5,000 gram pradhans resign after U’khand slashes gram sabha funds

More than 5,000 gram pradhans (village heads) in Uttarakhand have submitted their resignations to protest slashing of budgets allocated to gram sabhas by the State Finance Commission. A total of 260 village heads from Dehradun submitted their resignations to district officials on Monday, as reports of resignations from other districts also trickled in.

Girvar Parmar, president of the Uttarakhand Gram Pradhan Sangathan, alleged that gram pradhans were being paid a paltry salary of ₹750 a month, which he said was too little. The running budgets of gram panchayats have also been slashed drastically which would impact development work in the villages, he added.

Roop Singh Thapa, the Dehradun district president of the Gram Pradhan Sangathan, said that at least 260 gram pradhans from Dehradun, out of 459 in the district, had already submitted their resignations. He added that more were likely to follow suit.

The gram pradhans also said that payments for the works completed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) had not been made. They asked the authorities to clear the MGNREGA dues, besides hiking the honorariums paid to gram pradhans from ₹750 to ₹5,000 per month.

The gram pradhans further said that the rules and regulations of the Panchayati Raj Act, that had been passed by the State Assembly, must be implemented on the ground.

Reacting to the spate of resignations, Uttarakhand’s Finance Minister Prakash Pant justified the budget cuts, saying that the State Finance Commission was just trying to fairly apportion resources between all three ties of the Panchayati Raj institutions. The 14th Finance Commission, constituted by Centre in 2015, had slashed the budgets of zilla panchayats and panchayat samitis as it decided on giving a larger chunk to the gram sabhas, Pant noted.

“The 14th Finance Commission had given ₹1694 crore to Panchayati Raj institutions for the next five years which is much more than the previous allocation but the gram pradhans are agitated since the State Finance Commission had decided to distribute the money among all the three tiers of the Panchayati Raj institutions,” he said.

Parmar, however, refused to buy the state government’s justification. He condemned the slashing of state’s gram sabha budgets by more than “60 per cent.”

“Most of Uttarakhand’s 7,953 gram pradhans have submitted their resignations while others would do so in the next few days,” he warned.