Getting on the Grid: The Politics of Public Service Formalization in Urban India

• In Event: Identity and Partisan Politics in Contemporary India

Abstract

Water is essential for human life, yet even democratically elected governments fail to provide it to all citizens. Why do poorer citizens fail time and again to access core urban services on which their well-being so heavily depends? And, more importantly, can civil society organizations help citizens successfully overcome the barriers to such access? The existing literature suggests contrasting answers to these questions. A burgeoning body of work emphasizes the significance of citizen-focused bureaucratic assistance interventions for gaining formalized access to key services. Other research, meanwhile, highlights the role of structural factors---notably electoral incentives, partisanship, and community characteristics --- in influencing public service provision. This latter set of arguments suggests that interventions that target political incentives will be the most successful in helping citizens gain access to state services.

Our research seeks to reconcile these views by developing and experimentally testing a complementarity framework in which both bureaucrats and politicians are key veto players when it comes to the provisioning of state services. This theory implies a potential role for two types of interventions by civil society actors to improve citizens' welfare. Intervening to reduce citizens' costs of interfacing with the bureaucracy should, we argue, help citizens overcome the first-mile hurdle of demonstrating their eligibility for formalization---that is, gaining legal access to state services via established rules and procedures. However, our complementarity framework suggests that achieving last-mile access to formal public utilities will not succeed without interventions that help citizens apply coordinated pressure on politicians, in turn shaping politicians' responsiveness.

We implemented a large, cluster-randomized controlled trial to shed light on the barriers to municipal water access experienced by poor residents of Mumbai's vast informal settlements – many of whom lack formalized access to water. Working with local NGOs and hundreds of NGO workers, we implemented two interventions on a sample of over 6,000 individuals in 152 slum clusters across the city designed to boost communities' prospects for acquiring formal water connections. In a bureaucratic assistance arm, partners helped citizens navigate the bureaucratic hurdles required to establish eligibility for formal services. The second treatment arm focused on political coordination. Implementing partners (i) convened public events on the topic of water access targeting local elected officials as their audience; (ii) organized group visits to the offices of politicians and bureaucrats; and (iii) collected and submitted petitions demanding access to municipal water. The purpose was to signal to elected leaders the community's willingness to mobilize around the issue of water access. The two interventions were staggered: the political coordination intervention began five months after the bureaucratic assistance intervention was fielded. We cross-randomized the two interventions in a multi-level factorial design, enabling us to assess both the individual effects of the treatments (compared to one another and to a pure control group) as well as potential interactions.

We evaluated the efficacy of the interventions at two stages: at midline in 2019 and at endline in 2023. In the short run, at midline, we found that bureaucratic assistance spurred citizens to initiate claims for services. However, contrary to our complementary hypothesis, the interventions failed to generate “last-mile” service delivery overall. At the same time, we found evidence that political coordination proved substantially effective in boosting formalization for members of non-dominant identity groups. This paper presents the results of the endline evaluation. Over the long run, large proportions of our sample had obtained water connections. We show how bottom-up political mobilization is a crucial determinant of formalization. This paper points to the benefits and limits of citizen empowerment interventions that tackle both bureaucratic constraints as well as political incentives simultaneously in helping marginalized citizens “get on the grid” in politically captured developing democracies.

Authors

• Nikhar Gaikwad, Columbia University

• Anjali Thomas, Georgia Institute of Technology