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Rajiv Ratna Gandhi (20 August 1944- 21 May 1991) served the nation as its seventh Prime Minister from 1984 to 1989. He took office after the 1984 assassination of his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, to become the youngest Indian Prime Minister at 40. He was assassinated while campaigning for the elections by a suicide bomber from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In 1991, the Indian government posthumously awarded him the Bharat Ratna, the country's highest civilian award.

Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust (RGCT) was established by his widow Sonia Gandhi to realise Mr. Gandhi's vision of an inclusive India, the many components of which included rapid computerisation, focus on local governance, voting rights to the youth, to name a few.

Here's is an extract from one of Mr. Gandhi's speeches on devolution of administrative power to the grassroots:

"I toured hundreds of villages. I spoke to countless people. There, in their hearths and homes, I experienced the cruelty of an unresponsive administration, the oppression of an administration without a heart, the callous lack of compassion that most of our people find at the hands of much of our administration. I then looked at the administrators themselves - most of them dedicated young men and women, of extraordinarily high intelligence, deeply concerned about the people placed in their charge and yet, apparently incapable of converting their enthusiasm and personal compassion into a responsive administration.

"At that time, I must confess, we were in quest of managerial solutions to an unresponsive administration. We were looking to a simplification of procedures, grievance redressal machinery, single-window clearances, computerisation and courtesy as the answers to the problem. As we went along, we discovered that a managerial solution would not do.

"What was needed was a systemic solution.

"We learnt that a grassroot administration without political authority was like a meal without salt. We learnt that however well-intentioned our district bureaucracy might be, without effective elected authority the gap between the people and the bureaucracy could not be closed. We learnt that the vacuum created by the absence of local level political authority had spawned the power brokers who occupy the gap between the people and their representatives in distant Vidhan Sabhas and the ever more remote Parliament. We learnt that corruption could only be ended by giving power to the panchayats and making panchayats responsible to the people. We learnt that inefficiency could only be ended by entrusting the people at the grassroot level with the responsibility for their own development. We learnt that callousness could only be ended by empowering the people to send their own representatives to institutions of local self-government.

"The Panchayati Raj and Nagarpalika Bills are not only instruments for bringing democracy and devolution of every chaupal (square) and every chabutra (platform), to (verandah) and every dalan, they are also a charter for ending bureaucratic oppression, technocratic tyranny, crass inefficiency, bribery, jobbery, nepotism, corruption and the million other malfeasances that afflict the poor of our villages, towns and cities. The bills are the warrant for ending the reign of the power brokers, of the intermediaries whom Shakespeare called 'the caterpillars of the commonwealth'."