 Thank you, my name is Mila Inveshiv. I'm the director of the South Asia program here at Carnegie. It's my pleasure to welcome you here for what I think is gonna be a really interesting and exciting discussion with two of the best young political scientists in the United States who are working on India. I was talking to Adam and Gabby before we started about a paper that was written by two economists at the World Bank, colleagues of some of yours here, Phil Kiefer and Stuthi Kimani. Why do the poor get poor services, right? And the idea was in lots of countries like India, the poor, the poor person's often the median voter, given that you have free and fair elections, why can't they use the power of electoral democracy to get stuff, right? To get equitable goods and services. And Phil and Stuthi have kind of a macro explanation that this has to do with social fragmentation cast divisions, the inability to act collectively. It has to do with information asymmetry so the poor simply don't know what they're entitled to or how to go about getting it. And so they end up failing. Also has to do with the fact that political parties in India and many other developing countries are frankly not very credible at delivering programmatic goods. So they instead focus on clientelism or these kind of direct transfers that can be given on the basis of political support and then withdrawn on the same token. There's an aspect to that. All of these three things are, I'm sure, you will find aspects of the truth if you go out in India and other places. But there's an element to the story which is really the kind of bottom up grassroots democracy part of the story. And the books that our guests today, Adam Aravak and Gaby Kirx-Wissner have written really put that bottom up approach under a microscope. So we're gonna have the opportunity here to hear from both of them. Adam, I'm sure a lot of you know, he's a local here, he's a professor at the School of International Service at American University. His new book is called Demanding Development, The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums. He spent more than two years in the slums of Bhopal and Madhya Pradesh and Jaipur and Rajasthan hanging out with slum residents. These are squatter settlements and talking to informal political leaders and trying to figure out, why is it that you go to a slum on this side of the highway and people seem to get stuff and you go on the opposite side and the state just seems completely absent, right? And these things, these are two places that otherwise look pretty much the same and they're next to one another. So Adam will come up and talk first and we'll hear from Gaby. Gaby's new book is called Claiming the State, Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India. So unlike Adam who focuses exclusively on urban settlements, Gaby spends time in one of the same states, Rajasthan looking at rural dwellers, basically asking how do ordinary Indians use civic engagement and civic activism to make demands? And more importantly, why do some never choose to make any demands? And I wanted to do for a long time both of these books together. I was going back, I think our original correspondence, Adam is like two years old now, do this as a package because I think they are two new big books on India that tell us about some pretty big issues. You know, how does the state actually function or not function? How do the poor access development? How does the state deliver things that people have a right to access? But they also puncture a lot of myths. So one of the most interesting things you'll hear about is that caste doesn't have necessarily the same kind of power. And these two accounts that we've been led to believe that you hear in a lot of other political science. There is this notion that political parties in India are quite weak, that they're really active on the eve of an election. They win votes and then they disappear not to be heard from, seen from again until the next election. That's not at all what Adam finds in his work. And also, you know, we have very, I think kind of basic notions about kind of vote banks and vote bank politics and how that works, which both of these accounts really provide some nuance and show us that things are not quite as neat and tidy as some of our flow charts lead us to believe. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Adam. He's gonna speak for about 20 minutes or so on some of the major findings of his book and Gabby will talk. I might ask him a couple of questions and then we'll open it up and we'll try to wrap up by five o'clock. Over to you. Well, first and foremost, Milan, thank you so much for organizing this event. This is a really exciting honor to be able to discuss my book, Demanding Development, the Politics of Public Good Provision in India's Urban Slums. I'm here at the Carnegie Endowment. I'd also like to express my excitement about presenting alongside Gabby, who's really, as you'll see, trailblazing research on local politics in India has really influenced my own in many ways. So my book Demanding Development centers on a key puzzle that emerges from India's really vast population of slum settlements. And that is across these settlements, there is really dramatic variation in levels of basic infrastructural developments and access to public services. So things like paved roads, piped water, sewers, streetlights, trash removal, drainage. And this is despite a larger context of weaker absent formal property rights, informality and employment, entrenched forms of patronage politics and state institutions that are really widely described as largely dismissive towards the poor. And so the question framing the book is, why are some vulnerable communities able to claim and secure development from the states while others fail? To more concretely sort of to describe that variation, drawing on a survey that I did across 111 slum settlements in both Jaipur and Bhopal, capitals of their respective states, Rajasthan and Madhupadas. I consider six development indicators, paved road coverage, household sewer connections, streetlights per 1000 residents, household access to piped water, municipal trash removal and government medical camps. If you look through the columns, you'll see that some of these settlements have absolutely all of these goods and services. They almost seek to look like what we commonly sort of imagine a slum settlement to be. Others have absolutely none of these goods or services. They're just