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Chapter 2: The Paper Sarpanch

In 2023, a case reached the Orissa High Court from Kalahandi district. The facts were unremarkable: a dispute over the hiring and firing of a Gaon Sathi — a village-level functionary. What made the case noteworthy was who was doing the hiring and firing. It was not the elected sarpanch. It was the sarpanch’s husband.

The Court’s observation, in Manoj Kumar Mangaraj v. The Collector, Kalahandi & Ors. (W.P.(C) No. 31039 of 2023), was clinical: “The Sarpanch Pati seems to be playing a very important role in appointment and termination of the Gaon Sathi, while wielding the actual political and decision-making power behind his spouse who is elected as Sarpanch.” The Court did not stop at the facts. It stated what no panchayat administrator in Odisha had been willing to state formally: that the practice “defeats the very purpose of reservation for women in the Panchayati Raj institution” and “reduces the women to ‘faceless sarpanches’ at the grassroots politics and also deprives them of their agency, autonomy and voice in public affairs.”

The Court directed the Secretary of the Panchayati Raj Department to report what actions had been taken against proxy sarpanches and what capacity-building training had been provided to women sarpanches. It is a question the department had not been asked before in a judicial forum.

The case was from Kalahandi — one of the most underdeveloped districts in Odisha, part of the KBK region, with high tribal population, high male out-migration, and precisely the conditions where women’s governance should matter most. The elected sarpanch was a woman. The person exercising power was her husband. The institutional architecture that mandated her presence had nothing to say about this substitution. The 73rd Amendment to the Constitution required that she be elected. Nothing in the law required that she govern.

In corporate governance, there is a structure called proxy voting. Shareholders own stock — they have legal ownership of a share of the company. This ownership gives them the right to vote on corporate decisions: who sits on the board, whether to approve a merger, how executive compensation is structured. But the vast majority of individual shareholders do not exercise this right themselves. They delegate their vote to institutional fund managers — mutual funds, pension funds, asset management companies. The fund manager votes on behalf of thousands or millions of individual shareholders. The shareholders own the shares. The fund managers wield the power.

For decades, this was considered a solved problem. Delegation was efficient: individual shareholders lacked the information, time, and expertise to evaluate complex corporate decisions. Fund managers had all three. The delegation was rational.

Then came the governance scandals of the early 2000s — Enron, WorldCom, Tyco. It became clear that the fund managers voting on behalf of shareholders were not, in fact, acting in shareholders’ interests. They were voting in ways that maintained comfortable relationships with corporate management. They approved excessive executive pay. They ratified mergers that destroyed shareholder value. They nodded through board compositions that lacked independence. The owners of the company had delegated their power to intermediaries who used it to serve themselves.

The solution was not to eliminate proxy voting. It was institutional activism: governance reforms that made fund managers accountable for how they voted, that created transparency in proxy voting records, and that enabled shareholders to monitor and challenge delegated decisions. The structural innovation was not returning power to individual shareholders (who still lacked the information and time) but creating accountability mechanisms for the intermediaries.

The sarpanch-pati phenomenon in Odisha is proxy voting without the accountability reform. Women own the seat — they are the legal holders of political office. Husbands exercise the vote — they make the decisions, attend the meetings, sign the documents. The delegation is not formal, not contractual, not monitored. There is no proxy voting record. There is no accountability mechanism. The elected woman holds the share. The husband wields the power. And unlike the corporate governance world, where decades of activist pressure eventually forced transparency, the panchayat system has no equivalent of an institutional activist demanding that the proxy voter account for their decisions.

This chapter is about the largest experiment in women’s political representation in human history — India’s panchayat reservation system — and why, in Odisha, it produces paper sarpanches: women who hold office on paper but not in practice. It is about the distance between descriptive representation (having women in power) and substantive representation (having women exercise power). And it is about the three forces that are, slowly and unevenly, closing that gap: SHG political education, second-term learning, and direct cash transfers that bypass the proxy entirely.

Fifty Percent of Everything, on Paper

The numbers are staggering and should be stated clearly.

