Looking at Decentralisation from Gandhian Action Perspective

Village at the centre and as the focus of governance has been one of the cornerstones of Gandhian thinking. This has been debated ad nauseum and today has acquired new relevance in the context of the global concentration on decentralisation as much as possible. While for the West, decentralisation has emerged from the necessity to reduce carbon footprint, in India, Gandhi articulated the decentralisation to place the interest of the villager in the centre of governance and planning. While the West has to of course arrive at decentralisation from the commercial platform through the accumulation or the non-accumulation of sense of guilt on consumption, it doesn’t profess a real empowerment of the individual in the process of creating the decentralisation. Whereas in the Gandhian model of governance, the entire focus of the decentralised model of governance is to ensure that in every way the individual is provided the required strength to move forward in life. While one spoke of consumption and choice of consumption, other spoke of freedom as a responsible and empowered life with a unique Indian title to it, Swaraj. Conceptually, Swaraj is a fundamental challenge to the western thought process, and it continues to be so till date. Indeed, this could be argued as the core of the understanding of the Gandhi ideological struggle