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HomeOpinionIndia's urban and rural poor expect different things from their local govts,...

India’s urban and rural poor expect different things from their local govts, and why it matters

The optimism of rural residents with regard to panchayats is striking compared to the largely despondent accounts of slum residents about urban local bodies.

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For India’s citizens living below or teetering just above the poverty line, the ability to make claims on local government is a matter of utmost importance. Critical resources in the areas of health, water, sanitation, housing, basic infrastructure, and a wide range of social protection schemes flow through India’s rural and urban local governance bodies. These local bodies are frequently the first port of call for citizens seeking assistance and are the frontline implementers of central and state policy. Democracy works better when local governments are accessible and responsive.


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Ties with local government

It, therefore, matters greatly how citizens see and engage with their local government. Yet little attention has been paid to understanding what citizens expect from their local bodies, or how these expectations influence their approaches to state institutions. Do people believe their local governments to be accessible and responsive? Do they attempt to access officials directly, or turn instead to intermediaries? The answers to these questions speak volumes about the nature of local democracy, and about the patterns of hope and despair that shape local citizen-state relations.

Take for example these two, short accounts, which illustrate divergent citizen expectations of and experiences with the state.

A woman in rural Udaipur, reflecting on water shortages in her village, offered us an optimistic view of her ability to make her voice heard, recounting: “Now, there is a government tank. We made it by telling the panchayat time and time again… We said, ‘we gave you our votes, now bring us water’!” In sharp contrast, a man residing in an urban slum in Jaipur, reflecting on a lack of street lights, expressed a bleak view, stating: “(Public officials) don’t listen. We don’t even get to see their faces.”


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Divergence across the rural-urban divide

These accounts reflect broad patterns in our comparative research in rural and urban India, drawing on surveys and fieldwork in 105 villages in Rajasthan and in 80 slums in the cities of Jaipur and Bhopal.

We find that the slum residents are much more pessimistic in their expectations of local government than similarly poor rural villagers; they are, in fact, almost four times less likely (at just 12 per cent) to believe they will get a response if they directly contact a public official. The same slum residents, moreover, are over two times more likely than villagers to report the presence of brokers (politically connected slum leaders), and turn to these mediated channels in large numbers when seeking assistance.

Villagers, in sharp contrast, are most likely to turn directly to the panchayat, engaging face-to-face with an elected official. These patterns persist, controlling for a range of socio-economic features (being below the poverty line, asset ownership, education level) as well as for caste, gender, and landownership.

Similarly, poor rural and urban residents, in other words, hold vastly different expectations of government responsiveness, which are diminished (and manifest in more brokered approaches) in cities compared to villages. This is surprising, since it contradicts conventional wisdom that suggests that residents of the “urban core” (who live in greater proximity to seats of government) should be more politically engaged, and so should demand more from their representatives, than those in the remote “rural periphery.”


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Democratic deficiency in urban slums

These findings point to a dramatic democratic deficiency in India’s slums —neighborhoods that house at least 65 million people across India’s cities, according to the 2011 Census — where the vast majority believe that they will simply “be ignored” if they approach a public official. This highlights, in part, a crisis in India’s urban local bodies.

In 1992, the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments mandated the creation of local elected bodies in villages and cities alike. Since then, patterns of rural and urban decentralisation have diverged dramatically.

In the last decade-plus, the panchayat, once widely thought of as little more than a “paper tiger”, has been strengthened by the injection of funds from a wide range of state and central government programmes. Relatively small constituency sizes (averaging 5,000 people in our study villages) make these rural local bodies broadly visible and accessible. The panchayat is the primary point of state contact for rural citizens (reported by more than 60 per cent in our rural survey); this is true for men and women from all caste backgrounds and income groups.

Municipal councils, in contrast, have remained moribund, starved for resources and stretched thin in their capacity — in no small part because of their order-of-magnitude larger constituency size (with municipal wards in our study averaging 40,000 and 26,000 people in Jaipur and Bhopal, respectively, based on the 2011 Census). Urban local bodies are less accessible for most urban residents (and for slum residents in particular) compared to panchayats for villagers. Political brokers, tapped into partisan networks, have proliferated to fill this gap.


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Quality of local democracy

How citizens assess the performance of their local governments reflects the quality of local democracy. In this sense, the relative optimism expressed by rural residents that their voices will be heard is striking when compared to the largely despondent accounts from slum residents.

Closing this “despondency gap”, especially within informal, low-income settlements, is among the greatest challenges in urban governance. Preventing such despondency from taking hold in villages is also critical; if citizens’ expectations outpace local government capacity, a different equilibrium — marked by exit, instead of voice — could take hold.

Indeed, a quarter of our rural sample reports a full disengagement, not just from the panchayat but from any kind of demand-making activity. The relative gains of the rural sector highlighted in our study are thus uneven and fragile. They nonetheless illustrate the potential for a virtuous cycle of improved public performance and rising citizen expectations.

Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner is an Assistant Professor of Politics and Global Studies at the University of Virginia, and the author of Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Adam Auerbach is Assistant Professor in the School of International Service, American University and the author of Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Views are personal.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. While it is by and large true that local self governments are short on performance, it must be seen against the background of citizens’ behaviour during periodic elections. They are too happy to get bribed in their voting choice. That choice,generally, does not tend to punish the non performers. So no improvement can be expected without change in the moral values of the voting class.

  2. You are fully right.Indians peoples are expecting Problem-solver leaders,Result-oriented performer leaders, but what are they getting election after election? Useless fellows,good for nothing fellows who dont know art of good governance and Comprehensive reforms .India is taking a beating in every areas unable to control Rapes unending saga of Rapes is continuing,unending corruption, unending mismanagement and maladministration,unending wastage and wanton destruction of Funds and resources as per comptroller and auditor general report and now international criticism for stupid policies like CAA etc. What remains next?

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