Odisha mandates 50% reservation for women at all three tiers of Panchayati Raj Institutions: Gram Panchayat, Panchayat Samiti (Block), and Zilla Parishad. This goes beyond the 73rd Constitutional Amendment’s requirement of one-third. With 6,794 Gram Panchayats, 314 blocks, and 30 Zilla Parishads, approximately 50,000-60,000 women hold elected PRI positions in Odisha alone. In the 2022 panchayat elections, over 2.79 crore eligible voters participated across five phases. Sixty to seventy percent of women candidates won their seats. Women were presidents in 21 of 30 Zilla Parishads. Seventy percent of district panchayats were headed by women.

India’s panchayat system as a whole contains approximately 14 lakh elected women representatives — more than any other country in the world. The scale is not merely impressive in a comparative sense. It is historically unprecedented. No political system, at any point in human history, has placed this many women in formal positions of governance.

And yet the question the Orissa High Court asked — what is being done about proxy sarpanches? — had not been formally asked before in Odisha’s judicial history. The answer, by implication, was: nothing. The system counted the women who held office. It did not measure whether they exercised it.

What Chattopadhyay and Duflo Found (and What They Didn’t)

In 2004, economists Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo published a study in Econometrica that became the canonical reference on women’s political reservation. Using the randomised assignment of political reservations in West Bengal and Rajasthan — where the rotation of reserved seats across elections created a natural experiment — they found that women elected under reservation invested more in public goods linked to women’s concerns. In West Bengal, women leaders invested more in drinking water and roads. In Rajasthan, more in drinking water. The investment patterns were measurably different from male-led panchayats.

This was the evidence for substantive representation: descriptive representation (having women in the seat) produced policy differences (investment in different priorities). The study also found something less celebrated: villagers were less satisfied with women leaders, even though those leaders were investing in priorities the villagers said they cared about. The perception gap was real. Women leaders were delivering what women wanted. The community judged them more harshly anyway.

Subsequent research by Beaman and colleagues extended the analysis: exposure to female leadership — women having served as GP heads — significantly reduced the gender gap in aspirations and educational outcomes for adolescent girls. The role model effect operated even when the individual leader was imperfect. Seeing a woman in the chair changed what girls believed was possible.

The Chattopadhyay-Duflo framework is foundational but incomplete. It asks: do women leaders make different policy choices? It does not ask: are the women who hold office actually making the choices? The sarpanch-pati phenomenon — which the academic literature acknowledges but which the randomised experiments did not measure — means the causal chain may be broken at the first link. The seat is reserved for a woman. A woman is elected. But if her husband makes the decisions, signs the documents, and attends the meetings, then the “woman leader” in the data is a phantom. The policy choices recorded as the woman’s may be the husband’s. The entire edifice of evidence for substantive representation through reservation depends on an assumption — that the person in the seat exercises the power — that the sarpanch-pati phenomenon directly contradicts.

This does not invalidate the research. Chattopadhyay and Duflo studied West Bengal and Rajasthan, not Odisha. The sarpanch-pati phenomenon varies by state, district, and individual panchayat. In some places, women govern genuinely. In others, they don’t. What Odisha adds to the picture is the modal case: the most common outcome of women’s reservation is not a woman who governs or a woman who is completely sidelined. It is a woman who occupies a spectrum between governance and proxy — some autonomy in some domains, some delegation in others, the balance shifting over time and depending on the specific decision. The binary of “empowered woman leader” versus “puppet sarpanch” conceals a more complicated reality that the proxy voting metaphor captures better: delegation is not all-or-nothing, and the question is not whether delegation occurs but under what conditions it can be accountable.

The Anatomy of a Paper Sarpanch

The sarpanch-pati phenomenon takes multiple forms, and understanding the mechanism matters more than condemning the practice.

Direct proxy: The husband attends panchayat meetings, speaks on behalf of his wife, and interfaces with block development officers, district officials, and contractors. The elected woman stays home. This is the most visible form and the one the Orissa High Court addressed.

Behind-the-scenes control: The woman attends meetings but the husband has made all decisions beforehand. She speaks the words he has prepared. She votes as he has instructed. To an observer, she appears to be governing. The governance is performed, not exercised.

