Even as political parties intensify efforts to consolidate the Other Backward Classes (OBC) vote bank ahead of the 2027 Assembly poll in Punjab, the community’s representation in grassroots institutions remains negligible.Data obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act has revealed that there’s no OBC sarpanch among the state’s 13,236 gram panchayats. This is in stark contrast to the community’s estimated 32 per cent share in Punjab’s population, spread across the Majha, Malwa and Doaba regions.The RTI findings further show that OBC representation among panches stands at just 3 per cent. At the intermediate level, there’s no representation of the community among chairpersons of the 154 panchayat samitis. In the 32 panchayat samiti zones, representation is marginal at around 1 per cent.The situation remains unchanged at the district level as well. There’s no OBC representation among the 23 zila parishad chairpersons or across the 357 zila parishad zones.Balwinder Singh Multani, chairman of the OBC Reservation Implementation Forum, who sought the information from the Rural Development and Panchayats Department, said the figures did not reflect the demographic reality of the state.He pointed out that the state had adopted a criterion requiring at least 20 per cent OBC population in a gram panchayat for reservation to apply, which, he argued, does not align with the overall 32 per cent OBC population in Punjab.Multani added that if the commonly followed benchmark of 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in local bodies —adopted by several states and Union Territories — were implemented, the representation would still remain disproportionately low.Officials in the Rural Development Department, however, maintained that the OBC reservation in panchayats was governed by the state-specific legislation rather than a uniform national policy.They noted that while the 73rd Constitutional Amendment mandates reservation for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women, provisions for the OBC reservation are determined by individual states, subject to guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court.The data highlights a significant gap between the OBC population share and its representation in Punjab’s Panchayati Raj Institutions, an issue likely to gain political traction in the run-up to the Assembly poll.