We investigate political entry and selection at an unprecedented scale within India’s local democracy, analyzing data from 3 million candidates across four major states and multiple election cycles. We find that 1 percent of rural adults run for office in each election. Local politicians, while descriptively representative, are significantly more educated than the general population across various positions and levels of rural governance. India’s seat reservation system has a disruptive dynamic. It disqualifies 29 percent of incumbents from re-election due to quota rotation. Consequently, quotas not only bring lower educated citizens to office, they disproportionately eliminate higher-educated candidates from recontesting office. Despite these disruptions, the educational qualifications of candidates gradually increase over time, with both re-running and new candidates generally more educated than the incumbents they replace. We further find a consistent incumbency disadvantage, including in reserved-seat races same-caste and same-gender races, which is similar in magnitude to open and mixed-candidate races. Exploring policy performance observationally, we find that incumbents who choose to recontest deliver strong workfare program benefits, with winning incumbents providing even greater benefits. Audit data suggest that these high provision levels do not reflect corruption. Our findings show that local Indian democracy has competitive selection and accountability processes that progressively enhance the quality of representation.