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