Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 46
Palash Biswas
http://troubledgalaxydetroyeddreams.blogspot.com/
By the time they reached India they had already started composing the Vedas. They had already invented chariot, arrow and better fighting skills as they had to fight their way through all the wilderness of the time. Peace-loving people of Indus were highly developed but they were not fighters as they did not need that skill till that time. These hordes of Aryan barbarians invaded and drove them into India . Mass killings happened. Their dams were destroyed. All these incidence are well described in the Vedas. Aryans leaders described as gods and local population described as Asuras or Rakshasas or Dravids. Then slowly drove them further south. This process was the biggest genocide of human history. Slowly these Aryans developed the Sanskrit language. The original language of Sind civilization was Prakrit and it evolved into Tamil and led to Malayalam, Telugu and other South Indian language. The South Indian are Dravids and Aryans became elite class Brahmins. Manu Samhita was written to protect Brahmins and gave them godlike stature among the conquered people. Now the Brahmin-dominated Indian society tries to re-write the correct history. But the Tamils have not forgotten this past. They kill Brahmins at every chance they get. They worship Ravan as a great saint and hate Rama and his army. In any war the victorious or the strong writes the history and people accept it as truth. That is how Rama became a god and Ravan became an Asura. Thanks to modern technology and media, we are able to know the truth of Iraq war otherwise victorious and strong America tried its best to fool the world that they invade Iraq to spread democracy and wipe out terrorism and WMD. But truth: they wanted the oil, they wanted to tilt Middle-East in favor of Israel. Before invasion there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq and there was nothing that could be labeled WMD. The Govt of India is doing its best to re-write history of Indus Valley Civilization and delete the unpleasant truth from the history. These facts were nicely there in Weikipedea online encyclopedia and by pressure from India these were deleted. Even genocide is denied by this website now. Reason: The divide between Dravid and Brahmins to be minimized. The gap between “lower castes” (the original Indian) and upper caste Hindu (who are decedents of Aryans) to be minimized. Otherwise result could be total disintegration of India.
http://www.dalitvoice.org/Templates/august2008/reports.htm
Conspiracy liaison of policy making is the greatest weapon of global ruling Class as the Mind control game has been. It has been the same case in Americas, Africa and Europe where Apartheid stopped empowerment and participation of the Black Indigenous communities in every sphere of life. In Asia it is the Zionism as well as Hindutva which stops the Muslims as well as more than six hundred castes, communities, nationalities, aboriginal and indigenous people to remain rooted in their life and livelihood!
All major crisis chronologies do involve around this conspiracy liaison of the Brahmins, the micro minority of three percent making the rest of the people subordinate , enslaved and bonded. That is why Kashmir bleeds today and the subcontinent has never got over the partition trauma! The phenomenon of Partition still continues with the Political religious Cocktail in this subcontinent.
North East and entire south India are isolated from the so called mainstream of India as the Brahmins always tried to play the old game of divide and Rule and the aboriginal and indigenous communities are either horizontally or vertically divided into castes, tribes, linguistic groups, nationalities, identifies, regions and religions! unfortunately the so called democratic institutions, constitution and parliament are manipulated and used to sustain the ruling Brahminical hegemony. It makes no sense who represents us in the Parliament, Assembly, Government , Judiciary, Media or anywhere else.. the process of Policy making is monopolised by the Brahmins. The Chief Secretaries in Indian states are cleverly appointed as well as the Cabinet secretaries. Nineteen out of twenty three Chief Secretaries of the Indian States belong to the micro minority ruling caste , the Brahmins. Ninety percent of the so called general quota for top positions in Secretariats, Collectorates, administration belong to the Brahmins only. Even the reserved posts remain vacant as the worthy candidates among the SC ST OBC communities are always unavailable. The result happens to the generalisation of the said quota liquidised. Left Ruled states in India are the best examples of this tradition where the OBCs are never identified!
Conspiracy liaison of rehabilitation has ousted the dalit Bengali refugees out of Bengali geopolitics and history altogether and they have been scattered and pitted against tribals countrywide, deprived of mother language, human rights, civil rights, political representation, reservation and even , citizenship.
My father late Pulin Kumar Biswas invested his life and everything in continuous lifelong struggle to regain all the lost rights of the dalit Bengali refugees.
I had to co operate him drafting his all documents.
I always insisted on strategies to influence Policy Making while he depended on the ruling Hegemony.
Even in situations like Nandigram, Singur, Navi Mumbai and Noida, the mass movement or insurrections are always hijacked by the Brahminical hegemony.
Last Tuesday, I accidentally landed in an informal talk among some icons of the Civil Society. Where, I spoke clear cut that neither the Power hegemony nor the Resistance hegemony has any space for the Indigenous communities. Further, I, somewhat to bitter to comment that the so called civil society is an effective weapon of the World Bank and Globalisation which tries its best to establish the sovereignty of Market.!
It was a real Tsunami in the cup of Coffee!
They quoted famine, Dr Amrtya sen and Md Yunus! I had to tell that all these policy makers stand to be the master conspirators. All the economists led by the so called Nobel laureates do work against the Indigenous communities as they create the logic of Annihilation. Just follow their stance in reference to any mass movement or insurrection like Singur, Nandigram, Navi Mumbai or Barnala. All of them make strategies how to exploit Natural resources of the Indigenous communities in the best interest of Global ruling Class as well as corporate US Imperialism!
I had to comment on NGO Politics, cocktail Ideology and anarchist Icons!
Some of them supported me. Dr Asit Roy informed me that he has gone through some of my articles on Net and found me quiet Interesting! However, he agreed with me that India remains a multi nationality geopolitics and the immediate agenda should be addressing the nationality problem.
Mr Samar Bagchi of NAPM knows my father and my friends in Uttarakhand and Jharkhand and he also has gone through some of my articles. but he concentrates on the development dynamics around Gandhi, whom I consider as the master Conspirator to finalise the deal of Power Transfer to the Brahmins with the decaying British Empire. In the Coffee House Mr Bagchi claimed that the Partition has proved to be good as the Muslims got enough opportunity of empowerment in the divided geopolitics.
I had to resist. I had to say that the Civil society consisting the Brahmins uses the Bangla nationality as well as mother language as prostitution! I had to say that all the Rubbish creative and so called classic literature on the Partition are no better than Fantasy! It is once again the Human documentation of hatred against the Indigenous communities and the Muslims! partition Victims enjoy no sympathy of the Ruling Hegemony! History and Literature never documented the first version of the Victims!
Please identify personally and chronologically who happened to be the Policy Makers! What have been their motivation and interest?
Please analyse the Gujrat Massacre and the University of Terrorism in the light of Policy making!
Pl study the Green revolution and the Akali Andolan!
Pl read all about the Peasants` Movement and Indigenous insurrections of the indigenous communities and follow the Policy Making! Then, follow the phenomenon of the Repression of Naxalites and Maoists countrywide!
Pl trace the history of Political movement in India, Political ideologies and applications, Telengana, Srikakulam,Wars of 1962, 1965, 1971 and kargil and analyse the defence deal!
Please Analise the changing demography, Majoritarian Election system, Panchayats, planning and regional development dynamics!
Please read the Military documentations and the accounts placed by the defence personnel including Dalvi, Kaul and Jacob!
What was it all about anti Congress Movement, Sarvodaya andolana,total revolution and the Emergency!
What was behind Operation Blue star?
What was behind the Anti reservation movement?
What is it the LPG?
SEZ?
Disinvestment?
Post modernism?
Chemical hubs?
Nuclear Plants?
Nuke deal and strategic re alliance?
FDI, IT and media bloom?
Pay commission Economy and politics!
Recruitment and training!
AFPSA?
POTA?
Open Market?
Retail chain?
Freedom!
- 7:02am Ninety percent top policy making posts are occupied by the ruling Brahmins! ... Communist Party was formed by the Hindu Zamindar Brhmins to stop any ...
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Sify Blogs India - Your free thought space with free 10 MB image ...
If I landed in school, I would like riding making the teacher a Horse. ... out castes and were called PEERALI Brahmins, Brhmins with Muslim connection. ...
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Welcome to rediff.com
23 Jun 2007 ... I would like to clarify that, In the policy of reservation there is .... system by making the reservation upto 49% in premier inst of INDIA. ...
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Untitled Document
The absence of the Marathi-speaking leaders in the decision-making group of the .... Deshastha Brhmins who were more known as money-lenders (Karve 1968:81). ...
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Brute! Killer regemented Hegemony Ruling West Bengal | Palash ...
Stung by criticism over his land acquisition policy, West Bengal Chief Minister ... happens to be the Real PAN CARD to hold power for Brhmins in Bengal. ...
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After fatwa, Vedanti invites Karunanidhi for debate on Lord Ram
5 Oct 2007 ... C)Brhamins made friend ship with Brhmins only -- yes 100%. avaal ..... I saw many Tamilians making frienship only with other tamils and not ...
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Discussion of current affairs and More.
“Tilak, Taraaju or Talwaar : Inko Maaro Jute Char “[ Brhmins , Baniyas and Thakurs ..... Now this hypocrite policy making by British Government when these ...
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Oh you Hindu wake up
THE SMART BRAHMINS BRHMINS are really smart people. ..... Can you believe that” a God making a mistake and cutting off his own son’s head? ...
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[PDF]
OH! YOU!! HINDU AWAKE! WRITTEN BY DR. CHATTERJEE MA., Ph.D ...
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
BRHMINS are really smart people. Since they are all motivated claiming that ..... Can you believe that” a God making a mistake and cutting off his own ...
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Chowk: Education: Brahmin and Mullah
The writer was making a case for open trade between india and pakistan for the ... Henry Kissinger writes in his book `Does America need a foreign Policy` ...
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Nobel Laureates Panacea for Policy Making
Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, Vikas Dhoot
Posted online: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 23:26 hrs
Updated On: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 23:26 hrs
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/A-Nobel-laureates-panacea-for-policymaking/315455/“India’s reserves are going up, your inbound capital flows are larger than your trade deficit (so, setting up a sovereign wealth fund is feasible). China has $1.6 trillion in reserves, largely from private capital inflows and its currency is a one-way street. But the astonishing trade surplus they are running since a couple of years is unacceptable in a developing country. It is pushing capital outside when it should be used at home and impoverishing people by holding real wages down.”
That’s the provocative Nobel laureate and former dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Michael Spence. As chair of the Growth Commission set up by the World Bank in April 2006 to ‘gather the best understanding about the policies and strategies that underlie rapid economic growth and poverty reduction’, Spence has been engaging with over 300 academics and policymakers from developing countries to examine growth and development, for two years.
The commission, whose members include Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Monetary Authority of Singapore chairman Goh Chok Tong, has come up with the world’s latest consensus on growth. Steering clear of prescribing a ‘secret’ recipe that the much-maligned Washington Consensus (1989) suggested for Latin American economies, the commission has tried to provide a policymaking framework that stresses on the subjective priorities and needs of different countries.
“While India’s priorities today are infrastructure, education, labour markets and ensuring the government doesn’t fiddle much with market prices, China has none of these problems. Instead, it needs to urgently fix social security, tertiary education, income inequalities and environmental issues. We have mooted a sensible policy priority-setting process that accounts for subjectivity of interests, so the output would be different across countries,” Spence told FE before releasing the report in the capital on Tuesday.
The Washington Consensus had stressed on minimising government’s role in the economy, engaging with the global economy and following rule-based regulatory frameworks. Spence differs: “The government must be an important and active player in leadership and implementation roles.”
Strategic Advising to Policymakers in India
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/cgsd/strategic_advising_india.html
Nirupam Bajpai's work with his colleagues, most notably with Jeffrey Sachs both at Harvard University (1995 to 2002) and at Columbia University (2002 to present), has helped advise policymakers on a variety of issues relating to the Indian economy and India’s economic reforms, both at the federal and state levels. Dr. Bajpai has been advising the Prime Ministers of India, (the Honorable Atal Bihari Vajpayee from October 1999 to May 2004 and the Honorable Dr. Manmohan Singh since June 2004) the Commerce and Industry Minister, the Ministers of Finance and Health and Family Welfare, among others. At the state level, Dr. Bajpai has advised the state Governments of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh among others. His research and advice has helped implement the following:
Based on Dr. Bajpai's suggestions, the former Prime Minister of India, the Honorable Atal Bihari Vajpayee, announced major National Goals for Indian development during his Address to the Nation on August 15th, 2000. The Prime Minister said, “…, let us together resolve to make this decade, the Decade of Development. To realise this goal, we have decided to achieve the target of doubling India’s per capita income in the next ten years. The Prime Minister added, “The most valuable investment that we can make in India’s future is to ensure that every child gets education. We have decided that by 2010, every Indian child will get education up to class eight. We have launched Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All campaign) to achieve this goal. Education until graduation has been made free for women.”
The complete speech of the Prime Minister is available: http://www.indianembassy.org/special/cabinet/Primeminister/pm_id_2000.htm
In response to the goal of doubling India's per capita income by the year 2010, the Planning Commission of India set an eight-percent-per-year growth target for India's Tenth Five-Year Plan. Similarly, in response to the goal of attaining universal elementary education by the year 2010, the government is investing vast sums of money for expanding school coverage, capacity building, mid-day meals, free school books for children of families living below the poverty line and quality improvement measures.
India's export/import policy for the years 1999 and 2000 draws extensively on Dr. Bajpai's research and advice. Twelve Special Economic Zones are being established in India across nine states, based on his work with Professor Sachs and their recommendations to the then Minister of Commerce and Industry, the late Murasoli Maran.
For details of India’s Special Economic Zones: http://sezindia.nic.in/
The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, based on Dr. Bajpai's suggestions, announced several major state-level development goals in July of 2002. Ms. Jayalalithaa said, “I would like to set the following development goals for Tamilnadu:
First by the year 2010 the per capita income of Tamilnadu would be doubled. Second, by the year 2005 there would be universalisation of education until class V with a special effort for girls and disadvantaged groups. Third, by the year 2008, Tamilnadu will not only be the leading player in the field of IT in India, but will also become a regional gateway to Asia home to half the humanity. Fourth by the year 2008,Tamilnadu will be the top ranking manufactured goods exporter in India and will double its export earnings and Finally, by the year 2010 all villages in Tamilnadu will possess electricity, a trunk road, telephone and internet connectivity, a school, clean water and sanitation, a village health worker and local self government. She added, “This is my dream, this is my vision for Tamilnadu and this is the theme the government headed by me has been striving to turn into a reality.”
Anchored on Dr. Bajpai's research papers on the information technology industry in Tamil Nadu, the State Government brought forth an Action Plan to develop the state's IT industry. In addition, his research and advising work has helped the Tamil Nadu government implement tax and expenditure reforms, and establish Special Economic Zones.
Based on Dr. Bajpai's recommendations and the research initiated under the leadership of Professor Sachs, the Government of India has set up a National Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (NCMH). The NCMH, launched in New Delhi on January 9th, 2003, is co-chaired by the Finance and Health Ministers of India. The Ministry of Health, Government of India published the NCMH report in August 2005. The NCMH report is available at:
http://mohfw.nic.in/reports_on_ncmh.htm
For a project entitled ‘Scaling up Services in Rural India’, with Dr. Bajpai’s research, project direction and advice, the state governments of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are scaling up public investments in the primary health and primary education sectors in the rural areas of these two states. Additionally, the federal government is also helping provide larger resources to the states for these social sectors. Several other recommendations from the project reports are being utilized in order to improve service delivery in the rural areas. The federal government has also announced the setting-up of five Institutes of Public Health Administration in collaboration with the private sector.
Other economic policy reforms that have utilized his ideas and suggestions are in the areas of growth strategy, fiscal reform, export orientation and the role of states in promoting export-led growth, small-scale industry, labor laws, information technology and the use of IT in the education and health sectors.
Return to Nirupam Bajpai's homepage
Rise of Asia will be a challenge for policy-makers in India, U.S. http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=19158&prog=zgp&proj=zsa,zusr
By Ashley J. Tellis
The Tribune, May 5, 2007
India, like the United States, is entering a complex geopolitical environment that is likely to survive for at least another two decades. This environment will be characterised by the continuing dominance of the United States in the global system.
However, the center of gravity in international politics, which is certain to shift from Europe to Asia, will produce at least four candidate great powers that could challenge Washington over time: Russia, Japan, China, and India. From this list, however, only China-for various reasons explored in the lecture-is likely, not certain, to materialise as a peer competitor to the United States in the future.
The American response to this possibility currently does not comport with either the classical Realist, the conventional Realist, or the Liberal internationalist prescriptions in their pure form: The United States rejected the option of preventive war that would be advocated by classical Realism.
It has also demurred from implementing a containment strategy that would be advocated by conventional Realism. And, it is uncertain whether the solutions of democratising China or tightly increasing economic interdependence with Beijing-the solutions issuing from Liberal internationalism-would prevent future geopolitical rivalry between the two countries.
Washington’s current approach to the emerging challenge of Asian geopolitics, therefore, reflects its own heritage of American exceptionalism, which combines elements from both the Realist and the Liberal traditions.
First, it emphasises not constraining Beijing but engaging it, while simultaneously increasing the strength of other states on China’s periphery.
Second, it seeks to protect the American capacity for sustained
innovation.
Third, it continues to invest in the technological bases for ensuring military superiority and uninterrupted access to the Asian continent.
Fourth, and finally, it endeavors to adapt its existing alliances to meet future challenges, while concurrently building new strategic partnerships
in Asia.
This multifaceted strategy is driven fundamentally by the conviction that the emerging Asian geopolitical environment will not be characterized solely by strategic rivalry - as was the case with the Soviet Union - but rather by different kinds of security competition that will coexist with deepening economic interdependence.
The presence of growing economic interdependence among states that might otherwise be political rivals implies that a country will aid its competitors in producing the very national power that may be used against itself, just as its competitors, in turn, would contribute to the production of that very national power which could be used against themselves as well.
This peculiar reality implies that India, like the United States, has to cope with a new Asian geopolitical universe where strategic threats are diffuse and attenuated, but never disappear and, more importantly, where the very forces that increase one’s prosperity also contribute to the increase in the dangers confronting oneself.
In such circumstances, New Delhi will be confronted by three unsettling certainties. First, India, like the United States, will not have the freedom to pursue simple and clear strategic policies, but only complex and ambiguous ones that will leave no single constituency – foreign or domestic – fully satisfied.
Second, India, like the United States, will have to perform a delicate juggling act which involves developing deep and collaborative bonds-political, economic, strategic-with a set of friends that are likely to be of greatest assistance to it (in relative terms), even as it seeks to pursue deepened interdependence with its prospective competitors.
Third, and finally, India, like the United States, will have to develop the organisational and psychological capacity for diplomatic, political, and strategic agility because of the perpetual course correction that will be essential for geopolitical success in a globalised world.
This is a summary of the writer’s address delivered after receiving the Professor M.L. Sondhi Prize for International Politics for 2006. This article originally appeared in The Tribune on May 5, 2007.
RAISING AIDS AWARENESS AMONG POLICY MAKERS IN INDIA
http://www.unaids.org/en/KnowledgeCentre/Resources/FeatureStories/archive/2006/20060705_India_Bihar.asp
First legislative forum on HIV and AIDS in Bihar state
The Indian North Indian state of Bihar is the first in India to have established a forum with a formal constitution and institutional mechanisms for elected representatives to address AIDS issues in the state.
The Bihar Legislative Forum on HIV and AIDS (BLFA) was launched last week at a symposium in Bihar’s capital, by Shri Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s Chief Minister, as a way to raise AIDS awareness among policy makers in the state and to build capacity to address the challenges posed by AIDS.
Alerted by the growing number of infections, a number of Indian officials, including a former minister, submitted a proposal to create a forum for policy makers where they could learn more about HIV and AIDS and engage in dialogues on possible responses in the state.
In his opening address the Chief Minister welcomed the initiative and recognized the critical importance of leadership in the response to AIDS.
Reported numbers of HIV infections in the state (Bihar State AIDS control Society)
2001 2003
192 2500
“This initiative has come at the right time,” said Symposium organizer, elected member and speaker of Bihar legislative assembly, Mr Uday Narayan Chaudhary. “We are aware of the devastating effects of AIDS, but we need to know more about how it spreads and what we can do about it.”
“Half of the recently elected village representatives are women. This amounts to almost 100 000 women who could play a critical role in increasing people’s awareness about HIV at the grassroots level,” he added.
Chaudhary also said that heightened awareness is a key element to reducing the social stigma associated with HIV and AIDS.
