Articles by D Bandyopadhyay

Where landlessness and exploitative informal tenancy relationships are the major causes of acute rural poverty and where the bureaucracy has a proven track-record of not reaching the lowest layers of the poor, without land reforms and empowerment of panchayats the best intentions of the Andhra Pradesh government will not give the desired results, leading to enormous investment in the rural sector yielding sub-optimal social returns.

If one wanted to assess, through a single document, the state of governance in India, from the financial angle particularly, one would not find a better alternative than The Activity Report 1998-99 of the Comptroller and Auditor-General.

Uninformed first impressions often tend to be very subjective, not correctly reflecting the reality. On the other hand, through untrained eyes and an open mind one can observe many peculiarities which are liable to escape the more familiar watcher. What the author saw and heard on a group package tour of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

'The Civil Society Response from India', a document issued at the end of a recent seminar in New Delhi to deliberate on the position India should take at the forthcoming session of the UN General Assembly to review the aftermath of the UN Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995, makes a number of recommendations which, though addressed to the General Assembly, are no less relevant to our own central and state governments.

The Constitution (Eighty-Seventh Amendment) Bill 1999 proposes in effect the abolition of elected panchayats at the intermediate level and in some cases of elected zilla parishads. In the same vein, the governor of Andhra Pradesh has promulgated an ordinance seeking to postpone elections to mandal parishads and zilla parishads and to appoint special officers-in-charge to replace the elected representatives of these institutions. What do these moves portend for the democratic structure of our polity?