Signature proxy: The woman signs documents — cheques, work orders, meeting minutes — that the husband has prepared. The legal trace shows her name. The decision-making trace leads to him.

Appointment power: As in the Kalahandi case, the husband controls hiring and firing of panchayat staff, determines procurement decisions, and manages the panchayat’s financial allocations.

Why does this persist? Six reinforcing factors, each structural rather than individual:

First, literacy. When the elected woman cannot read official documents — and in tribal districts of Odisha, female literacy can be below 30% — the literate husband becomes the de facto administrator by necessity, not just by patriarchal desire. The document-dependent governance system is structurally inaccessible to the person the reservation system placed in it. Second, social norms. Community members and government officials direct queries to the husband rather than the wife. The BDO visits the panchayat and addresses the husband. The contractor comes with a proposal and meets the husband. The cultural script says “speak to the man.” The institutional incentives reinforce the script. Third, mobility. Women may not be able to travel unaccompanied to block offices, district headquarters, or state-level meetings. Panchayat governance requires physical presence at multiple locations, and mobility constraints are a direct barrier. Fourth, no institutional support. Newly elected women sarpanches receive no systematic training, mentorship, or capacity building. The system places them in office and expects them to function. Fifth, party design. Political parties often select women candidates whose husbands are party workers. The candidate is chosen precisely because she will serve as proxy. The sarpanch-pati is not a failure of the system. It is the system working as the party intended. Sixth, economic dependence. Women who lack independent income have limited bargaining power within the household. The sarpanch’s salary is modest. If the husband controls the household finances, the sarpanch’s formal income does not translate to financial autonomy.

The proxy voting parallel is exact on each point. Shareholders delegate because they lack information (literacy), because the system is designed for intermediaries (social norms), because attending meetings is impractical (mobility), because there is no support for direct engagement (institutional support), because the corporate structure selects board members who will cooperate (party design), and because small shareholders have no financial leverage over large institutions (economic dependence). The sarpanch-pati is not a cultural aberration. It is the predictable outcome of placing formal ownership rights into a system designed for intermediary control.

Seven Percent: The Cliff Above the Panchayat

The distance between panchayat representation and legislative representation is a forty-percentage-point cliff.

Odisha mandates 50% women in panchayats. No reservation exists for the 147-seat state assembly. The result, across seventeen elections since 1952: women have never constituted more than about 10% of the Odisha Legislative Assembly. The pattern is remarkably stable. In the 2024 elections, 178 women contested — 14% of all candidates, a record — but only approximately 10-15 won. The BJP swept the state with 78 seats; the BJD collapsed from 112 to single digits. Across both parties, women’s representation in the winning cohort remained in single digits as a percentage.

The paradox is instructive. Where reservation exists (panchayats), women are 50% of officeholders. Where reservation does not exist (assembly), women are 7-10%. The gap is not caused by women’s inability to govern — the Chattopadhyay-Duflo evidence, the SHG-to-panchayat pipeline, the Zilla Parishad data all suggest otherwise. The gap is caused by the gatekeeping mechanisms that operate above the panchayat level: party ticket distribution, campaign finance requirements, electoral viability assessments, and the accumulated incumbency of male politicians. These mechanisms are not formally discriminatory. They are structurally exclusionary in the same way that corporate board nomination processes are: they select for criteria (name recognition, financial resources, party loyalty networks, prior legislative experience) that systematically disadvantage women.

The most significant woman in Odia politics — Draupadi Murmu, now President of India — is a tribal woman from Rairangpur who served as MLA and then Governor of Jharkhand before her elevation. Her career is exceptional in every sense: exceptional in achievement and exceptional in its distance from the modal experience of women in Odisha’s political system. The only woman to serve as Chief Minister, Nandini Satpathy (1972-73, 1974-76), was the daughter of a princely state leader. The path to high political office in Odisha, for the few women who have walked it, has required either dynastic privilege or exceptional circumstance. The pipeline from panchayat to assembly to ministerial office — which the reservation system was supposed to create — remains blocked at the assembly level.

