TENT, INDIA — As sarpanch, or chief, of this northern Indian village, Maya Yadav has fought hard for local women over the past five years. She has encouraged more parents to send their daughters to school and fewer to shell out fat dowries when their girls marry. But her proudest moment came when she negotiated a discount on a bulk purchase of latrines.

Today, Tent, in Haryana State, is one of the few villages in India to boast an indoor toilet in every house.

“Before this, pregnant women had to walk into the fields,” Ms. Yadav, 50, said as she sat in her living room — and office — dressed in a scarlet sari. “No man would have thought of this.”

Despite her self-confident manner, Ms. Yadav concedes that she is unlikely to have come to power had the Constitution not been amended in 1993 to reserve at least one-third of the seats for women in India’s 265,000 village governing bodies. More than a million women across India have since been elected into the reserved positions in these panchayats, which administer public services and resolve disputes on matters ranging from marriage to property.