Decentralisation and Good Governance

Decentralization aims to redistribute power, responsibility, and funding for delivering public services among several governmental tiers. Planning, funding, and control of some public tasks are transferred from the central government and its agencies to local, regional, or functional authorities, subordinate bodies of government, or semi-autonomous public authorities. 

• The authority to make plans, execute them, fund allocation is given to the local level of government.
• The basic idea behind decentralisation is that a large number of problems are best settled at the local level. People have better knowledge of problems in their localities.
• They have better knowledge about spending money and managing things efficiently. People can directly participate in decision making at a local level. 
• This helps to enhance democratic participation. Local self-government is best realised through local government. The Indian constitution recognised decentralisation.

Top-down approach: In top-down, approach decisions are taken at a higher level and trickle down to a lower level. There are some advantages of the approach like expertise in decision making, strong management, better organisation etc. However, it suffers from poor inclusion of people who are at the end of benefits, low creativity, poor adaptability to local challenges. Planners rather than focusing on specific problems look for solutions that fit all.

Bottom-up approach: It removes flaws in a topdown approach. Decentralised planning is an important factor in this approach. Decentralised planning is realistic as it maintains close coordination of locally available resources, skills, manpower, and requirements of people.

It is more flexible than top to bottom approach as it is easily adaptable to changing local conditions. It promotes the active participation of local people in implementing local plans and programmes. It can reduce the wastage of resources as people participating in developmental activities keep vigilance over the utilisation of funds. It helps in better public service delivery.

However Bottom-Up approach suffers from Following Drawbacks:

• Lack of coordination: The decisionmaking authority is dispersed rather than concentrated, creating the problem of coordination.

• Lack of uniformity: The policies and procedures followed may not be uniform for the same kind of work in different divisions.
• Lack of expertise: There is a lack of manpower for policy formulation at local levels.