New Delhi: Indian lawmakers who win closely fought elections often pay off their local political debts by engineering the award of village road-building jobs to contractors from their caste, a US-French study has found.
It has added that these roads have a higher probability of never being built.
The two major findings by Jacob N. Shapiro from Princeton University and Jonathan Lehne and Oliver Vanden Eynde from the Paris School of Economics are:
• After a close contest at an Assembly seat, the probability that contracts under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana in that constituency will go to someone sharing the new MLA’s surname rises from an average 4 per cent during the predecessor’s term to 7 per cent during the incumbent’s tenure.
(Since people sharing the surname are only a subset of the MLA’s caste brethren, the actual proportions of same-caste contracts should be higher than the 4 and 7 per cent that the researchers recorded.)
• The possibility of the road never being completed rises by 86 per cent if the contractor has the same surname as the MLA.
(All decisions on Yojana projects are to be taken by the panchayat and block authorities, but obviously, the researchers imply, the MLAs do engage in some influence-peddling.)
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