as squalid as they were when they first emerged 20 or 30 years ago. The vast majority of though are sort of suspended somewhere in between with patchy access to these services. So again, what drives this variation in access to these goods and services? So before proceeding to my explanatory framework and the data in the book, I'd like to put my book in context and describe the specific types of slum settlements that I examine in the book. So drawing on India's 2011 census, which is of course quite dated now, it was estimated that 65 million people in India's cities live in urban slum settlements. This is widely considered to be an underestimate. For instance, UN Habitat estimated that figure in 2011 to be well above 100 million people. But even if we take this potentially lower estimate of India's slum population, this is a massive chunk of humanity. This exceeds the entire population of countries like Columbia, Italy, South Africa. And it contributes to what is estimated to be roughly 850 million people living in informal urban slum settlements worldwide. The term slum is used to describe many different types of urban poverty pockets. I'm specifically interested in squatter settlements. In Delhi, these were usually referred to as jugi jopris in Jaipur and Bhopal, where I did my research. These would be kachi busties in Mumbai, Zoprapatis. But they fall into this classic definition of squatter settlements, which are communities that are entirely constructed by residents themselves in a totally haphazard unplanned manner. There's no centralized planning, sort of spontaneous growth. There's an empty plot of land. The migrant comes onto the land, sets up their jugi or their sort of shanty on that land and it becomes theirs. At least initially, and for many settlements, this persists until the current day. There's a total absence of formal property rights. This is unsanctioned squatting on the lands without any sort of land title or land deed. These are also usually greenfield sites, totally absent of any type of infrastructure or public services. Many squatter settlements, although not all, but most are established on environmentally sensitive land. So places along the side of a riverbed, next to a mountain side, next to a factory, next to the railroad tracks. And this is deliberate because there's fewer competing interests for that land because the land itself is so environmentally sensitive. So just to give you some images of some of the communities that I spent a lot of my ethnographic field work in over the course of two years. This is one community in the eastern part of Jaipur in a desertous sort of area along the mountains. For those of you that have been to Jaipur, it's in the sort of the Jawaharlnagar area in the eastern part of the city. This is an image that I collected when the settlement was really first getting up off the ground. It's now a community of about 25,000 people. The late 1970s though, rural migrants are coming in from Radistan predominantly. They are constructing this middle-class neighborhood Jawaharlnagar and it's neighboring neighborhood Rajapark. 30, 40 years later, I go in to do my own ethnographic field work and survey research. The quality of the housing itself has slightly improved but people still lack property rights. They don't have a pata. There's no land title for their home. Access to goods and services is also sort of uneven across the settlements. To give you a sense of the spatial distribution of these neighborhoods across India cities, this is just one state assembly constituency in the Indian city of Bhopal. So each of these purple polygons is Aislam settlements that has a name. They have their own social histories, their own social groups with different casts, people coming from different states, different religions. Politicians, so for instance, this is Bhopal Southwest as they're looking across their constituency, they're very much approaching these settlements as these sort of bounded communities in which sort of the urban poor reside. People that we can trade access to goods and services for votes. So at the center of my explanation for what drives variation across slum settlements is India's slum leaders. Most settlements have informal non-state actors within the neighborhood. They move to the settlements like any other residents but over time they get a name for themselves for being able to get things done in the city. Someone that residents can turn to approach state officials, write petitions and solve problems in the communities. These individuals become Bustinata or slum leaders. They emerge from within settlements. Their authority is totally locally derived. The moment they step outside of the settlement they sort of cease to have that hat as the slum leader. Political parties do not dispatch these individuals to live in settlements. Again, they migrate there like any other residents but because of various qualities, education, charisma, people are attracted to them and they become a slum leader. Slum leaders are absolutely pervasive. I'm across the 111 slum settlements that I sampled for my book. Only three, there was only three settlements in which not a single resident sort of acknowledged that there was a slum leader there. So it's a good bet that if you walk into any squatter settlement in India's cities and you ask, you know, Apkanita, you know, Kaharate, you know, people are gonna take you to one of their local slum leaders and typically these are multifocal leadership environments where there's multiple slum leaders. It's very rare that there's only one. And these are classic political brokers, the term that we would use in political science to describe these actors. They're engaged in upward forms of claim making for residents, helping people gain access to services. And during elections they're expected to translate the support they build in their communities to deliver votes for the political parties that they're affiliated with. So in my book I'm interested in a specific type of, excuse me, a specific type of slum leader, the party worker. These are informal slum leaders who are extended a formal position within a political party, placing them within that larger party organization in the city. And the political parties in India's cities are very much arranged in a similar style to any sort of machine politics party. So if we go back when we look at sort of Tammany Hall politics in New York City during the Gilded Age period or the first half of the 20th century, the spatial