local governments. The state intervention for welfare in a particular geographical or social sphere should be properly identified as the domain of that tier of government which is vested with the authority to formulate and implement such policy directly impacting the public at that particular level. Local government's role in problem-identification, policy formulation and policy implementation would involve optimum people's participation and public accountability which would greatly increase the efficacy of welfare delivery.

In the present scenario in India, such a conscious movement towards democratic decentralisation and the recognition of the role of Local Government would have to involve a re-imagining of the architecture for social welfare. This could include precisely defining the extent of powers of all three tiers of government, the areas of interface, the restructuring of the bureaucracy and the police, the reframing of tools of government like financial institutions, accounting and audit, data management and other regulatory systems. Such redesigning would have to be carried out in accordance with Constitutional means and procedures. But it is by doing so that the Local Governments would come into their own and in the process, democracy would be strengthened for the greater wellbeing and understanding imbued with human dignity, for the community, society as a whole.