How has DDC changed local governance in Jammu and Kashmir?

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The restructuring of the political and administrative framework of Jammu and Kashmir through the establishment of District Development Councils (DDCs) has remained a matter of legal and constitutional debate. The DDCs, which were established in 2021, completed their five-year term on 24 February 2026. With no new elections held and local government bodies remaining largely inactive in recent years, questions about the relevance of the DDC model have resurfaced. Introduced as a mechanism of direct local democracy, DDCs are seen by supporters as a step towards local governance, while critics argue that they have hindered rather than strengthened democratic decentralization in the region.

What do the 73rd and 74th Amendments provide?

One of the main arguments advanced for the repeal of Article 370 was the need to fully integrate J&K into the constitutional framework applicable to the rest of India.

Central to this argument was the introduction of the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Acts, which provide for elected rural and urban bodies. This integration was supposed to ensure regular, mandatory elections and strengthen human democracy.

How is local government structured?

The standard constitutional framework operates on a clearly defined multi-stage electoral system where citizens directly elect their local representatives:

Urban Areas: Municipal Corporations, Municipal Councils and Nagar Panchayats.

Rural Areas: Three tier structure comprising Gram Panchayats (Village Pradhans), Block Development Council (BDC) and District level bodies (Zila Parishads).

The District Planning Committee (DPC) empowered under Article 243 of the Constitution is considered a coordinating body which brings together the development plans prepared by the panchayats and municipalities and integrates them into a comprehensive plan at the district level.

Unlike an independent executive body, the DPC is intended to function as an institutional mechanism that reflects the priorities established by elected local authorities and facilitates bottom-up planning. In this sense, it is designed to enhance democratic decentralization by aggregating local mandates rather than exercising powers over them.

However, while the constitutional framework assigns DPCs a key role in district-level planning, their functioning is patchy across the country and many remain largely inactive, barring a few exceptions such as Kerala.

How is DDC different from DPC?

DDCs were established in J&K through an executive order rather than a legislative process. While the government presents DDCs as directly elected bodies that strengthen popular democracy, it is argued that the model contains major contradictions within governance.

Critics say the DDC structure bypasses existing institutions such as Zila Panchayats and urban local bodies. Unlike the DPC, which is meant to aggregate development priorities emanating from lower levels of government, the DDC functions as a parallel administrative body with executive and development powers. This blurs the relationship between voters and the actual exercise of power.

A key difference is that the DPC seeks to strengthen local democracy by consolidating mandates created from the ground up, while the DDC operates from the top, competes with lower levels of governance, and functions as an instrument of centralized bureaucratic control rather than democratic decentralization.

The structure of the DDC raises concerns about unequal representation. The distribution of seats between districts does not sufficiently reflect differences in population, thus weakening the principle of uniform political weight.

For example, Srinagar with a population of around 12 million and Kishtwar with a population of around 2.5 million have been allocated the same number of DDC members. This creates an imbalance where the political vote per capita is drastically skewed.

DDCs are likened to “special purpose vehicles” used in Smart City projects. They create the illusion of decentralization, but act as capital-driven, bureaucratically driven structures. Because DDCs can easily override legislatively mandated local initiatives, they function more as a substitute for governance than as a supplement to governance.

The creation of 280 DDC members across J&K created a form of parallel ‘parliament’ in disguise. Historically, in politically unstable regions, central authorities have often sought to weaken provincial or state-level assemblies by supporting district-level entities.

With the J&K State Assembly absent or weakened for years, the DDC framework allowed key functions and financial powers that would normally rest with elected legislatures and local panchayats to remain centralized under the control of the Union administration.

What is the way forward for local democracy in J&K?

Real local democracy cannot be reduced to administrative or legal performance; it is fundamentally a political question. True decentralization requires the restoration of the DPC model envisioned in the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution, which will ensure financially empowered and grounded local governments accountable to the state electorate, rather than an administrative architecture serving centralized union control.

Tikender Singh Panwar is an author, urban practitioner, former Deputy Mayor of Shimla and member of the Kerala Urban Commission

Published – 13 Jul 2026 08:30 IST