distribution and activities of these party organizations, at least in Jaipur and Bhopal and other cities that I visited in North India, are very reminiscent of these machine parties. And so I'm focused on the slum leaders that are embedded within these hierarchical networks. So to give you a concrete example, one of the community leaders that I spent a lot of my time with who's a party worker, Kureshi Bai. He lives in a settlement not far from Jaipur's train station called Mehmatnagar, sort of hardworking colony. He has his own Kiranadukan, his own sort of general store where he sells simple provisions, but his main vocation is slum leadership, Nitha Giddy, within the settlements. So here's a very common image of him, a resident coming to him asking, I need help to get a ration card. He has connections at the district collector's office and will then go on to spend an afternoon helping this resident to get that card. Again, during elections, he is the upadyaksh of the Congress Ward Committee. So he's the vice president of the Ward Congress Committee and is expected to take all of his popularity that he builds up on an everyday basis and then translate that into votes during elections. So I conducted a systematic census of these party workers, these slum leaders with party positions across the 111 settlements in my sample and I enumerated a total of 663 party workers across these 111 settlements. But what I found that was really striking that really goes against the grain of a lot of the research on these type of party organizations is that there was absolutely striking unevenness in the extension of these party networks into different settlements, spatial variation in the networks themselves. So variation in the presence, the density and the partisan distribution of those networks. So in the average settlement in my sample, there's about two party workers per 200 households. That might not sound like a lot, but these are extremely densely populated neighborhoods where 200 households is really within a stone throw of any one particular person's house. That means that there's two people down the street with an explicit connection to a political party organization that can help solve problems. In 20 settlements, there were no party workers whatsoever. There was no one that has those sort of connections to exploits for public goods provision in the settlement. In some communities, there were more than six party workers per 200 households. So sort of intensely competitive and dense networks. There's also a great deal of variation in the partisan balance of those networks. In some settlements, all of the party workers are for the Congress party. In some settlements, they're all for the BJP, but most are some sort of mix in the partisan makeup of the networks. So what I argue in the book is that slums with dense party worker networks are better positioned to demand and secure development from the state than those settlements in which party networks are sparse or absent. And largely drawing from my ethnographic field work, I identify three mechanisms through which this relationship holds between party network density and development. And I'll discuss each in turn. The first is that in settlements with dense party worker networks, where there's a lot of these party workers sort of clustered together, party workers need to really actively compete with one another to maintain their following, their popular following in the community and expand that following. On a really on an everyday basis, they need to demonstrate efficacy and problem solving to maintain their popularity. And this popularity they're following is essential to all of the spoils that come along with slum leadership. So every time the slum leader, goes out and helps somebody to get a ration card or helps you get an electricity connection or a water connection, they're oftentimes charging a small amount of money so that I noticed the going rate for a ration card in Jaipur is around five or 600 rupees. So they're getting these everyday sources of fees for services. Also during elections, parties are paying many of them very handsome sums of money to deliver residents both for rallies and during election day itself. And many of these actors have their own political aspirations. They're not satisfied with just being sort of slum leaders forever. They want to go and particularly get a ticket to fight in municipal elections. And so building that popularity within their settlement is helping their launch their own political careers. But they can only have access to these sort of material goodies that come along with slum leadership if they are active claim makers and more so than the other slum leaders existing in the settlement. So to give you an example from a representative example of a quote from one of the slum leaders sort of talking about him displacing another slum leader because he was more active. Yes, there's an example of one leader who people stopped following after I came to the slum because I knew more than him. I knew everything about the system whether you go to the public health and engineering department, the Jaipur Municipal Corporation, the electricity board, the development authority, the collector it. I knew how to solve all of these problems. Hence that leader became most popular. Another sort of surprising mechanism having to do with accountability was there's some degree of accountability even from above within the party organization itself that these local party workers embedded living in neighborhoods, they are very much the face of the party in a very visible sense. When you go to their house, oftentimes there's literally a placard that has the lotus flower of the BJP or the hand of the Congress. Residents associate them with the parties that they belong to. And so those slum leaders that are transgressing on residents physically or having reputations for not really doing much of anything that can hurt the party brands. And so I outlined many examples in the book of stalled promotion within the party hierarchy or even expulsion from the party. If slum party workers are engaging in sort of forceful behavior or dabhagiri, we're having reputations for not doing much. So this is another sort of quote from the state president of the BJP slum cell, the Kachi Basti Prakost. He says, in a slum I'll have a pramuk, sort of a chief, who will watch the other party workers. Every worker monitors every other worker. And so this is how we get to know what's going on from the