गुजरात में स्वराज को मूर्तरूप दिया जा रहा है। Soumitra Das drives to a village in Gujarat's Anand district to meet 12 collegians who will decide the fate of 7,000 villagers for the next five years The floral tapestry sofas arranged in a semi circle around a smoked glass coffee table that holds a bunch of fabric roses, are not enough to seat all 12 girls. Hinal Patel pulls up a couple of chairs. Twenty three-year-old Nisha Patel adjusts her georgette dupatta to sit firmly on her slight shoulders before she whips out a pen, holding it to a notepad. It's a Sunday panchayat meeting. Except there are no members squatting under a shady banyan. And there are no men. Hinal, the 25-year-old sarpanch of Siswa village in Borsad town of Anand district in Gujarat, Nisha and 10 of their friends meet every weekend to debate over the nitty gritty of running the village administration. The all-girls panchayat was appointed last month as part of the Samras scheme introduced by chief minister Narendra Modi a decade ago. Under it, as many as 254 villages have entrusted their panchayats entirely to women. The goal, say government representatives, is to avoid inter-village enmity; an inescapable outcome of election politics. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-01-08/people/30604104_1_samras-panchayat-meeting-woman-sarpanch

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