Revision summary
The 73rd and 74th Amendments create panchayats and municipalities with the Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules. Good local governance needs functions, funds and functionaries, plus live Gram Sabhas and ward committees. Merger helps peri-urban planning, tax and utilities. Merger hurts rural voice, PESA areas and the distinct 73rd settlement. Article 243Q already invents the nagar panchayat as a half-merge. Metropolitan planning committees can share utilities without killing the Gram Sabha. The test is the peri-urban belt, not a nationwide glue.
Model answer
Introduction
- Local bodies are the third stratum after the 73rd and 74th Amendments: panchayats for the village, municipalities for the town. Good governance at that level is water, streets, primary health, schools, property tax and a grievance that does not need a yatra to the Secretariat. Whether rural and urban bodies should merge is the question the census town and the peri-urban belt ask every decade.
Body
Local bodies and good governance
The schedules are live only when functions, funds and functionaries move with them.
- Peg: Articles 243G and 243W, the Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules, and State conformity Acts name the functions; the three Fs decide whether the name is real.
- Peg: Where State Finance Commissions are timely, property tax is collected, and the Gram Sabha or ward committee actually sits, local bodies cut the last-mile gap that line departments cannot.
- Peg: Failures are familiar: parallel schemes that skip the panchayat, MP/MLA local-area funds that recreate a second executive, delayed elections, and a CEO who answers to the State more than to the elected chair.
- Peg: Urban bodies add planning, building bye-laws and transport; rural bodies add land, forests-as-livelihood and MGNREGA — the skill-sets are not identical.
Gains from merger
Census towns and villages glued to a municipal edge already share sewers, labour markets and crime.
- Peg: A nagar panchayat or a municipal merger can unify master plans and stop the jurisdiction shrug over a drain.
- Peg: A wider tax base and a city bus on the village road are real planning gains.
- Peg: Climate drainage and solid waste do not honour the 73rd/74th line; some States have folded peri-urban panchayats into corporations for that reason.
Costs of merger
The 73rd Amendment was a rural political settlement, not a waiting room for a corporation.
- Peg: Merge into a municipal corporation and the farmer’s vote is diluted by an urban density that does not live on that land.
- Peg: PESA Gram Sabhas in Scheduled Areas are a further bar: merger without a Fifth Schedule conversation is a constitutional slight.
- Peg: Forced municipalisation is also a tax event — property tax, trade licence — that villages may not have asked for.
- Peg: The workable line is statutory agglomeration where the census already has: metropolitan planning committees (Article 243ZE) that actually meet, nagar panchayats for transitional areas, and shared utilities without extinguishing the Gram Sabha.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD R[73rd PRIs] --> G[Local goods] U[74th ULBs] --> G P[Peri-urban] --> M[Merge or share] M -->|plan tax drain| U M -->|Gram Sabha PESA| R N[Nagar panchayat] --> M
Conclusion
Local bodies govern well when the three Fs are real. Merging rural and urban houses can fix peri-urban mess. It can also erase a rural constitutional identity. Transitional forms beat a single nationwide glue.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Public charitable trusts have the potential to make India's development more inclusive as they relate to certain vital public issues. Comment.
Next question in the 2024 paper (Q6). View answer →
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Did the Constitution require two separate local systems?
Yes, two chapters. It also invented the nagar panchayat because it knew the village-city line moves.
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Is merger the same as urbanisation?
No. People can urbanise in a census town while the panchayat still exists. Merger is a legal death of one body.
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