Study on Evolution of Panchayati Raj Institutions in India

India is rightly regarded as the land of villages. In a country where seventy-five percent of the population dwells in over five lakh seventy-five thousand villages, the importance of Local Government, popularly known as Panchayati Raj in India, looks self-evident. Indeed, thoughts on Local Government are but part of the larger concern for social and economic amelioration of the people, a task to which India is committed. Panchayats have been amongst the oldest political institutions of India, and the very use of this term has deeply nostalic association tending to take the mind to the distant and dim past. But in the form in which it is constituted and made to function today is a modern innovation. Community Development Programme was inaugurated on 2nd October 1952 in the country to synchronise the programme with the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, to whom the rural amelioration was dearer.