Jhumku is a small but healthy young woman with shining brown eyes. Belonging to the Bheel tribal caste, near the bottom of the traditional Indian social order, she is illiterate and obliged to live in squalid conditions on the outskirts of Delwara, a village in northern India.

Nearly a thousand miles away, the picture is vastly different. Sukanya lives in Tandamuther, a village in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Here, in the more developed south, education levels and social tensions are not as pronounced as in Delwara. Sukanya, who holds a degree in agricultural studies and belongs to a higher caste, does not face the crippling social ostracism that Jhumku does.

Yet, on one level, these two women are one and the same. Jhumku and Sukanya are both part of a government-led revolution to empower the masses of rural India. In 1993 the Indian Parliament passed a series of constitutional amendments known as the Panchayat Acts, kicking off an experiment in local democracy unprecedented in size and scope. The reforms devolved political accountability, administrative control, and financial resources to the local level, mandating that each village institute a panchayat council with regular elections to take charge of developmental matters previously handled by state governments. Both Jhumku and Sukanya were elected by their village to serve as the sarpanch, the head of the village council.

A third of the seats on every council is reserved for women, and minority castes hold seats in proportion to their population in the area. When the first series of elections took place across the country under the Panchayat Acts, the body politic of India gained nearly three million legislators. One million of the new legislators were women and over 700,000 were minorities.

What prompted such a drastic change? Some contend that the reforms were the product of a broad consensus among the political elites that India’s centralized bureaucratic state had failed to deliver the necessary reforms. Others point to government attempts to undermine state-wide political parties by devolving power underneath them to the sub-state level.

Regardless of the original motivation for the Panchayat program, 15 years after its launch, the results have been mixed. Social inequality has led Jhumku and Sukanya to have drastically different experiences in attempting to implement reforms. Leading a large village of 5,000, Jhumku said that her illiteracy forces her to sign off on documents that she cannot understand. Her husband explained that she was elected because the sarpanch position was reserved for a woman of her social caste and Jhumku was one of only two eligible candidates.

In contrast, Sukanya has now been elected to the post of sarpanch three times. In the most recent election she was chosen over her male counterparts to continue the impressive programs she began. She said with pride that she has brought plumbing and sanitation to all houses in her village and has ensured that the roads remain in perfect condition—in marked contrast to a time when the inefficient state bureaucracy had her role. She beamed as she gestured around the brick and mortar panchayat office, which included a brand new HP desktop computer.

But Sukanya’s successes are inherently limited by macrolevel politicking. Each state has the freedom to delegate as much power and funding as it sees fit to the local councils under its jurisdiction. In the face of an ongoing struggle against the central government, state legislatures and government bureaucrats have every incentive to hold onto their prerogatives. Thus, with the exception of very few states, a broad-based devolution of authority and financial support is still lacking.

Jhumku and Sukanya have both struggled against the sexism, casteism, and classism which impede their work as sarpanches. However, their efforts will be fruitless if the system as a whole remains crippled. The central government must recognize that power is shifting irrevocably to the regional level and must stop using the panchayats as a tool to undermine that change. The states, for their part, must not cling obsessively to their power at the expense of local empowerment. Finally, the bureaucrats—a powerful vested interest—must be placated. By way of their technical competence, they should be assured a place in this new order as advisors and executors of the democratic will of the panchayat.

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