Reservations for Women in Panchayats

Panchayats DN IN the run-up to the elections Rajiv Gandhi has taken a number of steps to build a constituency among sections of the rural electorate. The 'Jawahar Rojgar Yojna', which takes schemes of rural employment out of the purview of the state governments and centralises them, and the Panchayat Bill, which supposedly gives more power to the village-level ('grassroots') organisations