View Article - Institute of Development Studies

46performance of elected representatives regarding the implementation of public projectsand iii) to inspect accounts of expenditure and budgets (Ghatak and Ghatak, 2002). Somerecent studies indicate that until now such meetings are not well-attended; only about 20percent of the voters routinely meet and adjourn. Some also note that ‘green room’ decisionsin separate party meetings are held prior to sansad meetings, partly explaining people’slack of interest in such deliberations. Some of these worries may be somewhat premature,as one would expect a process of ‘learning by doing’ to take place after a reasonable timelag. All these will make the analysis of gram sansad meetings an integral component ofour future research.It is useful to bring out one related point here. In the mainstream literature ondecentralisation, the alleged benefits of local level decision-making are to flow from itspresumed information advantage, among others. But the standard focus is on the bottomupgeneration of information to provide planners with more accurate details of local costs,needs and preferences. In the context of fiscal discipline and accountability however (andmore generally in the case of the Right to Information movement), the emphasis is ondemanding access to expenditure records, subjecting these to collective verification (i.e.,social audit) and thus demanding accountability from local authorities. 28 The State-citizenchannel may get clogged, even when the former is tax-financed and in a non-corporateeconomy through the ‘contract Raj’. Thus, the thesis of State responsiveness is expectedto work when people have ‘unclassified’ information which they can collectively scrutinise(the military budget for example is largely immune from public scrutiny) and then politicallymobilise their concerns such that the State is compelled to respond.Using the political and legislative narrative of the panchayats in West Bengal as auseful benchmark, we hope to take up these above-mentioned issue for further probing.