Government
• As we know, human beings live and work together, so some rules have to be made that apply to everyone, and there needs to be some amount of organisation to make rules and regulations.
• Governments do this on behalf of their people by exercising leadership, taking decisions and implementing laws.
Role of Government
• Government decides many things such as building roads and schools, controlling inflation, ways to effective distribution of resources, maintaining peace with other countries.
• Government takes action on many social issues – for example, it has several programmes to help poor, running of postal and railway services. This is responsible for ensuring that all its citizens have enough to eat and have good health facilities and helps citizen during natural disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes.
• Judiciary [courts] is an important organ of government.
• government works at different levels: local level, state level, and national level.
• government functions by making laws, and everyone who lives in country follows these laws.
Types of Government
Monarchy
• Another form of government is monarchy. monarch [king or queen] has power to make decisions and run government.
• monarch may have a small group of people to discuss matters with, but final decision-making power remains with monarch.
• Kings and Queens do not have to explain their actions or defend decisions they make.
Democratic
• In a democratic government, people elect their government through voting.
• In a democracy government has to explain its actions and defend its decisions to people.
Democratic Government
• India is a democracy.
• main feature of a democracy is that people have power to elect their leaders.
• Democratic governments are generally referred to as Representative democracies.
• In Representative democracies people do not participate directly but choose their representatives through an election process.
• These representatives meet and make decisions for entire population.
• A democratic government allows Universal Adult Franchise. This means that all adults in country are allowed to vote.
• Young India was a weekly paper [in English] started by Mahatma Gandhi where he popularised demand for Swaraj.