Where was the National Panchayati Raj Day 2025 event organised?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Madhubani. The national observance of National Panchayati Raj Day on 24 April 2025 was held in Bihar's Madhubani district, and more precisely than the option can show: at Lohna Uttar Gram Panchayat in Jhanjharpur block, with the Prime Minister present in person. From that village stage he addressed Panchayati Raj Institutions and Gram Sabhas across the country, conferred the Special Category National Panchayat Awards 2025 — the Climate Action Special Panchayat Award, the Atma Nirbhar Panchayat Special Award and the Panchayat Kshamta Nirman Sarvottam Sansthan Puraskar — and inaugurated, dedicated or laid foundation stones for development projects worth over Rs 13,480 crore in housing, rural development, power, railways and connectivity. Three of the award-winning panchayats were headed by women sarpanches, one of them Motipur in Bihar and the others from Maharashtra and Odisha, and the programme was delivered on a 'whole-of-government' basis drawing in six Union Ministries. The date is not arbitrary and is the part worth carrying forward: 24 April marks the day in 1993 on which the Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992 came into force, giving panchayats constitutional status, so 2025 was the 32nd anniversary of that commencement; the Day itself has been observed since 2010. Note also the specific Bihar substance the Prime Minister used the occasion to state, because BPSC can ask it directly — that Bihar was the first state in the country to provide 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayats, well ahead of the constitutional floor of one-third. As of the exam on 13 September 2025 this was the current edition; the venue moves each year, so the answer is anchored to 2025 and should never be updated to a later host.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The reflex answer, and a well-designed one. Patna is the state capital and does host most of Bihar's national-scale events — the 7th Khelo India Youth Games were inaugurated at its Pataliputra Sports Complex on 4 May 2025, ten days after this one. But the Panchayati Raj Day national event is deliberately taken to a village rather than a capital: the whole point of the occasion is the Gram Panchayat, and in 2025 the stage was Lohna Uttar Gram Panchayat in Jhanjharpur block, Madhubani.  (c) Gaya is in south Bihar and is the state's pilgrimage and tourism headline — the Vishnupad temple, and Bodh Gaya with the UNESCO-listed Mahabodhi Temple Complex a few kilometres away. It draws national and international events of a completely different kind and had no role in the 2025 Panchayati Raj Day programme, which was held in the Mithila region of north Bihar, on the other side of the Ganga.  (d) A single national observance has a single host venue, so the compound option cannot hold. The Ministry of Panchayati Raj organises one national event each 24 April at one location — Madhubani in 2025 — with satellite programmes in states and panchayats elsewhere; those satellite events are not the 'National Panchayati Raj Day event' the question asks about, and neither Patna nor Gaya hosted the national programme in any case.

Concept: Panchayati Raj became a constitutional subject rather than a state-discretionary one with the Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992, which inserted Part IX, Articles 243 to 243-O, and added the Eleventh Schedule listing 29 subjects that States may devolve to panchayats. The architecture it built has a fixed skeleton: the Gram Sabha as the body of all registered voters of a village under Article 243A; a three-tier structure of village, intermediate and district panchayats, with States having a population not exceeding 20 lakh permitted to skip the intermediate tier under Article 243B; a five-year term with fresh elections before its expiry and within six months of a dissolution under Article 243E; reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to population and not less than one-third of all seats and chairperson posts for women under Article 243D; a State Election Commission to superintend panchayat elections under Article 243K; and a State Finance Commission constituted every five years to review panchayat finances under Article 243I. A separate Ministry of Panchayati Raj was created at the Centre in 2004 to drive this, and it is the ministry that organises National Panchayati Raj Day and the National Panchayat Awards. The Amendment set a floor, not a ceiling, which is why state practice diverges sharply — Bihar's 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayats, the first such move in the country, sits well above the constitutional one-third.

State PCS 2025 Q15 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q15 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer