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.

Orlov

 With the help of two overnight trains, we managed to squeeze in another weekend trip around project work (more details on that to come soon), this time to Udaipur in Rajasthan.  As a bonus, the visit happened to coincide with my birthday...

Udaipur City Palace (at top)

 

 My new favorite method of dealing with the summer heat

 Patrick and Yashas, two other members of the the Delhi Voter Project team

A pleasant surprise

Langar

A few shots of Amritsar, India/Pakistan border ceremony, and our non-AC sleeper car from a quick trip to Punjab last weekend.

AADI Lower Ground Floor

Following a shift in my travel dates, I arrived in Delhi shortly before midnight on June 2nd. While it was simple enough to find a taxi from the airport, locating the guest flats was another matter. Though I had a google map and a list of directions from the airport, this was only of slight help as I spoke no Hindi and the driver had a minimal grasp of English. After traveling for research purposes in Indonesia in recent years with a basic grasp of Bahasa, I’d forgotten how frustrating it can be to have one’s ability to communicate limited to gesturing. However, with the assistance of various individuals sitting beside the road to point us in the increasingly correct direction, I finally arrived at the flat at around 2:30am. At this point I promptly proceeded to watch an episode of Community on my laptop to settle into the apartment before falling asleep.

The last few days at the Delhi office have been eventful ones. We became aware that the local government previously passed a law restricting the ability of councilors to spend in slum areas, effectively eliminating the possibility of there being a treatment effect from the planned mobilization campaign. As a result, the main intervention that was to be implemented in the coming year has been put on indefinite hold while we determine how best to recast it. However, we've also been meeting with SNS to conceptualize an alternative intervention which will center on the provision of information and mobilization activities to leaders of Resident Welfare Associations. Though this shifts the focus of the research a bit, I'm still hopeful that we will be able to answer some interesting questions.

Average High 38ºC

I'm off in 10 days to spend the next two months in Delhi, India where I'll be working on a randomized intervention with members of the teams at Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), a local non-governmental organization, and the MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In their own words, SNS "train citizens to use the Right to Information Act to obtain information on the performance of elected representatives and on the functioning of the Government in areas such as ration, civic works, education and social welfare schemes." More broadly, they aim to "promote transparency and accountability in government functioning and to encourage active participation of citizens in governance".

I'll be assisting with a multi-year field experiment in the capital city of Delhi where the Right to Information Act has been used to obtain detailed information on the performance record of local councilors (each of whom were elected to a five-year term in 2007). The study uses an experimental design that allows for the distinct identification of several effects: (i) the standard incentive effect coming from the fear of being penalized by voters; (ii) whether voters became more aggressive in demanding entitlements in response to information about their rights and the performance of their representative; (iii) any selection effects resulting from voters voting for candidates with a better track record.

I previously spent three years at the Cambridge office of J-PAL (with related summer journeys to various parts of Indonesia), so it's certainly exciting to return to working with them for a more extended period in the field. Also, it's been more than two decades since I last spent time in India, visiting my grandparents. I can only imagine how much things have changed and am looking forward to finding out.