As per the Government Resolution dated October 9, 2024, what is the minimum population requirement for establishment a 'Gram Panchayat' in Banjara/Laman/Labhan Tanda areas ?

Question

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Correct — option (2), 700. The Government Resolution of the Rural Development Department dated 9 October 2024 relaxed the population condition for constituting a separate gram panchayat in a Banjara, Laman or Labhan tanda from 1,000 to 700. The figure to carry is 700, and the fact that gives it meaning is the number it replaced. Before that Resolution a tanda needed a population of 1,000 before it could be given a gram panchayat of its own; below that threshold it stayed attached as a hamlet to the gram panchayat of some larger neighbouring village. That arrangement was the grievance the 2024 order answers. A tanda is typically a compact settlement of the Banjara/Laman community sited apart from the revenue village — often on higher or poorer ground, sometimes a few kilometres away — and where it was small enough to fall short of the old threshold, it had no panchayat of its own, no separate share in devolved funds, and its needs competed for attention inside a body dominated by the parent village. Lowering the bar to 700 brings a large number of such settlements over the line and lets them constitute their own panchayat, elect their own sarpanch and receive funds directly. Note precisely what the order does and does not do: it changes a population threshold for constituting a panchayat: it does not create a new tier of local government and it does not alter the constitutional scheme, which continues to run on Part IX of the Constitution and, in this state, on the Bombay Village Panchayats Act, 1958. Read the question the way the Commission wrote it — it names the Government Resolution and its date, so it is testing whether the candidate followed one specific administrative decision, not whether the candidate can reason out a plausible number.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 600 is below the figure the 2024 Government Resolution fixed. It is the number a candidate reaches by assuming the relaxation went further than it did — from 1,000 all the way down to 600 — or by importing a round threshold remembered from some other discussion of village panchayat formation. The order relaxed the condition to 700 and no lower, and in a question that names the resolution and its date the only defensible answer is the figure that resolution actually carries.  (c) 800 understates the relaxation. A candidate who remembers that the threshold used to be 1,000 and that it was brought down will find 800 comfortable, because it is the smallest step that still counts as a reduction. But the reduction was of 300, not 200, and the resulting figure is 700. Half-remembering the direction of a change without its magnitude is the commonest way to lose this mark, and it is why the earlier figure of 1,000 is worth memorising alongside the new one.  (d) 900 is the nearest of the four to the pre-2024 position and therefore the weakest as a relaxation — a cut of only a hundred would leave most small tandas exactly where they were, which is the opposite of what the order set out to achieve. It is included to catch a candidate who has heard that the threshold moved but is anchoring on the old 1,000 and shaving it. The operative figure in the Government Resolution of 9 October 2024 is 700.

Concept: The gram panchayat is the base tier of the three-tier panchayati raj system that Part IX of the Constitution, inserted by the 73rd Amendment in 1992, made mandatory for states above the population threshold, with the gram sabha under Article 243A as the assembly of registered voters of the village. Which settlement counts as a 'village' for this purpose is left to state law and executive orders, and that is where population thresholds live. In Maharashtra, panchayats are constituted under the Bombay Village Panchayats Act, 1958, and the Rural Development Department fixes, by Government Resolution, the conditions a habitation must satisfy before it can be separated from its parent village and given a panchayat of its own — a minimum population, and usually a minimum distance from the parent settlement. Thresholds are a rationing device: too low and the state is left with thousands of panchayats too small to staff or fund, too high and genuinely distinct habitations are left as appendages of villages they have nothing to do with. Every relaxation of a threshold is a judgement that the second cost has grown larger than the first for a particular class of settlement.

State PCS 2026 Q23 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q23 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer