The institutions of the marketplace, which are both the products and the prime supports of this democracy, also underpin much of its success. But in their present, capitalist form, they are also the cause of its greatest failure – extraordinarily profligate and wasteful consumption patterns on the one hand, and the consequent, unprecedented inequity and poverty on the other, which now threaten the very survival of the planet. And this, in turn, demonstrates the weakness of the democratic process: its inability, in the face of political and electoral compulsions, to generate the moral leadership needed to change people’s behaviour even when it is clearly not sustainable.

"Subsidiarity" is not a household term in the US, but it accurately describes the systems of governance in that country. It was, apparently, coined in India more than a hundred and fifty years ago by the British to describe the least cost and most effective way to govern their remote colonies: the devolution of political and social decisions to the lowest level at which they can properly be made. Ironically, it was again the British who, in the 1970s, revived the term – this time in the European context and for the opposite reason. Subsidiarity became the keyword in the debate to curb the growing tendency of the powerful bureaucracy in Brussels to centralise European decision making at the expense of national and local governments.

Subsidiarity is clearly not the most euphonic word in the English language. Even the concept it represents has its limits:

it implies that decision making powers are to be devolved, top down, from a higher authority to a lower one. Once the national government has been elected, it decides on national priorities and collects taxes to pay for the programmes to meet these. It then devolves authority and passes any remaining funds down to local administrations to take care of provincial and local needs. The people themselves come into the picture once every five years or so to express their approval or displeasure by electing the next government.

The imperatives of sustainability dictate otherwise. For development to be sustainable, people must acquire a sense of ownership and responsibility for their resources – economic, social and natural. And they must be able to oversee and correct the actions of their elected representatives on a continuing basis. Such a sense of ownership can in the long run come only from actual ownership – enshrined in institutions of local governance involving the entire adult population. These bodies should collect revenue from local resources, decide on local priorities and authorise higher level institutions to coordinate activities that involve other jurisdictions or skills and knowledge not available at the local level. And for any such citizen oversight to be effective, it needs certain basic prerequisites – transparency, accurate information and the right to be consulted in all matters that affect the citizen.

As the work of People First continues to show, a true democracy, of the type that can lead to sustainable development, is actually an inversion of subsidiarity. We now need a new concept and a new word – supersidiarity, a bottom-up form of democracy that assigns the primary decision making responsibility to the local community – "gram sabha" in the village or the "mohalla samiti" in the city. They retain the portion of the tax money collected in their jurisdictions to implement these decisions. These bodies and the ones above them devolve successively upwards only those decisions and activities that cannot be handled at a given level of governance, together with the residual funds to implement these. This does not mean that each village will decide on its own what it wants to devolve. A professional group will work out what resources villages and districts need and provide distribution of resources in the constitution accordingly.

It is gratifying that the Government of India in its 1999 Budget has designated this the "Year of the Gram Sabha". q