Hits and misses: Women's quota in rural, urban local bodies a mixed bag

A suave spokesperson for the Biju Janata Dal (BJD). A Trinamool Congress leader with three key portfolios in West Bengal.

A Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leader who is now a senior minister in Telangana. And a Dalit woman who rose to become a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator after leading a grassroots campaign for sanitation and education in Bihar.

The common thread tying the disparate careers of these four women lawmakers is just one the reservation granted to women in local bodies, as part of the panchayati raj revolution unlocked by the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution in April 1993, which enabled them to enter public life.

This quota-first pegged at 33% and then increased to 50% in some states was India's first experiment in using reservation to boost the political participation of women. Three decades later, the results are decidedly a mixed bag: While many women found an opening through reserved seats, an equal number found their political power subverted by male relatives installing proxies.

According to a woman panchayat president from Karnataka, often male members of the family conduct the panchayat work on behalf of the women representative. "It has not happened with me but it is not uncommon," Bagalkote Zilla Panchayat president Veena Kashappanavar said.

The seeds of panchayati raj originated in Bihar in 1948, when regular elections provided the country with the first model c decentralised governance system, decades before the Constitutional Amendments established the three-tier panchayat system with regular elections.