In India, Panchayati Raj (village council) was established in the 1950s to ensure community
participation in rural development programs, but until 1993, the Panchayati Raj system did
not have a constitutional sanction (Jain 2001). In 1997-98, India introduced a ‘Citizen’s
Charter’ to ensure a transparent implementation process with local people, but still today the
development implementation (except inform the locals) is controlled by the bureaucrats. A
number of research studies have been conducted by various scholars on the functioning of the
Panchayati Raj system, and these have pointed to the limited extent of the involvement of
people in decision making at grass-roots level (Tayler 2005).