Recognizing the need for consolidated action in Bihar, the Chief Minister Shri Nitish Kumar called for strengthening the public awareness campaign and committed to expand health infrastructures at various levels in the state. He also committed to support seminars and workshops to educate more than 200 000 elected village representatives on issues of public importance such as agriculture, rural development as well as AIDS.
Supporting these initiatives, Denis Broun, UNAIDS country coordinator in India, underlined the importance of political leadership to move the response to AIDS one step further. “Facing up to the issue of AIDS and taking concrete action such as this is vital to getting ahead of the epidemic,” he said. “By creating this forum, , Bihar’s leaders have introduced a critical link that will be key to Bihar’s victory in its AIDS response.”
Econometrica, Vol. 72, No. 5 (September, 2004), 1409¡©1443
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY TO SILENCE INDIAN MUSLIMS « GhulamMuhammed.Mumbai
12 Jul 2008 ... India’s skewed foreign policy, keeping the Arab world at arms ... There certainly seems to be a conspiracy to silence Muslims of India to ...
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Human All Too Human: India's food crisis and neo-liberal conspiracy
A billion plus population of India cannot depend on the ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence and the government needs to restore its policy to build up food grain ...
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Stop the conspiracy bogies!
15 Aug 2008 ... It would be one thing to make the case for why policy should not be ... the India-US deal in a similar fashion with each side making the ...
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Conspiracy against Pakistan
Conspiracy against Pakistan By Air Marshal (Retd) Ayaz Ahmed Khan ... That India is already a major factor in US defence policy making, and US will soon see ...
www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2000/december/dec5d2000.htm - 19k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Book Review : The Srinagar Conspiracy
The implications are as clear as the back of one's palm: Bill Clinton is making a historic trip to India in March and the LET is going to make its old ...
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Impact of the Hindu-German Conspiracy - Wikipedia, the free ...
[edit] In India. The conspiracy, especially in the scenario of the British war ... concessions as well as Whitehall's India Policy during and after WW I, ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_Hindu-German_Conspiracy - 57k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
an indian conspiracy theory
The iodised salt sold in India contains the chemically much more stable of the two; ... A public health policy has been influenced by a conspiracy theory, ...
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Red-faced BJP clears the air, says blasts no conspiracy - Express ...
31 Jul 2008 ... There is a conspiracy from the ruling Congress(Italy) to destabilise India. Some of the minority criminal elements(there are many) of the ...
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The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Haryana
With a view to making Guru Jambheshwar University here a centre of academic ... some of his “own men” may also have played a dubious role in the conspiracy. ...
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Russia's Policy Towards India: From Stalin to Yeltsin - Google Books Result
by J. A. Naik - 1995 - Political Science - 219 pages
As a result of the strike, prominent communist leaders in India were arrested and put on trial in what is popularly known as the "Meerut Conspiracy Case," ...
books.google.co.in/books?isbn=8185880794...
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS: EVIDENCE FROM A RANDOMIZED
POLICY EXPERIMENT IN INDIA
BY RAGHABENDRA CHATTOPADHYAY AND ESTHER DUFLO1
http://www.povertyactionlab.org/papers/chattopadhyay_duflo.pdf
This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of
women¡¯s leadership on policy decisions. Since the mid-1990¡¯s, one third of Village
Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these
councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible
for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas.Using a dataset we
collected on 265 Village Councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, we compare the type
of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Village Councils. We show that
the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided. Specifically,
leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own
genders.
KEYWORDS: Gender, decentralization, affirmative action, political economy.
1. INTRODUCTION
RELATIVE TO THEIR SHARE IN THE POPULATION, women are under-represented
in all political positions. In June 2000, women represented 13.8% of
all parliament members in the world, up from 9% in 1987. Compared to economic
opportunities, education, and legal rights, political representation is the
area in which the gap between men and women has narrowed the least between
1995 and 2000 (Norris and Inglehart (2000)). Political reservations for women
are often proposed as a way to rapidly enhance women¡¯s ability to participate
in policymaking. Quotas for women in assemblies or on parties¡¯ candidate lists
are in force in the legislation of over 30 countries (World Bank (2001)), and in
the internal rules of at least one party in 12 countries of the European Union
(Norris (2001)).
Reservation policies clearly have a strong impact on women¡¯s representation,
2 and there is evidence that women and men have different policy preferences
(Lott and Kenny (1999) and Edlund and Pande (2001)). This does not
1We thank Daron Acemoglu, Abhijit Banerjee, Timothy Besley, Anne Case, Mihir Ghosh
Dastidar, Angus Deaton, Marie Lajus, Steve Levitt, Rohini Pande, and Emmanuel Saez for discussions,
Prasid Chakraborty and Mihir Ghosh Dastidar for organizing and supervising the data
collection in West Bengal, Callie Scott and Annie Duflo for organizing the data collection in
Rajasthan, Lucia Breierova, Shawn Cole, and Jonathan Robinson for excellent research assistance,
and the editor as well as four anonymous referees for very useful comments on previous
drafts. We also thank the National Institute of Health (through grant RO1HD39922-01),
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation for financial
support. Chattopadhyay thanks the Institute for Economic Development at Boston University
for its hospitality.
2See Jones (1998) for a study of the Argentinian case, and Norris (2001) for the impact of
reservation in the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. Women¡¯s representation fell from 25%
to 7% in Eastern Europe when gender quotas were eliminated during the transition from Communism
(World Bank (2001)).
1409
1410 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
necessarily imply, however, that women¡¯s reservation has an impact on policy
decisions. In a standard median voter model (e.g., Downs (1957)), where candidates
can commit to a specific policy and have electoral motives, political
decisions reflect the preferences of the electorate. Alternatively, in a Coasian
world, even if the reservation policy increases women¡¯s bargaining power, only
transfers to women should be affected; the efficient policy choices will still be
made, and women will be compensated with direct transfers.
However, despite the importance of this issue for the design of institutions,
very little is known about the causal effect of women¡¯s representation on policy
decisions. The available evidence, based on cross-sectional comparison, is
difficult to interpret, because the fact that women are better represented in a
particular country or locality may reflect the political preferences of the group
that elects them. The correlation between policy outcomes and women¡¯s participation
then may not imply a causal effect from women¡¯s participation.3
Furthermore, even if we knew more about the causal effect of women¡¯s
representation, this knowledge would not necessarily extend to the effects
of quotas or other mechanisms to enforce greater participation of women in
the political process. Ensuring women¡¯s representation through quotas may
change the nature of political competition and thus have direct effects. For
example, it may lower the average competence in the pool of eligible candidates,
alter voter preferences for political parties, or increase the number of
politicians that are new in office.
This paper studies the policy consequences of mandated representation of
women by taking advantage of a unique experiment implemented recently in
India. In 1993, an amendment to the constitution of India required the States
both to devolve more power over expenditures to local village councils (Gram
Panchayats, henceforth GPs) and to reserve one-third of all positions of chief
(Pradhan) to women. Since then, most Indian States have had two Panchayat
elections (Bihar and Punjab had only one, in 2001 and 1998 respectively), and
at least one-third of village representatives are women in all major States except
Uttar Pradesh, where only 25% of the village representatives are women
(Chaudhuri (2003)).We conducted a detailed survey of all investments in local
public goods in a sample of villages in two districts, Birbhum in West Bengal
and Udaipur in Rajasthan, and compared investments made in reserved and
unreserved GPs. AsGPs were randomly selected to be reserved for women, differences
in investment decisions can be confidently attributed to the reserved
status of those GPs.
3For example, Dollar, Fisman, and Gatti (2001) find a negative correlation between representation
of women in parliaments and corruption. Does this mean women are less corrupt, or that
countries that are less corrupt are also more likely to elect women to parliament? Besley and
Case (2000) show that worker compensation and child support enforcement policies are more
likely to be introduced in states where there are more women in parliament, after controlling for
state and year fixed effects. But they explicitly recognize that the fraction of women in parliament
may be a proxy for women¡¯s involvement in politics, more generally.
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1411
The results suggest that reservation affects policy choices. In particular, it
affects policy decisions in ways that seem to better reflect women¡¯s preferences.
The gender preferences of men and women are proxied by the types
of formal requests brought to the GP by each gender. In West Bengal, women
complain more often than men about drinking water and roads, and there are
more investments in drinking water and roads in GPs reserved for women. In
Rajasthan, women complain more often than men about drinking water but
less often about roads, and there are more investments in water and less investment
in roads in GPs reserved for women.
We exploit specific features of the reservation legislation to further investigate
whether the effects on public good provisions can be attributed to the
gender of the Pradhan, rather than to other consequences of reserving seats.
We specifically investigate whether the results can be explained by the fact
that women are inexperienced, that they may perceive themselves as being
less likely to be re-elected, and that they tend to come from more disadvantaged
backgrounds than men. We do not find any evidence that the impact of
reservation is driven by features other than the gender of the Pradhan.
These results thus indicate that a politician¡¯s gender does influence policy
decisions. More generally, they provide new evidence on the political process.
In particular, they provide strong evidence that the identity of a decision maker
does influence policy decisions. This provides empirical support to political
economy models that seek to enrich the Downsian model (Alesina (1988),
Osborne and Slivinski (1996), and Besley and Coate (1997)). The results are
consistent with previous evidence by Levitt (1996), which shows thatU.S. Senators¡¯
votes do not reflect either the wishes of their constituency or that of their
party, and by Pande (2003), who shows that in Indian States where a larger
share of seats is reserved for minorities in the State Legislative Assembly, the
level of transfers targeted towards these minorities is also higher. Our paper
presents the advantage of being based on a randomized experiment, where
identification is entirely transparent.
The remainder of this paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 describes the
political context and the policy. Section 3 presents a simple model, based on
the ¡°citizen candidate¡± model of Osborne and Slivinski (1996) and Besley and
Coate (1997), which outlines the possible effect of the reservation system.
Section 4 discusses the data collection and the empirical strategy. Section 5
presents the central results of the paper: the difference in public goods provisions
in reserved and unreserved GPs. Section 6 presents robustness checks.
Section 7 concludes.
2. THE POLICY AND DESIGN OF THE STUDY
2.1. The Panchayat System
The Panchayat is a system of village level (Gram Panchayat), block level
(Panchayat Samiti), and district level (Zilla Parishad) councils, members of
1412 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
which are elected by the people, and are responsible for the administration
of local public goods. Each Gram Panchayat (GP) encompasses 10,000 people
in several villages (between 5 and 15). The GPs do not have jurisdiction over
urban areas, which are administered by separate municipalities. Voters elect a
council, which then elects among its members a Pradhan (chief) and an Upa-
Pradhan (vice-chief).4 Candidates are generally nominated by political parties,
but have to be residents of the villages they represent. The council makes decisions
by majority voting (the Pradhan does not have veto power). The Pradhan,
however, is the only member of the council with a full-time appointment.
The Panchayat system has existed formally in most of the major states of
India since the early 1950¡¯s. However, in most states, the system was not an effective
body of governance until the early 1990¡¯s. Elections were not held, and
the Panchayats did not assume any active role (Ghatak and Ghatak (2002)). In
1992, the 73rd amendment to the Constitution of India established throughout
India the framework of a three-tiered Panchayat system with regular elections.
It gave the GP primary responsibility in implementing development programs,
as well as in identifying the needs of the villages under its jurisdiction. Between
1993 and 2003, all major states but two (Bihar and Punjab) have had
at least two elections. The major responsibilities of the GP are to administer
local infrastructure (public buildings, water, roads) and identify targeted
welfare recipients. The main source of financing is still the state, but most of
the money which was previously earmarked for specific uses is now allocated
through four broad schemes: The Jawhar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) for infrastructure
(irrigation, drinking water, roads, repairs of community buildings, etc.);
a small additional drinking water scheme; funds for welfare programs (widow¡¯s,
old age, and maternity pensions, etc.); and a grant for GP functioning.5 The GP
has, in principle, complete flexibility in allocating these funds. At this point, the
GP has no direct control over the appointments of government paid teachers
or health workers, but in some states (Tamil Nadu andWest Bengal, for example),
there are Panchayat-run informal schools.
The Panchayat is required to organize two meetings per year, called ¡°Gram
Samsad.¡± These are meetings of villagers and village heads in which all voters
may participate. The GP council submits the proposed budget to the Gram
Samsad, and reports on their activities in the previous six months. The GP
leader also must set up regular office hours where villagers can lodge complaints
or requests.
In West Bengal, the Left Front (communist) Government gained power in
1977 on a platformof agrarian and political reform. The major political reform
4In Rajasthan, the chief is called a Sarpanch. In this paper, we will use the terminology ¡°Pradhan¡±
for both States.
5According to the balance sheets we could collect in 40 GPs inWest Bengal, the JRY accounts
for 30% of total GP income, the drinking water scheme 5%, the welfare programs 15%, the grant
for GP functioning 33%, and the GP¡¯s own revenue for 8%. GPs can also apply for some special
schemes¡ªa housing scheme for SC/ST, for example.
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1413
was to give life to a three-tiered Panchayat electoral system. The first election
took place in 1978 and elections have taken place at five-year intervals ever
since. Thus, the system that was put into place by the 73rd Amendment all over
India was already well established inWest Bengal. Following the Amendment,
the GP was given additional responsibilities inWest Bengal. In particular, they
were entrusted to establish and administer informal education centers (called
SSK), an alternative form of education for children who do not attend school
(an instructor who is not required to have any formal qualification teaches
children three hours a day in a temporary building or outdoors).
In Rajasthan, unlike West Bengal, there was no regularly elected Panchayat
system in charge of distribution of state funds until 1995. The first election was
held in 1995, followed by a second election in 2000. Since 1995, elections and
Gram Samsads have been held regularly, and are well attended. This setting
is thus very different, with a much shorter history of democratic government.
As inWest Bengal, the Panchayat can spend money on local infrastructure, but
unlikeWest Bengal, they are not allowed to run their own schools.
2.2. Reservation for Women
In 1992, the 73rd Amendment provided that one-third of the seats in all Panchayat
councils, as well as one-third of the Pradhan positions,must be reserved
for women. Seats and Pradhan¡¯s positions were also reserved for the two disadvantaged
minorities in India, scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST),
in the form of mandated representation proportional to each minority¡¯s population
share in each district. Reservations for women have been implemented
in all major states except Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (which has only reserved
25% of the seats to women).
InWest Bengal, the Panchayat Constitution Rule was modified in 1993, so as
to reserve one-third of the councilor positions in each GP to women; in a third
of the villages in each GP, only women could be candidates for the position of
councilor for the area. The proportion of women elected to Panchayat councils
increased to 36% after the 1993 election. The experience was considered a disappointment,
however, because very few women (only 196 out of 3,324 GPs)
advanced to the position of Pradhan, which is the only one that yields effective
power (Kanango (1998)). To conform to the 73rd amendment, the Panchayat
Constitution Rule of West Bengal was again modified in April 1998 (Government
ofWest Bengal (1998)) to introduce reservation of Pradhan positions for
women and SC/ST. In Rajasthan, the random rotation systemwas implemented
in 1995 and in 2000 at both levels (council members and Pradhans).
In both states, a specific set of rules ensures the random selection of GPs
where the office of Pradhan was to be reserved for a woman. All GPs in a
district are ranked in consecutive order according to their serial legislative
1414 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
number (an administrative number pre-dating this reform). They are then
ranked in three separate lists, according to whether or not the seats were reserved
for a SC, for a ST, or were unreserved (these reservations were also
chosen randomly, following a similar method). Using these lists, every third
GP starting with the first on the list is reserved for a woman Pradhan for the
first election.6
From discussions with the government officials at the Panchayat Directorate
who devised the system and district officials who implemented it in individual
districts, it appears that these instructions were successfully implemented.
More importantly, in the district we study in West Bengal, we could verify that
the policy was strictly implemented. After sorting the GPs into those reserved
for SC/ST and those not reserved, we could reconstruct the entire list of GPs
reserved for a woman by sorting all GPs by their serial number, and selecting
every third GP starting from the first in each list. This verifies that the allocation
of GPs to the reserved list was indeed random, as intended.7
Table I shows the number of female Pradhans in reserved and unreserved
GPs in both states. In both states, all Pradhans in GPs reserved for a woman
are female. In West Bengal, only 6.5% of the Pradhans are female in unreserved
GPs. In Rajasthan, only one woman was elected on an unreserved seat,
despite the fact that this was the second cycle. Women elected once due to the
reservation system were not re-elected.8
TABLE I
FRACTION OF WOMEN AMONG PRADHANS IN RESERVED
AND UNRESERVED GP
Reserved GP Unreserved GP
(1) (2)
West Bengal
Total Number 54 107
Proportion of Female Pradhans 100% 6.5%
Rajasthan
Total Number 40 60
Proportion of Female Pradhans 100% 1.7%
6For the next election, every third GP starting with the second on the list was reserved for a
woman, etc. The Panchayat Constitution Rule has actual tables indicating the ranks of the GPs
to be reserved in each election.
7We could not obtain the necessary information to perform the same exercise in Rajasthan.
However, there too, the system appears to have been correctly implemented.
8The one woman elected on an unreserved seat had not been previously elected on a reserved
seat.
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1415
3. THEORY
3.1. Model
In this section, we analyze the possible effects of the reservation policy in
a representative democracy.We use the framework developed in Osborne and
Slivinski (1996) and Besley and Coate (1997), where the elected representatives
are ¡°citizen candidates.¡± Citizen candidates cannot commit to specific
policy platforms. Once elected, politicians will try to implement their preferred
policy option.However, citizens know other citizens¡¯ preferences and can influence
the final political outcome through their choice of whom to elect. Citizens
decide whether or not to run for office by trading off the probability of being
elected (and getting to implement their favorite outcomes) against a fixed cost
of running for election.
This framework is well suited to analyzing decentralized policymaking in India
since it is reasonable to assume that citizens in a Gram Panchayat know
each other well. In addition, a rationale for reservation in favor of women
can be introduced very naturally, by recognizing that women have a much
higher cost of running for office than men. These higher costs can prevent
the participation of women in the political process in the absence of reservation;
consequently, reservations can have a real effect on the decisions taken
if women and men have different preferences over which public goods to provide.
9
Everyone is eligible to vote and to stand as a candidate. The village elects
an individual who will implement a policy, chosen in the interval [0 1]. Each
citizen has a preferred policy option ¥øi, and women and men have different
policy preferences. Specifically, we assume that women¡¯s preferences are distributed
over the interval [0W ], and men¡¯s preferences are distributed over
the interval [M1].10
As in Osborne and Slivinski (1996) and Besley and Coate (1997), the political
game has three stages. Citizens first decide whether or not to run. The cost of
running for women, ¥äw, is greater than the cost of running for men, ¥äm. This
seems to be a very realistic assumption: In rural areas in India (at least in the
two states we are studying in this paper), literate women (who can run for
9Pande (2003) develops an alternative model to analyze the possible impact of the reservation
of a share of seats to SC/ST in state legislative assemblies in India. The argument is that candidates
are fielded by political parties, where minorities are under-represented relative to their
share in the population, which in turn leads to an under-representation of SC/ST among legislators,
in the absence of reservation. The present model seems better suited to the description of
local democracy, and avoids assumptions on the objective functions of political parties.
10Women¡¯s and men¡¯s distributions can overlap¡ªthat is, we can haveM
that men¡¯s and women¡¯s preferences are neatly ordered in this linear fashion is, of course,
quite extreme. However, relaxing this assumption would not change the qualitative nature of our
results.
1416 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
office) come from lower middle class backgrounds, where it is frowned upon
for a woman to work outside their home, let alone to campaign or serve in
public office (for example,Hindu women inUdaipur generally observe Purdah,
and keep their face covered in public). Citizens then elect a candidate (as in
Besley and Coate (1997), we will assume that voting is strategic), and finally the
policy is implemented. During a given period of time, the candidate decides
each period which decision to take. The utility of citizen i if outcome xj is
implemented is |xj ¥øi| if citizen i was not a candidate, and |xj ¥øi| ¥äi
if citizen i was a candidate.
Where our model departs from the basic models by Besley and Coate and
Osborne and Slivinski is in the assumption that the policy that is finally implemented
is a mixture of the preferred policy option of the elected candidate,
and a policy option ¥ì, preferred by the local elite (as against just what the
candidate wants). This can reflect the ¡°capture¡± of decentralized government
by the local elite, modelled for example in Bardhan and Mookherkjee (2000)
and Besley and Coate (2001). An alternate, more positive view of this process
is that the elected official is subject to the control of the village assembly or
the elected council.11 Under both interpretations, it is plausible that ¥ì would
be more ¡°pro-male¡± than the median voter¡¯s preference, since the local elite
tend to be male, and men are also more likely to attend village meetings than
women. Therefore, this is what we will assume. Formally our assumption is
that the candidate¡¯s preferences are given a weight ¥á, so the policy finally implemented
by the elected citizen j is xj = ¥áwj + (1 ¥á)¥ì. This formalization
gives us an intuitive choice for the default decision, implemented if no one decides
to run.12 In this case, the decision is ¥ì, and citizen i¡¯s utility is |¥ì ¥øi|.
Initially, we will assume that ¥á is constant across elected candidates. We will
also assume that ¥ì >m, the median voter¡¯s preferred outcome. Citizens know
that the policy that will eventually be implemented will be influenced by the
lobbying process, and they take this into account when they cast their vote.
3.2. Analysis of the Model
Despite the fact that voters are completely informed and vote strategically
in this model (in particular, they correctly anticipate that the decision of the
elected citizen will reflect ex post lobbying), the outcome that is finally implementedmay
not reflect the preference of the median voter, for several reasons.
11There is evidence of both phenomena in the districts we study. First, bigger and richer villages
receive more public goods per capita than smaller villages, presumably because they have the
means to lean on the Panchayat leader. Also, in village meetings, there are instances of groups
trying to make sure they are getting the public goods they want, as well as of citizens complaining
that the allocations of goods favor politically more powerful people.
12Of course, in practice, there is always a candidate.However, it is not infrequent that Pradhans
are perceived as being a cover for someone else. There is even an expression to designate a
Pradhan who is in fact a dummy for a lobbying group: a ¡°shadow Pradhan.¡±
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1417
First, as in Besley and Coate (1997), there may be an equilibrium with two candidates
who, if elected, will implement decisions that are symmetric around the
median voter, but relatively far away from the median voter¡¯s preferred position.
With strategic voting, it may be impossible for a third candidate to enter
in the middle and win.13 Second, and specific to this model, parameters may
be such that, without reservation, there is no equilibrium where a woman is a
candidate. In this case, the outcome that will be implemented in equilibrium
will be to the right of M, the most ¡°pro-female¡± outcome preferred by a man.
Moreover, if the preferences of men and women do not overlap substantially,
if the preferences of the lobbies (or the village meeting) are sufficiently biased
towards male preferences, or if the power of the lobbies is sufficiently strong,
it is fully possible that any policy outcome will be to the right of the median
voter¡¯s preferred outcome. By inducing women to run, the reservation policy
moves to the left of the range of outcomes that can be implemented in equilibrium.
This will tend to improve women¡¯s utility, and, because the median
voter¡¯s policy may now be included in the range of policies that can be implemented
in equilibrium, this may also improve the utility of the median voter.
The intuition for this result is that the influence of the lobbies tends to moderate
women (since they start from the left of the median voter), while it makes
men more extreme.
In this section, we first analyze women¡¯s decision to run for office when there
is no reservation. We then derive the conditions under which the reservation
policy unambiguously improves the welfare of the median female voter, and
that of the median voter.
As most people who have analyzed a model of this class, we restrict the analysis
to pure strategy equilibria where no more than three candidates run. Under
mild assumptions, this also implies that there is no equilibria with more than
two candidates.14 All the proofs are in the Appendix.
The first proposition gives the conditions under which, without reservation,
women will not run.
PROPOSITION 1: If the following conditions hold, there is no equilibrium where
a woman runs in the absence of reservation:
(i) ¥äw 5 ¥äm >¥ì m;
(ii) ¥äw >m (1 ¥á)¥ì.
13Osborne and Slivinski (1996) show that this would not be true with sincere voting, which
would be defined here as voting for the person who, after the influence of the lobbying, would
implement the outcome that the citizen preferred. In this case, two candidates cannot be too far
apart.
14Formally, Besley and Coate (1997) show that there are no equilibria with exactly three candidates
if citizens abstain whenever they are indifferent between all candidates, and that Assumption
I (nonclumping) holds: For any interval I of the policy space [0 1], if there exists an
interval I of smaller length that contains the ideal point of at least one-third of the citizens, the
interval I must contain the ideal point of at least one citizen. They cannot rule out equilibria with
more than three candidates.
1418 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
The first condition is the condition under which no woman runs unopposed.
The intuition is that when the cost of running is high for women, only women
with strong pro-women preferences will want to run. But if the cost of running
is low for a man, a man can then enter and win for sure. If the second condition
is satisfied, no woman agrees to run against a man: The two candidates
must have equal chances of winning, and thus the outcome they will implement
must be symmetric around the median voter. Under this condition, the
distance between the outcomes implemented by the two most extreme candidates
symmetric among the median voter is too small to compensate even the
most extreme woman¡¯s cost of running.
Of course, there is no guarantee that a woman would run once there is
reservation. The following lemma states the condition under which no woman
agrees to run even after reservation.
LEMMA 1: If ¥äw >¥á¥ì, there is no equilibrium in which a candidate runs under
the reservation regime.
Basically, if the cost of running is too high for women, or if the power of
elected officials is low, even the women with the most extreme preferences
would prefer the default option to what she can get by running and winning
the election. The fact that no one runs may decrease the utility of the median
voter: if a candidate had been running before the reservation, but no candidate
is running now, the outcome after reservation may be further away from the
preferences both of the female voters and the median voter. Reservation replaces
representative democracy with lobbying. Proposition 2 makes this point.
PROPOSITION 2: If ¥äw >¥á¥ì, ¥ì [¥áM +(1¥á)¥ì] ¡Ã ¥äm and ¥ì > max(m+ 5¥äm 2m [¥áM + (1 ¥á)¥ì]), the reservation leads to an unambiguous loss in
the utility of the median voter and that of women.
By contrast, when women run because of the reservation, reservation can
lead to an unambiguous increase in women¡¯s utility and the median voter¡¯s
utility. The conditions under which this is true are given in Proposition 3.
PROPOSITION 3: If ¥ì(1¥á)¥ì ¡Ã ¥äw, and the conditions in Proposition 1 are
satisfied, so that no woman runs without a reservation system, then the reservation
system:
(i) always increases the utility of the median female voter if ¥ì [¥áM + (1 ¥á)¥ì] ¡Ã min(m+ 5¥äw¥áW + (1 ¥á)¥ì¥ì ¥äw);
(ii) always increases the utility of the median voter and of the median female
voter if condition (i) is satisfied and, in addition, ¥ì [¥áM + (1 ¥á)¥ì] > 2m max((1 ¥á)¥ì (m 5¥äw)).
The first condition ensures that the most ¡°pro-woman¡± outcomes implemented
by a man are to the right of the most ¡°pro-man¡± outcomes
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1419
implemented by a woman. If this condition is not satisfied, the reservation
may or may not increase the utility of the median female voter, depending on
which equilibrium is chosen before and after the reservation system.
If the overlap between men¡¯s and women¡¯s preferences is not large, and if
lobbying power is important (but not so important that women refuse to run
altogether), reservation will unambiguously improve the median woman¡¯s utility.
The median voter¡¯s utility will also improve if the moderation induced by
electoral tactics (or the ex post lobbying) implies that the most pro-woman
outcome that can be implemented after the reservation
become easier for women to try to influence the policy process ex post (by lobbying
or by attending the meetings). This would move ¥ì to the left, and would
reinforce the results in the previous section: women¡¯s reservation will move
policy in a pro-woman direction.
Second, it assumes that all candidates have the same ability to impose their
preferred policies (what we call ¥á). Suppose we now allow ¥á to differ across
people. It is easy to see that in this case the only women who will run before
the reservation policies will tend to be strong women (high ¥á). Further,
men running before the reservation policies will tend to be strong men (to be
elected, they have to be strong enough for the outcomes they implement to
be reasonably close to what the median voter wants, even after lobbying). After
the reservation, however, relatively weak women with a strong pro-women
bias are as likely to be candidates as strong women with more moderate preferences,
and both will implement similar policies. Candidates¡¯ characteristics
are thus endogenous to the system of reservation; controlling for endogenous
characteristics without controlling for preferences (which are unobserved) may
therefore lead to biased estimates of the effect of the reservation policy. In
specification checks, we will nevertheless be able to control for differences in
some of these characteristics by using exogenous variation in candidates¡¯ characteristics
generated by the reservation policies.
Third, the model ignores many other possible effects of the reservation system.
In particular, it does not consider the possibility of strategic behavior on
the part of the elected official, which would occur if there was a future election.
Thus, it ignores possible effects of the model on incentives, which would arise
naturally if we embedded this model in a several-period model. In this model,
when Proposition 1 holds, women will return to not running when their GPs
rotate away from the set of reserved GPs. They thus face different incentives
than men who will be allowed to run again. On the other hand, men who are
elected on seats that are reserved in the next election face a term limit.We will
present estimates that directly control for different dynamic incentives, using
exogenous variation generated by rotation in the reservation system.
3.3. Testing the Empirical Predictions
The most robust prediction of the model, which sets it in contrast with a
Downsian or Coasian model of the political process, or with a model in which
the Panchayat is entirely directed by the bureaucracy, is that policy outcomes
are likely to differ in GPs that are reserved for women. To test this, we will
simply compare the type of goods provided in reserved and unreserved areas
and perform robustness checks to confirm that the difference seems to be due
to the gender of the reserved Pradhans.
More specifically, the model predicts that, in some cases, policy outcomes
will be closer to what women want than to what men want. To test this feature
of the model, we need measures of the average preferences of women and
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1421
men. One possible approach would be to derive women¡¯s and men¡¯s preferences
from a model of gender roles in the household. If the households are not
unitary and cannot commit to excluding the policy environment in their bargaining,
women and men will prefer policies that are likely to affect their bargaining
power or the price of the goods they consume, and thus have different
policy preferences. Women will thus prefer programs that increase women¡¯s
opportunity (such as public works programs where they can be employed) or
their productivity on their tasks (such as having a drinking water source next
to their house), while men will prefer programs that improve men¡¯s opportunity
and productivity. This is the approach in Foster and Rosenzweig (2002),
who construct a model that predicts the preferences of the poor versus the
rich, and then test when public goods allocation better reflects the needs of
the poor than the needs of the rich. Another approach would be to ask men
and women what their preferences are, an approach often conducted in political
science. This approach has the drawback that individuals may be reporting
socially acceptable preferences.
The approach we use here is to use the data on formal requests and complaints
that are brought to the Pradhan. Since complaining is costly (the
individual has to come to the GP office), the complaints are a reasonable
measure of the preferences of the individuals, if the individuals assume that
complaining will have an effect. A simple way of integrating the possibility
of costly communication into our model is to build it into the lobbying outcome
¥ì, so far assumed to be exogenously given.
Specifically, assume that the policy the Pradhan is implementing is in fact a
series of binary policy decisions (a choice between two goods). Before every
decision, a villager chosen at random gets a chance to convey to the leader his
preference over the choice that the village faces in this specific period. Assume
that villagers cannot lie. If a villager chooses to speak, he has to face a cost bi,
which differs across individuals. If the leader received no signal, the probability
that he chooses to implement 1 is a weighted average of his own preferred
policy (with a weight ¥á) and his prior belief of what the villagers¡¯ preferred
policy is. If the leader received a signal, his prior will be influenced by the
signal. Specifically, assume the leader¡¯s prior is .5, and that he gives a weight ¥â
to his prior, and 1¥â to the signal. Then an individual i will choose to convey
his signal if and only if 5(1 ¥á)(1 ¥â) ¡Ã bi.
In this very simple model, the probability of complaining depends only on
the cost of complaining for an individual, not on the signal received or on the
intensity of the individual¡¯s preferences (which only predicts how likely it is
that the individual will prefer one of the outcomes in a specific period). Thus,
the frequency of complaints of a specific type among a group of people is an
unbiased estimate of the underlying distribution of preferences in this group.
In practice, we do not observe 0 or 1 signals, but instead a series of complaints
about different types of goods (drinking water, roads, irrigation, schools, etc.).
If in every period, the Pradhan must decide between two goods and the individual
who gets a chance to express his opinion can request one or the other
1422 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
or none, the frequency at which a good appears is an unbiased estimate of the
frequency at which this good is preferred to every other good (weighted by the
probability that a pair of goods appears together). The difference
Di = nw
i
Nw
nm
i
Nm
is thus a measure of the strength of the difference between women¡¯s and men¡¯s
preferences for a particular good and the average
Si =
1
2 nw
i
Nw +
nm
i
Nm
is a measure of the strength of the preference in the aggregate population (i.e.,
men and women together) for the good, if we assume that there is an equal
share of men and women.
In thismodel,Di and Si are not themselves affected by the reservation policy.
Of course, this model might be too simple, and in general, they may themselves
be outcomes of the reservation policy. If people report their preference ¥øi (instead
of a discrete number) to the Pradhan, the distribution of who decides to
complain will depend both on the preferences of the Pradhan, as well as on the
preferences of the individual who gets a chance to communicate in a given period.
The higher the cost, the more polarized the preferences will be that the
request will reflect. Analyzing this communication game is beyond the scope
of this paper and is the subject of Banerjee and Somanathan (2001). If women
have a higher cost of speaking than men, for example, women¡¯s complaints
will thus be more biased towards extreme preferences.16 Men may express an
opinion on just about anything, while women will speak only about relevant
trade-offs. If there are specific goods that are on average more important,
women¡¯s complaintsmay then be more skewed towards these goods than men¡¯s
complaints. To this extent, Di measures women¡¯s preferences with error, which
should attenuate the results. The simplifying assumption (that the nature of
the complaint does not depend on the intensity of preferences) is, however,
testable if the cost of complaining is affected by reservation (we will show it is,
since there are manymore complaints by women in reserved GPs). In this case,
if the assumption is not satisfied, there will be a difference in the frequency of
requests for the different types of investments in reserved and unreserved GPs.
In the model, allocations are more closely aligned to women¡¯s needs in
reserved GPs because of the selection of women candidates and potentially
because of the reduction in the cost of speaking for women (which moves
16Women are indeed likely to have a higher cost of complaining in this context, given the
social norms that limit their mobility (and hence the possibility of attending meetings, if they
are conducted at night, for example) and the conditions under which they can speak to a man.
Indeed, we will show that women are less likely to attend village meetings then men.
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1423
¥ì to the left), but not because women are more responsive to the complaints
of women (or to complaints in general). This differentiates it from a model
where women make different decisions because they are more responsive to
women¡¯s complaints, more altruistic¡ªas the experimental literature suggests
(e.g., Eckel and Grossman (1998))¡ªless corrupt (Dollar, Fisman, and Gatti
(2001)), on their best behavior because they know they are part of a social
experiment, or simply more susceptible to lobbying. To test this, we will test
whether, in reserved GPs, the Pradhan reacts more to the specific complaints
expressed in this village (by women, in particular) than in unreserved GPs.
4. DATA COLLECTION AND EMPIRICAL STRATEGY
4.1. Data Collection
We collected data in two locations: Birbhum inWest Bengal and Udaipur in
Rajasthan.
In the summer of 2000, we conducted a survey of all GPs in the district of
Birbhum,West Bengal. Birbhum is located in the western part ofWest Bengal,
about 125 miles fromthe state capital, Calcutta. At the time of the 1991 census,
it had a population of 2.56 million. Agriculture is the main economic activity,
and rice is the main crop cultivated. The male and female literacy rates were
50% and 37%, respectively. The district is known to have a relatively wellfunctioning
Panchayat system.
There are 166 GPs in Birbhum, of which five were reserved for pre-testing,
leaving 161 GPs in our study. Table II shows the means of the most relevant village
variables collected by the 1991 census of India in reserved and unreserved
GPs, and their differences. As expected, given the random selection of GPs,
there are no significant differences between reserved and unreserved GPs, and
the differences are jointly insignificant. Note that very few villages (3% among
the unreserved GPs) have tap water, the most common sources of drinking
water being hand-pumps and tube-wells. Most villages are accessible only by a
dirt road. Ninety-one percent of villages have a primary school, but very few
have any other type of school. Irrigation is important: 43% of the cultivated
land is irrigated, with at least some land being irrigated in all villages. Very few
villages (8%) have any public health facility.
We collected the data in two stages. First, we conducted an interview with
the GP Pradhan.We asked each one a set of questions about his or her family
background, education, previous political experience, and political ambitions,
as well as a set of questions about the activities of the GP since his or her
election in May 1998 (with support from written records). We then completed
a survey of three villages in the GP: Two villages randomly selected in each
GP, as well as the village in which the GP Pradhan resides. During the village
interview, we drew a resource map of the village with a group of 10 to
20 villagers. The map featured all the available infrastructure in the village,
and we asked whether each of the available equipment items had been built
1424 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
TABLE II
VILLAGE CHARACTERISTICS IN RESERVED AND UNSERVED GP, 1991 CENSUS
West Bengal Rajasthan
Mean, Reserved GP Mean, Unreserved GP Difference Mean, Reserved GP Mean, Unreserved GP Difference
Dependent Variables (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Total Population 974 1022 49 1249 1564 315
(60) (46) (75) (123) (157) (212)
Female Literacy Rate 35 34 01 05 05 00
(01) (01) (01) (01) (01) (01)
Male Literacy Rate 57 58 01 28 26 03
(01) (01) (01) (02) (02) (03)
% Cultivated Land that Is Irrigated 45 43 02 05 07 02
(03) (02) (04) (01) (01) (02)
Dirt Road 92 91 01 40 52 11
(02) (01) (02) (08) (07) (10)
Metal Road 18 15 03 31 34 04
(03) (02) (03) (07) (06) (10)
Bus Stop or Train Station 31 26 05 40 43 03
(04) (02) (04) (08) (07) (10)
Number of Public Health Facilities 06 08 02 29 19 10
(01) (01) (02) (08) (06) (10)
Tube Well Is Available 05 07 02 02 03 01
(03) (02) (07) (02) (02) (03)
Handpump Is Available 84 88 04 90 97 06
(04) (03) (05) (05) (02) (05)
Wells 44 47 02 93 91 01
(07) (04) (08) (04) (04) (06)
Tap Water 05 03 01 12 09 03
(03) (02) (03) (05) (04) (06)
Number of Primary Schools 95 91 04 93 116 23
(07) (03) (08) (09) (10) (15)
Number of Middle Schools 05 05 00 43 33 10
(01) (01) (01) (08) (07) (10)
Number of High Schools 09 10 01 14 07 07
(01) (01) (02) (06) (04) (07)
F-Statistics: Difference Jointly Significant 93 154
(p-value) (53) (11)
Notes: 1. There are 2120 observations in the West Bengal regressions, and 100 in the Rajasthan regressions. 2. Standard errors, corrected for clustering at the GP level in the
West Bengal regressions, are in parentheses.
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1425
or repaired since May 1998. Previous experience of one of the authors, as well
as experimentation during the pre-testing period, suggested that this method
yields extremely accurate information about the village.We then conducted an
additional interview with the most active participants of the mapping exercise,
in which we asked in more detail about investments in various public goods.
We also collected minutes of the village meetings, and asked whether women
and men of the village had expressed complaints or requests to the GP in the
previous six months. For all outcomes for which it was possible, we collected
the same information at both the GP level and at the village level. The village
level information is likely to be more reliable, because it is not provided by the
Pradhan, and because it was easy for villagers to recall investments made in
their village in the previous two years. However, the information given by the
GP Pradhan refers to investment in the entire GP, and is thus free from sampling
error. Therefore, when an outcome is available at both levels, we perform
the analysis separately for both and compare the results.
Between August 2002 and December 2002 (after a first draft of this paper
was completed), we collected the same village-level data (there was no Pradhan
interview) in 100 hamlets in Udaipur, Rajasthan, chosen randomly from a
subset of villages covered by a local NGO.17 The reference period for asking
about investment was also two years, 2000¡©2002. In Rajasthan, there was no
regularly elected Panchayat system until 1995. Table II displays the characteristics
of reserved and unreserved villages in our sample.18 Udaipur is a much
poorer district than Birbhum. It is located in an extremely arid area with little
irrigation and has male and female literacy rates of 27.5% and 5.5% respectively.
Because the villages are bigger, they are more likely to have a middle
school, a health facility, and a road connection, compared to villages in West
Bengal. As in West Bengal, we see no significant difference between the characteristics
of reserved and unreserved villages before the reservation policy was
implemented.
4.2. Empirical Strategy
Thanks to the randomization built into the policy, the basic empirical strategy
is straightforward. The reduced form effect of the reservation status can be
obtained by comparing the means of the outcomes of interest in reserved and
unreserved GPs. Note that this reduced form difference is not an estimate of
17Rajasthani villages are much more spread out thanWest Bengali villages (a Rajasthani village
covers an area on average ten times bigger than aWest Bengali village) and are much less densely
populated. They are made of a series of independent ¡°hamlets,¡± which are not administrative
entities but function as independent villages. Our sampling unit is the hamlet: We first sampled
100 villages (with probability of selection weighted by village size) and then one hamlet per village
(again, the probability of selection was weighted by village size).
