When the 16th Finance Commission recommended an 84% increase in grants to rural local bodies, bringing the total allocation to ₹4.35 lakh crore for the 2026-31 period, it said something significant in the only language that fiscal policy permits. It said that the future of Viksit Bharat runs through the gram panchayat.
India has approximately 2.5 lakh gram panchayats governing nearly 65% of its population. They are the constitutionally mandated unit of self-governance closest to the citizen, the institution the 73rd Amendment placed at the centre of democratic life in 1992. And yet, for three decades since that amendment, they have largely been treated as delivery vehicles for centrally designed schemes rather than as the self-governing bodies the Constitution intended. The 16th Finance Commission's recommendation is a correction, long overdue. The village is not the last mile of governance. It is the first.
This moment did not arrive without preparation. Over the past decade, an ecosystem of institutional support for gram panchayats has been taking shape, and its cumulative weight deserves recognition.
The Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP), institutionalised as an annual participatory planning exercise from 2015, was among the earliest of these investments. When it functions as designed, when communities deliberate, priorities are set with evidence, and plans align to actual data, the GPDP is arguably the most powerful instrument of democratic planning available at local government in India. It gave the village a process. What followed gave that process a direction and a measure.
{{/usCountry}}The Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP), institutionalised as an annual participatory planning exercise from 2015, was among the earliest of these investments. When it functions as designed, when communities deliberate, priorities are set with evidence, and plans align to actual data, the GPDP is arguably the most powerful instrument of democratic planning available at local government in India. It gave the village a process. What followed gave that process a direction and a measure.
{{/usCountry}}In 2018, the ministry of panchayati raj formalised the Localised Sustainable Development Goals as the primary vehicle for SDG localisation at the grassroots. The LSDGs translated nine themes, from poverty-free and clean-green villages to child-friendly and well-governed villages, into language a sarpanch/mukhiya could recognise and own. For the first time, the GPDP had not just a process but a destination.
Technology has deepened these gains. Platforms like eGramSwaraj have embedded accountability into service delivery at the grassroots, making the village record a site of public audit rather than opacity. The Panchayat Advancement Index, built on 435 indicators mapped across all 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats, has given India something it never had before. It today has a comprehensive, evidence-based, panchayat-by-panchayat picture of how each village is faring across health, water, education, gender, and governance. It turns the abstract ambition of Viksit Bharat into a road map of distance yet to be covered. On the side of human capability, over 1.23 crore participants were trained across gram panchayats in just three years between 2022 and 2025. The ministry of panchayati raj signed Memoranda of Understanding with multiple institutions including Indian Institutes of Management to deliver leadership programs for elected representatives and panchayat functionaries, a signal that grassroots governance is finally being treated with the same seriousness as any other domain of public leadership.
Numbers trained, however, are not the same as capability built. A sarpanch who attended an orientation is not the same as one who can read her Panchayat Advancement Index dashboard, identify the gap that matters most to her community, and convert that evidence into a GPDP line item that gets implemented and accounted for. The distance between these two things is the distance between capacity-building as activity and capacity-building as outcome. It is in that gap that genuine transformation must be earned.
This is where the Capacity-Building for Viksit Panchayat initiative, launched by the Capacity-Building Commission and implemented by Kaivalya Education Foundation, locates its purpose. It works through three linked approaches.
The first is competency-linked learning, a shift from training measured by attendance to learning measured by demonstrated capability. Kishorbhai Vasava, a sarpanch from Gopaliya Gram Panchayat in Narmada district of Gujarat, describes the change plainly. After the training, he activated the village committees and decisions began to be taken collectively. He no longer felt alone. Competency-linked learning did not merely inform him. It redistributed the ownership of governance.
The second is technology-enabled delivery, built not for a classroom but for a ward member with a smartphone and 20 minutes before the day takes over. Himani Daimary, a first-time ward member in Dudhnoi gram panchayat in Goalpara, Assam, arrived with little sense of where to begin. A chatbot that gave her instant answers when she was stuck was not a convenience. In a remote district, it was the difference between feeling equipped and feeling lost.
The third, and the one most consistently absent from government capacity building, is sustained field support. Field coordinators, working alongside civil society partners with years of presence in their communities, accompany sarpanches and secretaries through the actual moments, including the gram sabha where PAI data is first placed before the community. Vallesi Chinni, a panchayat development officer in Kadeli gram panchayat in the Paderu Block of Andhra Pradesh, found that this accompanying presence sharpened everything. Regular gram sabhas became forums for action. One of them translated a community grievance about coffee prices into a formal panchayat resolution. Data, deliberation, and decision moved together because support was present at the right moment.
In 40 years of working in villages, first among the Jenukuruba and Bettakuruba communities of Heggadadevanakote and then across many corners of this country, one has seen a pattern repeat itself. Resources arrive. Frameworks are designed. Structures are built. And then, somewhere between the policy document and the village meeting, the energy dissipates. Not because people lack the will, but because they were never equipped with the tools, the knowledge, and the sustained accompaniment that would have made the difference.
The 16th Finance Commission has placed an extraordinary bet on India's gram panchayats. The money is there. The frameworks are in place. The data is available. What remains is the harder work of equipping the people closest to the problems to become the authors of the solutions. That has always been the promise of democratic decentralisation. The Capacity Building for Viksit Panchayat initiative is one attempt to close that distance.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by R Balasubramaniam, member (HR), Capacity Building Commission, Government of India and Manmohan Singh, co-founder & CEO, Kaivalya Education Foundation.