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19in the 1990s in the State, an imminent policy shift from land reforms to contract farming,and growing austerity in State-level spending, the ‘third’ generation panchayats areenvisaged to play a new role. That is to say, they are expected to become more active ingenerating their own resources. 7 Tied to this new imperative of panchayats raising fundsare issues of fiscal autonomy and fiscal responsibility and their possible effects onredistributive goals. These are the sets of issues that will engage us in the second phase ofour research.At this point, however, we push back our enquiry to focus on the political as wellas legislative initiatives in decentralisation reforms, undertaken by the ruling coalition inWest Bengal during the period between late 1970s and mid-1990s. Based upon the analysisof relevant documents and Acts, Legislative Assembly debates and proceedings, andinterviews with academics, senior administrators and politicians, we summarise belowour findings regarding the constellation of forces that has made the decentralisationexperiment happen in the State, the sweep of State legislative measures, the concerns andconflicts of major political parties evinced through Assembly debates, the nature of party-PRI relationship and relationship between ‘local power’ and State-level politics. 8 Whilethe literature on decentralisation reforms in India is quite vast now, varieties ofdecentralisation within the nation, their varying contexts and implications remain a relativelyunderstudied area. Our comparative account of the ‘politics of Panchayati Raj’ in the threeselected States will hopefully shed some light on these not-so-well-understood issues. Toput it another way, there is a great deal of scope to learn from ‘within’ India (Dreze andSen, 2002). Comparisons are always difficult within, leave alone, between nations. Still,nations share some common problems which persist despite their contextual specificities.Hence, results of this study will likely have some implications beyond national borders, asthey will hopefully throw light on international understanding of both democratic institutionsand democratic practice. Arguments in the rest of the paper are developed in three parts. Insection II, we attempt to build up a political narrative of the PR system in West Bengal.Section III discusses the relevant PR legislations in the State, the core issues that emergedduring Legislative Assembly debates around these legislative initiatives and then undertakesa thematic analysis of the Panchayat Act of 1973. In section IV, we revert back, althoughvery briefly, to the question of fiscal devolution and look for some pointers for futureresearch.