According to Gandhiji, ideal society is a Stateless democracy, the state of enlightened anarchy where social life has become so perfect that it is self-regulated. “In the ideal state, there is no political power because there is no State.” Gandhiji believed that perfect realization of an ideal is impossible. However “the ideal is like Euclid's line that is one without breadth but no one has so far been able to draw it and never will.Village Swaraj as conceived by Gandhiji is thus a genuine and virile democracy which offers a potent cure for many of the political ills that mark the present political systems. Such a pattern of decentralized genuine democracy will have a message for the whole of humanity.

Village Swaraj It is, indeed, a matter for gratification that the Navajivan Trust is publishing selections from Mahatma Gandhis writings on "Village Swaraj" in a book form. The publication contains Gandhiji's views on different aspects of rural life including agriculture, village industry, animal husbandry, transport, basic education, health and hygiene. At a time when we are endeavoring to establish Panchayat Raj in India on the basis of wide decentralization of political and economic power, this book is bound to be of great value to a large number of official as well as non-official workers. The Community Development movement should not be regarded as some kind of a programme which has been largely imported from the Western democracies; it must necessarily be based on Indian conditions and traditions.

This book contains Gandhiji's views on different aspects of rural life including agriculture, village industry, animal husbandry, transport, basic education, health and hygiene. The Community Development movement should not be regarded as some kind of a programme which has been largely imported from the Western democracies; it must necessarily be based on Indian conditions and traditions. Mahatma Gandhi strongly pleaded for decentralization of economic and political power through the organization of Village Panchayats. He was of the definite view that Panchayat system in India, if worked on scientific lines, could not only build up the social and economic strength of the countryside but also strengthen the forces of national defence against the risk of foreign invasion.

The last one-and-a-half years in India have been defined by the anti-graft agitation led by Anna Hazare. His key lieutenant, Arvind Kejriwal, has played a central role in the movement. In 2012, as it became clear that the political establishment was not going to accede to the main demand of the movement - to pass the Lokpal Bill. Team Anna demanded the setting up of a Special Investigative Team to probe corrupt politicians. On 25 July 2012, Kejriwal, along with two of his colleagues and Anna Hazare, sat on a fast to press this demand. This book, which serves as a manifesto for the movement going forward, gives practical suggestions as to what the ordinary citizen, the opinion makers and the political establishment in India can do to provide a political alternative, or to achieve true swaraj (self-rule). The author's central point is that power must shift from New Delhi and the state capitals to the village councils and the town communities, so that people can be directly empowered to take decisions about their own lives. A must-read for anyone with a dream to leave behind a better India for the next generation.

The restructuring of school governance, especially in urban school districts, is fundamental in current educational reform. This book provides a model of school governance based upon participatory democracy, derived from the "developmental" tradition in political theory. The result is a system of governance that is fundamentally integrated, in that it is simultaneously participative, communicative, associative, and nonviolent, as well as sensitive to the need for collective, democratic deliberation concerning community-wide interests. This model is critically compared to the bureaucratic model of school governance and current school-based management plans.

Participatory governance has a long history in India and this book traces historical-intellectual trajectories of participatory governance and how older Western discourses have influenced Indian policymakers. While colonial rulers devolved power to accommodate dissenting voices, for independent India, participatory governance was a design for democratizing governance in its true sense. Participation also acted as a vehicle for localizing governance. The author draws on both Western and non-Western theoretical treatises and the book seeks to conceptualize localizing governance also as a contextual response. It also makes the argument that despite being located in different socio-economic and political milieu, thinkers converge to appreciate localizing governance as perhaps the only reliable means to democratize governance. The book aims to confirm this argument by reference to sets of evidence from the Indian experience of localizing governance. By attempting a genealogy of participatory governance in the West and in India, and an empirical study of participatory governance in India, the book sheds light on the exchange of ideas and concepts through space and time, thus adding to the growing body of literature in the social sciences on ‘conceptual flow’. It will be of interest to political scientists and historians, in particularly those studying South Asia.