18For Udaipur, we could not obtain the data necessary to match villages to Panchayat in the
entire district.
1426 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
the comparison between a system with reservation and a system without reservation.
The policy decisions in unreserved GPs can be different than what they
would have been if there was no reservation whatsoever. They will be different,
for example, in the presence of dynamic incentives. What we are trying to
estimate is the effect of being reserved for a woman, rather than not reserved,
in a system where there is reservation.
Denoting Yij as the value of the outcome of interest for good i (say, investment
in drinking water between 1998 and 2000) and Rj as a dummy equal to 1
if the GP is reserved for a woman, this is simply:
E[Yij |Rj = 1] E[Yij |Rj = 0]
In the village-level regressions in West Bengal, the standard errors are
adjusted for possible correlation within GP using the Moulton correction
(Moulton (1986)).19 We run village-level regressions using only the data for the
two villages we selected randomly since the Pradhan¡¯s villages are not random
and may be selected differently in reserved and unreserved GPs.
Since all the reserved GPs have a female Pradhan, and only very few of the
unreserved GPs do, this reduced form coefficient is very close to the coefficient
that one would obtain by using the reservation policy as an instrument for the
Pradhan¡¯s gender.20 We will therefore focus on the reduced form estimates,
which are directly interpretable as the effect of the reservation policy. These
estimates are the central results of the paper.
We then construct a standardized investment measure for the different categories
of goods in both samples by subtracting the mean in the unreserved
sample from the actual measure and then dividing this difference by the standard
deviation in the unreserved sample. This generates variables whose scale
can be compared across goods. We then run the following regressions to test
the proposition that, in reserved GPs, there is more investment in goods mentioned
more frequently by women:
Yij = ¥â1 + ¥â2 Rj + ¥â3Di Rj +
N
l=1
¥âldil +
ij (1)
and
Yij = ¥â4 + ¥â5 Rj + ¥â6Si Rj +
N
l=1
¥âldil +
ij (2)
19The outcomes we consider are jointly determined, since they are linked by a budget constraint.
However, because the regressor (R) is the same in all outcome equations, a joint
estimation of the system of equations would produce coefficients and standard errors numerically
identical to OLS estimation equation by equation.
20The instrumental variable estimate would simply be the reduced form estimate scaled up by
a factor of 1.075 (the ratio of the reduced form effect and the difference in the probability that a
woman is elected in reserved vs. unreserved GPs).
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1427
where dil are good-specific dummies, Di is the average difference between the
fraction of requests about good i from women and from men, and Si is the
average fraction of requests across men and women. We expect ¥â3 ¡Ã 0 and
potentially ¥â6 ¡Ã 0.
Finally, we will test whether the difference in policy comes from greater responsiveness
of women Pradhans to complaints expressed by women in a specific
village by running the regression:
Yij = ¥â7 + ¥â8 Rj + ¥â9Di Rj + ¥â10Dij Rj + ¥â11Sij Rj + ¥â12Sij
(3)
+ ¥â13Dij +
N
l=1
¥âldil +
ij
where Dij is the difference between an indicator for whether issue i was
brought by women in village j and an indicator for whether issue i was brought
by men in village j, and Sij is the sum of these two indicators.We expect ¥â10 = 0
and ¥â11 = 0 if the village specific complaints are drawn from a distribution of
preferences common to the district and if, as our model assumes, the policy affects
the outcome through the selection of a Pradhan with specific preferences.
Women elected as Pradhans differ from men in many dimensions. In particular,
they are much more likely to be new leaders, and they are probably
less likely to be re-elected in the next election.21 The reduced form estimates
capture all of these potential effects. As we noted earlier, controlling for Pradhan¡¯s
characteristics (like poverty, previous experience, size of the village of
origin of the Pradhan, etc.) can be misleading, since the Pradhan¡¯s characteristics
are endogenous to the reservation system. We will nevertheless present
these estimates and show that the results are unchanged. A very interesting
feature of the experiment, however, is that it is possible to disentangle the effect
of gender per se from these other effects of reserving electoral seats to
specific groups, using only exogenous random variation generated by the policy.
For theWest Bengal sample, we collected additional data to perform these
specification checks, which are described and implemented in Section 6.
5. RESULTS
5.1. Effects on the Political Participation of Women
Table III displays the effect of having a woman Pradhan on the political
participation of women. InWest Bengal, the percentage of women among participants
in the Gram Samsad is significantly higher when the Pradhan is a
woman (increasing from 6.9% to 9.8%). Since reservation does not affect the
21Recall that the reservation rotates: seats that were reserved in 1998 will not be reserved again
in 2003.
1428 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
TABLE III
EFFECT OFWOMEN¡¯S RESERVATION ON WOMEN¡¯S POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
Mean, Reserved GP Mean, Unreserved GP Difference
Dependent Variables (1) (2) (3)
West Bengal
Fraction of Women Among Participants 980 688 292
in the Gram Samsad (in percentage) (133) (79) (144)
HaveWomen Filed a Complaint to 20 11 09
the GP in the Last 6 Months (04) (03) (05)
Have Men Filed a Complaint to the GP 94 100 06
in the Last 6 Months (06) (06)
Observations 54 107
Rajasthan
Fraction of Women Among Participants 2041 2449 408
in the Gram Samsad (in percentage) (242) (305) (403)
HaveWomen Filed a Complaint to 64 62 02
the GP in the Last 6 Months (07) (06) (10)
Have Men Filed a Complaint to the GP 95 88 073
in the Last 6 Months (03) (04) (058)
Observations 40 60
Notes: 1. Standard errors in parentheses. 2. Standard errors are corrected for clustering at the GP level in theWest
Bengal regressions, using the Moulton (1986) formula.
percentage of eligible voters attending the Gram Samsad, this corresponds to
a net increase in the participation of women, and a decline in the participation
of men. This is consistent with the idea that political communication is
influenced by the fact that citizens and leaders are of the same sex. Women in
villages with a reserved Pradhan are twice as likely to have addressed a request
or a complaint to the GP Pradhan in the last 6 months, and this difference
is significant.22 The fact that the Pradhan is a woman therefore significantly
increases the involvement of women in the affairs of the GP inWest Bengal.
In Rajasthan, the fact that the Pradhan is a woman has no effect on women¡¯s
participation at the Gram Samsad or the occurrence of women¡¯s complaints.
Note that women participate more in the Gram Samsad in Rajasthan, most
probably because the process is very recent, and the GP leaders are trained to
mobilize women in public meetings.23
22In the subsample of villages in which we conducted follow-up surveys, we also asked whether
men had brought up any issue in the previous six months. In all cases but one (a reserved GP),
they had.
23Interestingly, women¡¯s participation is significantly higher when the position of council member
of the village is reserved for a woman (results not reported to conserve space). This difference
is probably due to the very long distance between villages in Rajasthan.
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1429
5.2. Requests of Men and Women
Table IV shows the fraction of formal requests made by villagers to the Panchayat
in the six months prior to the survey by type of good.24
In West Bengal, drinking water and roads were by far the issues most frequently
raised by women.The nextmost important issue was welfare programs,
followed by housing and electricity. In Rajasthan, drinking water, welfare programs,
and roads were the issues most frequently raised by women. The issues
most frequently raised by men in West Bengal were roads, irrigation, drinking
water, and education.With the exception of irrigation, men have the same
priorities in Rajasthan. A chi-square test rejects the hypothesis that the distributions
of men¡¯s and women¡¯s complaints are the same (at less than 1% inWest
Bengal, and 9% in Rajasthan). Note that this pattern of revealed preferences
is expected, in view of the activities of both men and women in these areas.
Women are in charge of collecting drinking water, and they are the primary
recipients of welfare programs (maternity pension, widow¡¯s pension, and old
age pension for the destitute, who tend to be women). In West Bengal, they
are the main source of labor employed on the roads. In Rajasthan, both men
and women work on roads, and the employment motive is therefore common.
However, men travel very frequently out of the villages in search of work, while
women do not travel long distances; accordingly, men have a stronger need for
good roads.
In columns (5) and (11), we report the average across men and women of
the fraction of complaints related to infrastructure (Si in the model) in West
Bengal and Rajasthan, respectively.25 In columns (6) and (12), we report the
difference between the fraction of issues raised by women and the fraction of
issues raised by men (Di in themodel). If themodel is correct,we would expect
more investments in drinking water and roads in reserved GPs inWest Bengal,
less investment in roads in Rajasthan, and less investment in education and
irrigation in West Bengal.26
In columns (1) and (2) (forWest Bengal), and (7) and (8) (forRajasthan), we
present the distribution of complaints in reserved and unreserved GPs. A chisquare
test does not reject that they are drawn from the same distribution
(and the point estimates are also very similar inWest Bengal, where we have a
difference in the number of women who complain). Our assumption that the
intensity of preferences does not determine whether someone will communicate
her preferences therefore seems to be satisfied.
24We recorded the exact complaint or request: For example, the need to repair a specific well.
We classified them ex post into these categories. InWest Bengal, we had initially not asked about
issues raised by men: A random subset of 48 villages was subsequently resurveyed later.
25These are the goods that are linked together by a budget constraint for the Panchayat, and
therefore where we should see a trade-off.
26There are no Panchayat-run schools in Rajasthan.
1430 R. CHATTOPADHYAY AND E. DUFLO
TABLE IV
ISSUES RAISED BYWOMEN AND MEN IN THE LAST 6 MONTH
West Bengal Rajasthan
Women Men Average Difference Women Men Average Difference
Reserved Unreserved All Reserved Unreserved All
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12)
Other Programs
Public Works 84 84 84 85 84 01 60 64 62 87 74 26
Welfare Programs 12 09 10 04 07 06 25 14 19 03 04 16
Child Care 00 02 01 01 01 00 04 09 07 01 02 06
Health 03 04 04 02 03 02 06 08 07 04 03 03
Credit or Employment 01 01 01 09 05 08 06 06 05 04 09 01
Total Number of Issues 153 246 399 195 72 88 160 155
Breakdown of Public Works Issues
Drinking Water 30 31 31 17 24 13 63 48 54 43 49 09
Road Improvement 30 32 31 25 28 06 09 14 13 23 18 11
Housing 10 11 11 05 08 05 02 04 03 04 04 01
Electricity 11 07 08 10 09 01 02 04 03 02 02 01
Irrigation and Ponds 02 04 04 20 12 17 02 02 02 04 03 02
Education 07 05 06 12 09 06 02 07 05 13 09 09
Adult Education 01 00 00 01 00 00 0 0 00 00 00 00
Other 09 11 10 09 09 01 19 21 20 12 28 05
Number of Public Works Issues 128 206 334 166 43 56 99 135
Public Works
Chi-square 8.84 71.72 7.48 16.38
p-value .64 .00 .68 .09
Notes: 1. Each cell lists the number of times an issue was mentioned, divided by the total number of issues in each panel. 2. The data for men in West Bengal comes from a
subsample of 48 villages. 3. Chi-square values placed across two columns test the hypothesis that issues come from the same distribution in the two columns.
