LOCALIZING DEVELOPMENT: DOES PARTICIPATION WORK?
Some evidence suggests that villages in India that hold a gram sabha do a better job of targeting the most disadvantaged.
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Besley, Pande, and Rao (2005, 2007) find that villages that hold a gram sabha do a better job of targeting BPL cards to the most disadvantaged villagers. People without any formal schooling, for example, fare substantially better in villages that hold gram sabhas. However, not all villages hold such meetings, and among those that do, only about a fifth discuss beneficiary selection for public programs. Consequently, most local politicians in their sample (87 percent of the 540 surveyed) believed that they, rather than the gram sabha, were responsible for benefit allocation decisions. Bardhan and others (2008) also find that villages that had greater gram sabha participation rates were more pro-poor in their allocation of benefits. Although they are careful to point out that this finding does not provide evidence of a causal impact of gram sabha meetings on targeting, they argue that it is consistent with the hypothesis that village meetings “formed a channel of accountability of gram panchayats to poor and low caste groups” (p. 7). Besley, Pande, and Rao (2007) also find support for the disciplinary effect of the gram sabha on capture. They show that the odds of a politician’s household receiving a BPL card were lower in villages in which a gram sabha was held. These results are only suggestive, as the design of these studies does not allow the authors to determine why some villages hold meetings and others do not. Several studies using data from India have tried to identify village characteristics that predict the holding of gram sabhas as well as household characteristics associated with participation. Bardhan and others (2008) find that participation rates were higher in villages in which the proportion of landless and scheduled caste households was lower. Besley, Pande, and Rao (2007) find higher participation rates for the landless and low caste in villages with higher average levels of education. Kumar (2007) looks at the effect of community participation on the targeting of BPL cards in India. Her data come from the state of Madhya Pradesh, where a participatory development project, the District Poverty Initiatives Project (DPIP), was initiated in 2001. She assesses the extent to which DPIP, which aims to build political awareness and confidence among the disadvantaged, affects the allocation of BPL cards to eligible households. Her results indicate that the targeting of BPL cards is indeed more pro-poor in DPIP villages, where a greater fraction of BPL cardholders are landless and belong to lower castes. (See also the discussion in chapter 6.)