Wallace and Ferguson

The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act was introduced in 1992 and mandated that: "Not less than one-third (including the number of seats reserved for women belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes) of the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in every Municipality shall be reserved for women and such seats may be allotted by rotation to different constituencies in a Municipality" (http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/amend/amend74.htm).

This act applies to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), which governs nine districts of Delhi (covering a population of roughly ten million people),and the behavior of its 272 councilors is central to our project's research. Sheila Dikshit, the Chief Minister of Delhi, has proposed recently to split the MCD into three distinct entities, while increasing the number of councilor seats reserved for women to fifty percent. Should the proposal be implemented successfully, it will be interesting to observe where possible how the major political parties react in choosing female candidates and potentially shuffling male politicians across wards, as the increased reservations would likely rotate among wards over time.

A particularly inspiring related piece of journalism can be found online at:
http://post.jagran.com/mcd-hike-of-women-reservation-worries-political-parties-1306937088.
It is difficult to imagine that in a city such as Delhi that there could truly be a "crisis of apt women candidates in the civic body elections".  Also, the claim that "according the sources [without reference, of course], 75 per cent of the total women councilors are either wife of the legislators or their relatives" is hopefully just evidence of shoddy reporting.  If not, then the actual benefit to women of the increase in reservations sadly seems greatly hampered by the fact that the women put forth for election will be for the most part mere proxies for their male relatives, and not actually the most qualified female candidates.

Maggi

Last week the entire Delhi Voter Project team had a full day meeting with one of our PI's and two officials from SNS. An interesting tension was present between putting into place an experimental design most likely to allow for relatively clear channels of causal impact and/or yield statistically significant results and one most likely to be feasibly scalable.

One criticism sometimes raised against experimental field research such as ours is that while an intervention may reveal important relationships/mechanisms from an academic research perspective, the actual intensity of effort and resources expended over the course of the experiment is such that, even in the event of finding a beneficial impact, it is impractical to implement the program on a larger scale. The nature of some of the discussions during the meeting were heartening because, while academic concerns were dominant (and in all honesty are also my primary interest), practicality and relevance from a policy standpoint were certainly given consideration.  We have another meeting next week with two of the PI's and the SNS officials, after which the structure of the RWA intervention should be finalized.

Long ago, during my first year as a research assistant at JPAL, a professor and I were discussing the involved, and not so rarely frustrating, process of data analysis used to take results from the field and produce meaningful academic work.  As he put it, being involved in this allowed one to "see what went into making the sausage".  After three years or so of being enmeshed in that very process, it's been really useful for me to engage with a different sort of charcuterie, bettering my understanding of what goes into running a field experiment and gathering the data which I had too much begun to take for granted.

I've been spending this week in Landour working remotely in the company of Nilesh and Alicia, two other members of my PhD cohort also involved in research in India over the summer.  While sitting at my laptop crunching away at Stata, being enveloped in a cloud as it rolls up the hillside has become a routine experience.  After the din and heat of Delhi, it's not been an unwelcome one.