WOMEN AS POLICY MAKERS 1431
5.3. Effects of the Policy on Public Goods Provision
Table V presents the effects of the Pradhan¡¯s gender on all public good
investments made by the GP since the last election in West Bengal and in Rajasthan.
As we aggregated investments in categories, these regressions reflect
all the data we collected on public good investments.
Both inWest Bengal and in Rajasthan, the gender of the Pradhan affects the
provision of public goods. In both places, there are significantly more investments
in drinking water in GPs reserved for women. This is what we expected,
since in both places, women complain more often than men about water. In
West Bengal, GPs are less likely to have set up informal schools (in the village,
this is significant only at the 10% level) in GPs reserved for women.
Interestingly, the effect of reservation on the quality of roads is opposite in
Rajasthan and inWest Bengal: InWest Bengal, roads are significantly better in
GPs reserved for women, but in Rajasthan, this is the opposite. This result is
important since it corroborates expectations based on the complaint data for
men and women. The only unexpected result is that we do not find a significant
effect of reservation for women on irrigation in West Bengal. The differences
between investments in reserved and unreserved GP are jointly significant. In
West Bengal, we run the same regression for GP-level investments (instead of
village-level). The results, presented in panel B, are entirely consistent, and
the effect on informal schooling is significant at the 5% level in the GP-level
regression.
These results suggest that the reservation policy has important effects on
policy decisions at the local level. These effects are consistent with the policy
priorities expressed by women.
In Table VI, we present estimates of equations (1) and (2) for both states,
which are a convenient way to summarize these results.27 Columns (1) and (6)
show that, in both states, on average, the provision of public goods is indeed
more closely aligned to the preferences of women than to those of men; if the
difference between the frequency at which a specific request occurs for women
andmen is 10%, the provision of that good increases by .16 standard deviations
inWest Bengal, and .44 standard deviations in Rajasthan. Columns (2) and (7)
show that in both states the decisions taken by women also end up reflecting
more closely the issues that are relevant to villagers.28
Our model posits that women are no more sensitive to women¡¯s complaints
per se than to men¡¯s complaints. This implies that public goods allocation
27The good-specific equation with the variable expressed in standard deviation leads to exactly
the same conclusions as the level equations. They are thus omitted to save space.
28The model makes no prediction about the extent to which political decisions will reflect
female preferences, conditional average preferences, and vice versa. However it is interesting
to note that when both variables are entered in the regression simultaneously, the coefficient
of Di remains significant at the 10% level in both states (the coefficient (standard error) of the
interaction Di R is .44 (.24) inWest Bengal and 3.89 (2.18) in Rajasthan). The coefficient of the
sum loses significance (result omitted from the table to save space).
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The Institutional Basis of India?s Defensive Position on ...
7 May 2008 ... This paper analyzes trade policymaking in India in the context of the ongoing negotiations on trade in agriculture at the WTO. ...
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India's Ad Hoc Arsenal: Direction Or Drift in Defence Policy? - Google Books Result
by Chris Smith, Stockholm International Peace ... - 1994 - Political Science - 267 pages
Defence decision making in India: the policy-making process I. The making of defence policy The decision-making process is, in essence, the institutional ...
books.google.co.in/books?isbn=019829168X...
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Women Politicians, Gender Bias, and Policy-making in Rural India
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and Policy-making in Rural India. THE STATE OF THE. WORLD’S CHILDREN 2007. Background Paper. December 2006. Lori Beaman. Yale University. Esther Duflo ...
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by L Beaman - Cited by 1 - Related articles
HEPVIC - Health Policy-Making in Vietnam, India and China: key ...
This research aims to enhance the health policy making processes in developing countries through a comparative study of three Asian countries - Vietnam, ...
www.ist-world.org/ProjectDetails.aspx?ProjectId=a875eb5b561c40aa8a598bc904f0519e&SourceDatabaseId=7cf... - 165k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
ERAWATCH: Research Inventory
Government policy making and coordination. Policy setting of the R&D agenda and the priorities for science and technology areas of research in India is ...
cordis.europa.eu/erawatch/index.cfm?fuseaction=ri.content&topicID=44&countryCode=IN - 30k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Reserve Bank of India
Current Challenges to Monetary Policy Making in India (Special lecture by Dr. Rakesh Mohan, Deputy Governor, RBI, at the 9th Global Conference of Actuaries ...
www.rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_SpeechesView.aspx?Id=321 - 135k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
JSTOR: The Expansive Elite. District Politics and State Policy ...
District Politics and State Policy- making in India. By Donald B. Rosenthal. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1977. 348 pp. $16.75. ...
links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-851X(197824%2F197924)51%3A4%3C680%3ATEEDPA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P - Similar pages - Note this
by RG Wirsing
policy & position statement :: Trained Nurses' Association of ...
Policy & Position Statement > Nurses’ Role in Planning and Policy Making : ... The Trained Nurses’ Association of India also advocates the implementation of ...
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Planning and policy-making in India; Reports and studies (for the ...
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Page 1. Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. Page 6. Page 7. Page 8. Page 9. Page 10. Page 11. Page 12. Page 13. Page 14. Page 15. Page 16. Page 17. Page 18 ...
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IngentaConnect External Constraints on Policy-Making and ...
External Constraints on Policy-Making and Industrial Development in India. Author: Degnbol-Martinussen J. Source: The European Journal of Development ...
www.ingentaconnect.com/.../edr/2002/00000014/00000001/art00005;jsessionid=2mr8voyy8tnyh.alice?format=print - Similar pages - Note this
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Experiences with Biodiversity Policy-Making and Community ...
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Participation in Access and Benefit-Sharing Policy. Case Study no 3. Experiences with Biodiversity. Policy-Making and Community. Registers in India ...
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by RV Anuradha - Cited by 4 - Related articles - All 11 versions
The Political Economy of Agricultural Policy Reform in India ...
Her current research deals with the politics of trade policy-making in India. Neeru Sharma is a Research Analyst based in IFPRI's New Delhi Office. ...
www.ifpri.org/events/seminars/2008/20080812India.asp - 7k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
India Political and Economic Business Forecast Report - Business ...
Current Administration and Policy-making in India BMI profiles key policy-makers and power-brokers in the Indian government, assessing threats to the ...
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SIPRI - Publications Arms Procurement Decision Making Volume I ...
The defence debate in India and Israel is comparatively more developed. ... Better coordination between the foreign and defence policy-making structures ...
books.sipri.org/product_info?c_product_id=156 - 29k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
India's problem with making trade policy: part two | Asia > South ...
HEADNOTE In the second of two articles, Julius Sen looks at how India's approach to making trade policy has constrained the country's economic development ...
www.allbusiness.com/government/1130888-1.html - 107k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Dynamics Cultural Policy Making: The Industry India
Cultural Policy Making:. The. U S . Film. Industry. in. India. by. Manjunath Pendakur. A history of the U S .film cartel, the MPEAA, ...
www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1985.tb02972.x - Similar pages - Note this
by M Pendakur - 1985 - Cited by 7 - Related articles - All 2 versions
Technology policy making as a social an political process ...
This paper investigates the policy-making process i n a high-technology Indian industry—software—that epitomizes the liberalizing, export-oriented India of ...
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Projects - advanced search - Royal Tropical Institute
Health policy making in Vietnam, India and China; key determinants and their ... a comparative study of three Asian countries; Vietnam, India and China. ...
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Bridging Research and Policy
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Bridging the Gap between Research and Policymaking in India Seminar , Delhi, 3. rd. January 2004. Purpose and Outline ...
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forthcoming in Language policy Linguistic imperialism: a ...
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conspiracy, but rather that foreign-policy making is so ‘secretive, elitist and unaccountable that. policy-makers know they can get away with almost ...
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by R Phillipson - Cited by 2 - Related articles - All 5 versions
The Chronicle: 5/2/2003: The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory ...
Thus empowered, this neoconservative conspiracy, "a product of the .... Political scientists and historians have long described policy making as an ...
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"American Conspiracy": Historical Memory, Foreign Policy and the ...
The place of history and memory in the conduct and understanding of foreign policymaking remains a much under-studied field. This research contributes a ...
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The NASSAR AND HIS ENEMIES: FOREIGN POLICY DECISION MAKING IN ...
Thus Nasser came to believe in a "wider conspiracy" between imperialism, Zionism, ...... Foreign Policy Making in Developing States: A Comparative Approach ...
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by L James - Related articles - All 4 versions
Who Rules America: Conspiracy Theories
But studies of policy-making suggest that experts work within the context of ... events and media exposures, no conspiracy theory is credible on any issue. ...
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The Need for Exopolitics: Implications of Extraterrestrial ...
These conspiracy theories span the spectrum from a belligerent desire by ETs ...... policy making community in the event of a continued government policy of ...
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Jeremy Hargreaves » Blog Archive » Sometimes there really is no ...
4 Oct 2007 ... 5 Responses to “Sometimes there really is no conspiracy” .... where you take Claire Bentham to task for her elitist view of policy making. ...
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The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid
Chronicle of the Conspiracy Join us as we discover, document, ..... "In the Reagan Administration economic policymaking was guided not by analysis but by ...
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Jeff Weintraub: Mearsheimer & Walt on the Zionist Conspiracy ...
26 Mar 2006 ... Mearsheimer & Walt on the Zionist Conspiracy . .... should be kept away from involvement with Middle East diplomacy and policy-making unless ...
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American Thinker: Eurabia: 'Conspiracy' or Policy?
13 Jun 2007 ... Eurabia: 'Conspiracy' or Policy? By Andrew G. Bostom .... Reagan, and the Death of Détente · There Is No Such Thing as Making Peace ...
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