How do governments apportion basic public services when budget constraints necessitate their rationing? This project engages this critical question by examining the provision of scarce electrical power in northern India over the last two decades at an unprecedented level of geographic precision. More people in India lack electricity than any other country in the world, and nowhere more so than in the state of Uttar Pradesh where an estimated 50 million people are unconnected to the power grid. Drawing on a novel set of satellite imagery of nighttime lights, official government data on electricity distribution, and harnessing geographic information systems technology and statistical methods to identify patterns of change over time, this research analyzes variations in electricity provision across Uttar Pradesh over the last four state election cycles. By observing this period of dramatic social and political change, the ability of poor citizens to garner improvements in public service delivery via the polling booth was evaluated. Intensive fieldwork and interviews within one state assembly constituency were designed to substantiate the results of the statistical analysis and elucidate causal mechanisms. The results are a detailed and precise analysis of how an integral public service is distributed in a democratic region with one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the world.
The project's intellectual merit lies in its theoretical investigation of how basic public services are distributed in developing democracies. Since electricity and other basic services are requisites for economic development, this research has critical implications for the life prospects of the world's poor. By testing the observable implications of a theory that links variations in electoral competitiveness and the value placed on local public goods by voters, the research in India is designed to explicitly connect with a broader project that examines the provision of local public goods across the entire developing world.
The project also has broader impacts by informing scholars and policy makers of the ways in which political institutions mediate the delivery of public services to the poor. The study is relevant to all developing democracies in which governments face the challenge of allocating scarce resources among their citizenry. In addition, by intensively validating the use of satellite imagery as an indicator of electrification, the project also opens new opportunities for the study of electricity provision in the rest of the world. Given that we simply do not know who gets public services in many countries, the application of this technology makes a significant contribution to social sciences research
