Bengaluru: Indian voters do not vote on the basis of development or policies, according to a recent study, confirming the results of the 2019 general elections.
Despite a raft of economic woes afflicting the country, ranging from joblessness to farm distress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has swept to power in India, winning 56% of seats.
The study, ‘Do Citizens Enforce Accountability For Public Goods Provision?’, by Oxford University scholar Tanushree Goyal took into account election results across 14 states that hold 90% of India’s population. It linked the performance of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (prime minister’s rural roads project; PMGSY) to the results of state and central elections between 1998 and 2017.
A flagship programme of the earlier Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, PMGSY was launched in 2000. By 2018, the programme had resulted in more than 5,50,000 km of roads being laid across rural India at a cost of Rs 28 million crore ($40 billion).
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