When was the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act passed by Indian Parliament ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, 1996. The Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, universally called PESA, was enacted on 24 December 1996, and the year is carried in the Act's own short title — the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996. Its purpose follows directly from a gap the 73rd Constitutional Amendment left behind. That Amendment, passed in 1992, inserted Part IX into the Constitution and made panchayati raj a constitutional institution, but Part IX did not extend to the Fifth and Sixth Schedule areas; the Constitution instead left it to Parliament to carry those provisions into the Scheduled Areas by law, with whatever exceptions and modifications it thought fit. PESA is that law. It extends Part IX to the Fifth Schedule areas while reshaping it around the Gram Sabha, which is given ownership of minor forest produce, control over minor water bodies and minor minerals, the power to select beneficiaries, to approve plans and projects, and the right to be consulted before land is acquired.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The most tempting wrong answer, and the one the question is built to catch. 1993 is the year the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments came into force, which is why it sits in every student's memory next to the word 'panchayat'. But that Amendment is the parent event; PESA is the separate statute passed three years afterwards to carry its provisions into the Scheduled Areas. Keep the two dates as a pair — the Amendment in 1992, in force 1993; the extension to Scheduled Areas in 1996.  (c) No milestone in the panchayati raj story falls in 1998. It is a plausible-looking year placed after the correct one so that a candidate who remembers only 'sometime in the later nineties' has somewhere wrong to go.  (d) Likewise empty. The mid-nineties saw the committee work that fed into PESA's design, but no Act was passed in 1995, and the statute a candidate is being asked about carries 1996 in its own title.

Concept: The Fifth Schedule of the Constitution provides for the administration of Scheduled Areas in States other than those of the north-east, while the Sixth Schedule provides separately for tribal areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram through Autonomous District Councils. When the 73rd Amendment constitutionalised panchayati raj in 1992, Part IX was expressly not extended to either of those categories; the Constitution allowed Parliament to extend it to the Scheduled Areas by law. PESA, 1996 exercises that power for the Fifth Schedule areas alone, and it does so with a distinct philosophy: instead of pushing power down to the elected panchayat, it pushes it down to the Gram Sabha, the assembly of all voters in a village, and requires State panchayat laws for these areas to conform to that scheme. PESA applies to the Fifth Schedule areas of ten States — Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Rajasthan.

State PCS 2022 Q76 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q76 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer