PERSPECTIVES MARCH 21, 2020 vol lV no 12 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 26 The Mandal System in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh Anil Kumar Vaddiraju The author is enormously thankful to D Rajasekhar for encouraging him to write the article, and Abdul Aziz for kindly providing comments on an earlier draft. He is also immensely thankful to the anonymous referee for extremely helpful suggestions, with which the article has definitely improved. Anil Kumar Vaddiraju (anilvaddiraju@gmail.com) teaches at the Centre for Political Institutions, Governance and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. The mandal system came into existence as an administrative reform, as part of reducing the size of erstwhile taluks and making them more effective and manageable. The decentralisation of taluks into mandals was done with a two-pronged strategy of modernising the revenue administration, record-keeping as well as further decentralising the panchayati raj system. It was hoped that the division of erstwhile large taluks into mandals could make them more manageable, and also that the administration of the state government, especially the revenue administration, will become modernised. The question of how governments should be organised must be as old as the study of politic — Triesman (Saito 2011) Governance, in a way decentred government and within its conceptualisation, lies the no- tion of dispersal of power in society. — Mathur (2008) O f the three dimensions of decen- tralisation—delegation, decon- centration and devolution—what must be said of decentralisation reforms in the name of the mandal system in Andhra Pradesh and what is currently taking place now in Telangana is that these are essentially aimed at the deconcen- tration of the government rather than the delegation and devolution of powers. Also, it should be noted that these reforms had been carried out earlier, and are being carried out now (at least in the context of Telangana), essentially for two avowed purposes: modernisation of the administration and the decentralisation of polity. It is argued that though the avowed purposes then and now have been modernisation and decentralisation, what this actually entailed then, and entails now, is the deconcentration of admini- stration rather than the devolution of political power. 1 Panchayati Raj Reform The mandal system concerns the middle tier of the panchayati raj system. It was introduced while replacing the earlier panchayat samitis in Andhra Pradesh during the tenure of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) government led by N T Rama Rao (Kistaiah 1990). The attempt had been inspired by the recommendations of the Ashok Mehta Committee. The Ashok Mehta Committee, in fact, had recom- mended a two-tier system of mandals and zilla parishads in place of the previ- ously existing three-tier structure of vil- lage panchayats, panchayat samitis (or taluk panchayats) and zilla panchayats. However, when the recommendations of the Ashok Mehta Committee were adopted in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, the three- tier structure was retained, while replac- ing the middle tier, that is, panchayat samitis with smaller size mandals. Thus, post the reform, the panchayati raj system in Andhra Pradesh still had three tiers, that is, the village panchayat, the mandal panchayat and the zilla panchayat. Thus, the recommendations of the Ashok Mehta Committee were only partially implemented and were not fully adopted. In the first place, the Ashok Mehta Committee had recom- mended the implementation of smaller intermediate-tier mandal panchayats because it was thought that they would be in a closer geographical vicinity of the villages and villagers. In all, the recommendations of the Ashok Mehta Committee were adopted, either partially or fully, only by four Indian states, that is, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir (Mathew 1995). Given that the Indian states were spatially large, making the intermediate tier of pan- chayati raj institutions (PRIs) smaller made a particular sense to the members of the Ashok Mehta Committee as well as policymakers during those days. For example, the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh was one of the largest states of the union, the fifth largest state to be pre- cise; Karnataka, the seventh largest state in India, also implemented the reforms. In such contexts, it was mean- ingful to make the larger intermediate-tier panchayat samitis into smaller mandals, so as to be easily within the reach of the village inhabitants. However, in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, the reforms were far-reaching in that 330 intermediate-tier panchayati samitis were replaced with 1,104 “mandal praja parishads,” as the latter came to be called. In fact, almost three to four mandal praja parishads were constituted in the place of each panchayat samiti. Each of the reformed mandal praja parishads came to consist of 10 to 12 revenue villages, covering a population of approximately 35,000 to 55,000. Thus, the slogan then