Panchayati Raj System In India

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1.1 INTRODUCTION India is a socialist, Secular, Democratic, Republic and the largest country in the world. India became modern nation State on 15 th August,1947.India is a constitutional democracy with a parliamentary form of government and it makes a commitment to hold regular, free, fair and just elections. These elections regulate the composition of the government, the membership of the two houses Lok Sabha and Raya Sabha, the State and Union Territory Legislative Assemblies, and the Presidency and Vice-Presidency. India conducts elections at various levels of the federal structure. There is the nation-wide election for House of the People consisting 545 members. Out of those, 543 members are directly elected by the people from the constituencies…show more content…
But the elections of these local bodies were not active in many States till the year of 1980’s because of political status of State governments. The 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments were passed by the parliament in 1992, in order to provide the mandated status for local bodies. In the result, by enactment of each State Governments, Panchayati Raj system, consisting of the zilla parishad at the district level, the panchayat samiti at the block level and the gram panchayats at the village level were regularized for rural areas. The five year was prescribed as a term of the office.At the end of this term elections used to be conducted strictly by the State Election Commission. There were exclusively reserved seats for the socially weak and backward class of people i.e Scheduled castes and Scheduled tribes. The 74 th amendment also provided elections for the municipal bodies. Due to full establishment of Panchayati Raj system and municipal bodies based on the constitution, the competitive election system was extended to the grass roots…show more content…
Electoral Rolls were published in all constituencies of every State by November 15th, 1951. The total number of voters (excluding J&K) was 17, 32, 13,635 as against the total population of India (excluding J&K), 35, 66, 91,760 according to 1951 census,. The first General Elections to the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabhas were held between October, 1951 and March, 1952. The first Lok Sabha consisting of 497 members was constituted on April 2nd, 1952. The Rajya Sabha of 216 members was constituted on April 3rd, 1952 for the first time. The first Presidential election was held in May, 1952 after the constitution of the two Houses of Parliament and the State Legislative Assemblies. The Commission had recognized 14 political parties as multi-state parties and 39 parties as the state parties, at the time of the first General Election in 1951-52.The Election Commission adopted the “Ballot system” of voting for the first and second General Elections in 1951-52, and 1957.In this system every candidate was allotted a separate ballot box in a screened compartment at each polling station and the voters

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