Getting on the Grid: A Field Experiment on Bottom-Up Political Pressure and Access to Essential Public Services

CASI Seminar

in partnership with the South Asia Center, PDRI-DevLab & Political Science Dept

Nikhar Gaikwad
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
133 South 36th Street, Blank Forum (2nd Floor)
Philadelphia PA 19104-6215

About the Seminar:
Water is essential for human life, yet governments frequently leave vulnerable citizens to rely on informal channels for access. What can motivate governments to provide public services such as water to citizens trapped in informality? In this seminar, Prof. Gaikwad theorizes how accessing state services involves distinct strategic interactions between citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians at different formalization stages. A large factorial field experiment in Mumbai’s informal settlements reveals that a bureaucratic facilitation drive significantly improved citizens’ ability to access municipal water connections in policy-eligible settlements, but only when combined with a bottom-up political coordination campaign targeting elected officials. While bureaucratic assistance helped citizens through the simplest stages of the formalization process, political pressure was needed to ensure service delivery in the more bureaucratically complex stages open to political influence. His findings illuminate how specific citizen empowerment campaigns reshape the incentives of otherwise reluctant bureaucrats and politicians to provide marginalized groups their basic human rights.

About the Speaker:
Nikhar Gaikwad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. He specializes in international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of economic policymaking and identity. Substantively, he works on trade, migration, and climate change policymaking. He has a regional specialization in India. Prior to joining Columbia University, he was a Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Political Science from Yale University and BA in Economics and Political Science from Williams College.

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The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.