Naveen Patnaik publicly demanded 33% reservation for women in state assemblies and Parliament. The Women’s Reservation Bill — passed by Parliament in 2023 after decades of delay — will create 33% reservation in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, but only after a census and delimitation exercise that may not occur before 2029. The BJD put 34 women candidates on the ballot in 2024, but the party’s collapse meant only five won. Intentions without structural mechanisms produce intentions.

Subhadra: The Transfer That Bypasses the Proxy

On September 17, 2024 — his birthday — Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Subhadra Yojana in Bhubaneswar. The scheme’s design is worth examining not for its welfare content but for its political architecture.

Eligibility: women aged 21-60. Amount: Rs 50,000 over five years, disbursed as Rs 10,000 per year in two installments of Rs 5,000 each. Installment dates: Rakhi Purnima and International Women’s Day (March 8). Delivery: direct benefit transfer to Aadhaar-linked bank accounts. Target: over 1 crore women. Registrations: approximately 1.2 crore. Budget: an estimated Rs 55,825 crore over five years.

The naming is precise. Subhadra is the sister of Lord Jagannath — the most emotionally resonant cultural symbol in Odisha. By naming a women’s welfare scheme after Jagannath’s sister, the BJP fused political technology with spiritual authority in a single word. Every disbursement is an invocation.

But the structural innovation is in the delivery mechanism. The transfer goes directly to the woman’s Aadhaar-linked bank account. Not to the household head. Not through the panchayat. Not via the SHG federation. Not channelled through any intermediary that a husband, a sarpanch-pati, a party worker, or a local official could intercept. The money arrives in the woman’s account on a fixed date, verifiable by SMS, withdrawable at a banking correspondent or ATM.

This is the anti-proxy. Where the panchayat system places women in formal power and allows husbands to exercise it, Subhadra places money directly in women’s hands and structurally prevents intermediation. The proxy voting parallel: this is not shareholder activism. This is the company cutting a dividend cheque directly to each shareholder, bypassing the fund manager entirely.

Political Landscape (Chapter 6) analysed Subhadra as political technology — a BJP counter to BJD’s Mission Shakti, designed to create a direct relationship between the party and individual women voters, bypassing the institutional infrastructure that Naveen Patnaik had built over two decades. The analysis stands. But there is a deeper structural contrast that the political reading misses.

Mission Shakti built institutions. SHGs, federations, procurement networks, a standalone government department. It created 6 lakh organisations through which benefits flowed. The benefits were real: 0% interest loans, government contracts, collective savings. But the institutions were also intermediaries — and like all intermediaries, they could be captured. The BJD captured them electorally (60-80% of women voted BJD in 2019, according to estimates). The sarpanch-pati captured the panchayat seat. The husband captured the household’s SHG income. Institutional empowerment creates institutions that can be intermediated.

Subhadra Yojana skips the institution. It transfers cash. The cash is smaller than the institutional benefit (Rs 10,000 per year versus potential SHG loan access, procurement contracts, and collective savings). But the cash is uncapturable. No intermediary can intercept it. No husband can attend the bank account meeting on his wife’s behalf. The transfer is structural individualism: one woman, one account, one deposit.

The trade-off is real and should be stated honestly. Institutional participation builds capacity: public speaking, financial management, collective action, political consciousness. Cash transfer builds none of these. A woman who receives Rs 5,000 on Rakhi Purnima has Rs 5,000 more purchasing power. She does not have more voice, more agency, more collective identity, or more political education. Mission Shakti produced 70 lakh women who can chair a meeting. Subhadra produces 1 crore women who receive a bank notification. Whether the latter is more or less empowering than the former depends on what you mean by empowerment — and whether you believe the institutional participation that Mission Shakti enabled was genuinely agentic or was itself a more sophisticated form of capture.

The honest answer: both. Mission Shakti was simultaneously genuine empowerment and political capture. Subhadra is simultaneously genuine material benefit and political clientelism. The 2024 election result is evidence for the uncomfortable possibility that women voters saw through both: they abandoned the BJD’s institutional approach and accepted the BJP’s transactional one, exercising independent electoral judgment against the party that had built the institutional infrastructure through which they developed that very judgment.

