Trudging through the treacherous, pock-marked road winding amidst the majestic Aravalli ranges, our ramshackle Tata Sumo took about three hours to reach Madri, a picturesque village in the Tribal Udaipur district of Rajasthan.

Setting out from Udaipur we had travelled to this far flung region to meet Jagdish Meena, the sarpanch of Madri panchayat of Jhdol block, 50 km from the city.

We wanted to enquire about the implementation of rural employment guarantee scheme NREGA in his panchayat. At the Zonal office of Sewa Mandir, a NGO working in the area, we waited for ‘sarpanchji’ to arrive. “He has been intimated of your arrival and he should soon grace you with his presence,” we were told.

An hour after we had sent for ‘sarpanchji’, a vehicle (probably a Bolero) purred to a halt at the entrance. In walked a dark lanky man with a large ‘tikka’ adorning his small forehead. He had an air of superiority, as he shook our hand.

As he began rattling off the statistics for the employment guarantee scheme-- job cards issued in his panchayat, kacha and pacca work carried out by his village folks, the funds approved till now, works in the pipeline-- he gave the impression of an educated sarpanch who had the grasp of the technicalities of various rural development programmes.

An hour long onto conversation with Meena, I asked him how he got along with the district officials. “Oh I often meet the tehsildar, the BDO and other block level officials and they all know me well,” he said with a huge smile, suggesting perhaps of his proximity to the government officials he had to deal with on a daily basis.

“And the District Collector..how is he/she?,” I asked.

“Oh! When it comes to the DC, it’s my mother who meets him,” he said nonchalantly.

“But why should the DC meet your mother when you are the sarpanch,” I shot back.

“Actually its my mother Ambavi Bai, who has been elected sarpanch. But since she is illiterate, I look after her work,” he said as a matter of fact.

It took some time to recover from the jolt that I had just received. All this while, I had been talking to a person who was defacto sarpanch. Not even once did anyone—from the Sewa Mandir worker to the ward panch to other villagers we had interacted—tell me that the guy I was speaking to was not the actual sarpanch.

But then they were not to be blamed. That is how it has been ever since women were given 30-50 percent reservation in panchayat elections.

In the reserved seats where the women sarpanches were elected, their male relatives like husbands (who is famously called sarpanch-pati), sons or even father-in-laws ruled by proxy.

While Madri panchayat was ruled by sarpanch-beta, the neighbouring Madla panchayat in the same block was ruled by sarpanch-sasur (father in law of the lady sarpanch).

The practice is so rampant that even the district officials unabashedly deal with these proxies without making any effort to discourage the deliberate murder of this constitutional precept aimed at empowerment of women at the panchayat level.