Food for thought: Local governments - Power to the people

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Recently I've been watching the series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister. An absolutely brilliant British sitcom. Visit http://www.yes-minister.com/ for a feel of it.

Well, in one of the episodes it mentions a nice technique called local government for maintaining true democracy in a bureaucratic environment. The main point is to decentralize the power of government and hand it over to the local people. We do have local governments in India. We do have the panchayats and Municipalities, but the granularity is far too coarse. Need is to make it a lot finer, say, at most 800-1000 people under each administrator. This administrator would be elected by these 800-1000 people themselves and would be based on the credibility of the administrator and his past records rather than the political party he represents! This way, the administrators would work towards the actual welfare of the people, rather than wasting time in useless hollow political publicity. Publicity would be mouth to mouth as each member would know the administrator personally and whom they would be able to meet in person. As the people have the right to elect as well as vote out the administrator, the power truly remains with the people!

With a lot of corruption and misgovernment cases cropping up in India this can be looked upon as an option to help contribute towards the betterment of the nation.

Not that this idea is recent and has not been looked at previously, its just that may be we need to look at it with a fresh perspective and in today's context.

Just some food for thought. Comments, anyone?