The Road Not Taken: Tribal Women in Governance

Everything discussed so far — the panchayat reservation, the sarpanch-pati, the assembly underrepresentation — operates within the mainstream Odia political system. But Odisha contains a parallel governance tradition where women’s political participation was not the product of reservation but of indigenous institutional design.

Tribal Odisha (Chapters 1 and 2) documented the governance architectures: the Gond garh system, the Kondh mutha, the Santhal Manjhi-Pargana, the Juang pirh, the Bhuiyan pirha. What those chapters noted in passing but did not foreground — because the series examined governance systems, not gender systems — is that several of these architectures included women in governance by design.

The Kondh system features the bejuni (female priest) alongside the beju (male priest) in the dual secular-sacred authority structure. The Dongria Kondh’s religious governance — which proved decisive in the Niyamgiri gram sabha that rejected Vedanta’s mine — operates through both male and female spiritual specialists. When twelve consecutive gram sabhas voted unanimously against mining, those assemblies included women who participated not because a quota required their presence but because the governance architecture assumed it.

The Saora dual leadership (Gomango/secular, Buyya/sacred) placed women in the sacred governance stream. The Kudan (shaman) role — the spiritual diagnostician who combines priest, prophet, and healer — could be held by women, representing a meritocratic appointment within an otherwise hereditary system. The Bonda, whose matriarchal elements give women significant authority in family and economic matters, practised a form of gender integration in governance that required no legislative mandate.

The critical insight, unstated in any prior SeeUtkal series: tribal women may have had more governance participation in pre-colonial systems than mainstream Odia women have ever had in the formal democratic system that replaced them.

The imposition of colonial and post-colonial institutional frameworks — individual land title, revenue settlement, forest bureaucracy, formal democratic elections — did not create gender equality in governance. It destroyed existing forms of women’s governance participation. The colonial encounter Hinduised tribal communities through a process anthropologists call Sanskritisation, and with Hinduisation came patriarchal restrictions that tribal societies had not previously enforced as strictly. The gender governance gap is not a natural condition that reservation tries to correct. It is a historical product of the same forces that displaced tribal self-governance and imposed the institutional architecture within which women now struggle to participate.

This reframes the sarpanch-pati problem. The question is not “why can’t women govern effectively in panchayats?” The question is “why does the panchayat system — designed by a dominant-caste, male-led, colonial-derived institutional framework — produce worse gender outcomes than the governance systems it replaced?” The Dongria Kondh did not need a 50% reservation to include women in the Niyamgiri decision. Their system included women by default. The formal democratic system required constitutional compulsion to achieve a fraction of what the indigenous system delivered organically. The road not taken — building on tribal governance models rather than replacing them — leads to a destination the road taken has not yet reached.

The SHG Pipeline: Where the Proxy Begins to Fail

The sarpanch-pati phenomenon is not universal, and understanding where it fails is as important as understanding where it succeeds.

The most reliable predictor of effective women’s panchayat leadership in Odisha is prior Mission Shakti SHG experience. This is not a correlation. It is a causal mechanism, and the mechanism is the same one that breaks proxy voting in corporate governance: institutional activism.

The weekly SHG meeting is a rehearsal space for governance. A woman who has served as SHG president has chaired meetings. A woman who has managed the group’s savings ledger has handled financial records. A woman who has negotiated with a bank manager has dealt with institutional authority. A woman who has spoken at a GPLF meeting has addressed a public forum. A woman who has coordinated with the block office on a procurement contract has navigated bureaucracy. When this woman contests a panchayat election, she arrives with skills the sarpanch-pati exploits as absent: literacy, numeracy, public speaking, institutional knowledge, and — critically — a constituency. Her SHG members are her base. They know her capabilities. They expect her to govern.

