On 25th May, Common Ground partners gathered for the inaugural session of a new learning series on decentralised governance, Panchayati Raj: Seekh aur Samvad (पंचायती राज: सीख और संवाद श्रृंखला), held virtually on the iECHO platform. Around 60 participants joined from 15 to 20 organisations, including PRI elected representatives, panchayat secretaries, Sahayaks, field practitioners, and community resource persons spread across states.
The session was led by Mr. S.M. Vijayanand, President of CRISP and former Secretary to the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Government of India. His decades of work on decentralised governance shaped the discussion in ways that moved between the structural and the practical: what policy frameworks like the localisation of Sustainable Development Goals (सतत विकास लक्ष्यों को स्थानीय स्तर पर अपनाना) actually ask of gram panchayats, and what ward members, panchayat secretaries, and community institutions need in order to make those frameworks real at the village level.
The series is a collaboration between CRISP and XISS, Ranchi, and is designed around an action-reflection cycle that takes seriously the gap between policy and field reality. Fortnightly sessions alternate between technical segments led by CRISP, which bring policy content and analytical frameworks, and field dialogue sessions facilitated by XISS, which are dedicated to troubleshooting live challenges from the ground. The structure is deliberate: rather than delivering a curriculum and moving on, the series is built to return to what practitioners are actually encountering, and to refine understanding through that encounter. Themes across the series will include gram panchayat development planning, PESA, and the practical conditions for community governance to function.
The series will run for at least six months, hosted on iECHO. It is one of two long-running learning programmes that Common Ground has recently launched alongside partner organisations, both oriented toward the same underlying question: how do governance institutions and field practitioners learn together, not just in parallel, in ways that actually change practice.