The pipeline is visible in the numbers. In recent panchayat elections, 60-70% of women candidates emerged victorious. Women preside over 21 of 30 Zilla Parishads. The government introduced a policy requiring SHG leaders who have held posts for more than two consecutive terms to step aside, creating space for new women leaders. This turnover is itself a governance mechanism: it prevents the SHG-to-panchayat pipeline from being monopolised by a small cadre of experienced women while ensuring a steady flow of new entrants who bring fresh perspectives and broader representation.

Research across India identifies the conditions that enable genuine female governance:

Education — at least secondary level — significantly increases effective governance. SHG membership provides institutional experience. Family support (and paradoxically, widowhood, because widows have no sarpanch-pati) increases autonomy. Critical mass matters: when multiple women serve in the same panchayat, collective confidence increases. Block and district officials who engage directly with women sarpanches rather than addressing their husbands change the institutional incentive. And the second-term effect is substantial: women in their second term are significantly more effective than first-term representatives. The learning curve — understanding procedures, building relationships with officials, gaining confidence — requires one full term to traverse. The rotation of reserved seats, where reservations shift between elections, often prevents this learning from compounding.

The SHG pipeline is the closest Odisha has to the institutional activism that reformed proxy voting in corporate governance. The woman who has been trained by the SHG system to manage money, speak publicly, and navigate institutions is the shareholder who has learned to read the proxy statement, attend the annual meeting, and challenge the fund manager. She is harder to proxy. She knows what governance looks like because she has practised it. The practice happened not in a training programme designed by the state but in a weekly meeting designed for a different purpose entirely — savings and credit — that produced, as an emergent property, political competence.

The Accountability Gap

The structural argument, stripped bare:

Odisha has built the most extensive formal architecture for women’s political participation in any Indian state. Fifty percent panchayat reservation. 6 lakh SHGs covering 70 lakh women. A standalone Department of Mission Shakti. Now Subhadra Yojana reaching 1 crore women. The Niyamgiri precedent demonstrating that women can participate in governance of the highest stakes. Every formal prerequisite for women’s political participation exists on paper.

The gap is accountability. The panchayat system places women in office but does not hold anyone accountable for whether they exercise it. The sarpanch-pati operates in plain sight — community members know, block officials know, the husband knows, the elected woman knows. Until the 2023 Orissa High Court ruling, no institution had formally challenged the practice. The NHRC’s 2024 summons to 32 states confirms the problem is not Odisha-specific but the response — training programmes, awareness campaigns — remains procedural rather than structural. The system counts inputs (women elected, women trained, women registered) and does not measure outputs (decisions made by women, budgets controlled by women, outcomes determined by women’s priorities).

In proxy voting terms: the reform that changed corporate governance was not more shareholders (Odisha already has more women in office than any historical precedent). It was transparency and accountability — making the proxy voter’s decisions visible, auditable, and challengeable. The equivalent in panchayat governance would be systems that track which person — the elected sarpanch or someone else — actually makes decisions, signs off on expenditures, attends meetings with officials, and determines procurement choices. This data does not exist. It is not collected. The system measures representation without measuring governance.

The distance between the panchayat and the assembly — between 50% and 7% — reveals where reservation stops and structural exclusion begins. Party gatekeeping, campaign finance, and the accumulated advantages of male incumbency filter women out at the assembly level with the same efficiency that the sarpanch-pati filters them out at the panchayat level. The mechanisms are different. The outcome is the same: formal access without effective power.

And the most unsettling piece of counter-evidence sits in the tribal interior. The Dongria Kondh gram sabha — where women participated in a decision of extraordinary consequence without any reservation mandate — demonstrates that the barrier to women’s governance is not innate incapacity. It is institutional design. The governance system designed by tribal communities included women. The governance system designed by the colonial and post-colonial state excludes them unless compelled by quota. The quota creates presence. Presence, on its own, does not create power. Power requires what the SHG pipeline provides — practice, competence, constituency, and accountability — and what the formal democratic system has not yet built: a mechanism to ensure that the person who holds the office is the person who exercises it.

The share is in her name. The vote is cast by someone else. Until the governance system tracks who is actually voting, the paper sarpanch will remain the modal outcome of India’s largest experiment in women’s political representation.

Sources

Source Research

The raw research that informs this series.