top to the bottom. If someone is doing wrong things, we'll try to teach them. If that doesn't work, we kick them out. The second mechanism linking the density of party networks in these communities and outcomes in local developments is mobilizational capacity. When you have this organizational infrastructure of these party networks and communities, when a problem arises, these networks are able to rally residents and bring them onto the streets for contentious political action. So the monsoon rains come and wash away the roads. The electricity line goes down because of stagnant water, because the drains haven't been cleaned out. Mosquitoes are sort of getting out of control. All of the everyday problems that emerge in these settlements, this organizational infrastructure of the party networks provides this sort of template to get people out to protest, to fight against it. So here's one of hundreds of pictures, even separate from the qualitative field worker that I did of party-led protests to advance the material interests of squatter settlements. So this is the Djugi Djopri Prakosht in Bhopal, leading this protest. The third mechanism is political connectivity. So residents in settlements with dense party worker networks have multiple sort of nodes to connect them to officials and politicians. And this kind of connectivity that party workers afford other residents manifests itself in various ways. Part of it is face-to-face. For those of you that have been sort of in a politician's office in India, they're usually sort of sitting around with their cardigarta, you know, their other workers. So they have this sort of everyday sort of face-to-face relations with people that can get things done in the city. It also manifests itself in terms of the use of paperwork. I was able to collect, and I'll discuss this a little bit more in a few minutes, I was able to collect thousands of petitions that slum leaders have kept for themselves over the course of decades on their correspondence with officials and the petitions that they write to claim public goods and services. Those that are party workers, it's on sort of formal party letterhead stationary. You know, it's very clear in conversations with bureaucrats, say a waterworks engineer. If I get something like this with a local BJP politicians name on it from this slum leader, I know I should be taking this much more seriously than this one that's, you know, just on sort of regular paper. This one could potentially come with sort of political sanctions or it might be inviting some degree of protest. And so the sort of the visual aesthetics that comes along with the stationary and the business cards and the network nature of these political party networks is important. So to express the need for these sort of connections, here's another interview with a resident of a slum settlement in Jaipur. The public can't solve these problems themselves. That's why we're dependent on slum leaders. It's a chain link. We're connected to the slum leader who is connected to a bigger leader who is connected to an even bigger leader. When we complain to the slum leaders, they complain to officials on our behalf. That's how our work gets done. Okay, so just to say a little bit more about the data that I collected over those two years of field work that culminated in the book. My theory that I just sort of outlined very much inductively bubbled up from 15 months of ethnographic field work. So I spent 15 months across eight case study communities for in Jaipur and for in Bhopal. And I really went in sort of with a sense that I don't know much about these spaces and I need to learn a lot from the residents. How do they solve problems and not sort of come in with too many assumptions? So, you know, hundreds of interviews with residents, slum leaders, local political elites. The most fascinating source of historical data that I was able to collect, I actually just mentioned. Much to my surprise, totally unanticipated. India's slum leaders obsessively archive all of the paperwork, all of the petitions that they write, the correspondences that are getting back from officials, neighborhood commuting, sort of the neighborhood association meeting notes, old photographs, old political ephemera, like party posters and party manifestos. This became an incredibly rich source of information that paired with interviews and oral histories of everyday residents and the slum leaders, really being able to reconstruct the history of these communities that are really only two, three, four decades old, but you can never rely on sort of going to a formal archive to be able to collect this sort of information. Then with the theoretical framework that I developed in the eight case study settlements, I then wanted to test that theory. How do these political party networks actually influence local development? And so I conducted a survey across these 111 settlements in Jaipur and Bhopal, involving just under sort of 2,600 residents. And then archival work to measure additional covariates that I wanted to include in my statistical models. And yeah, very happy to talk more about the sampling strategy and the use of satellite images in the survey in the Q&A if people are interested. So the main two independent variables sort of embedded in my theory that I really wanted to test in the quantitative work was one party network density, which is very simply the number of party workers per capita settlement. And then also something that I refer to in the book is party representational balance. The distribution, the partisan distribution of those networks in the communities. And so this would be measured between zero and one. A zero would mean all of the party workers in that settlement belong to one party. And a score of one would mean it's a perfect 50-50 split between the BJP and the Congress workers. So in terms of the outcomes that I look at in the book, the percentage of paved roads, the number of streetlights per 1,000 people, the percentage of residents with household access to sewer connections, to water connections, the percentage of residents that acknowledged that there was a Sarkadi-Chikitza camp or a government medical camp within the settlement within the last year, and the percentage of residents acknowledging that the municipal sends trash collectors or sweepers into their settlement to remove solid waste. And of course, there's lots of already existing alternative explanations for community development that was important for me to test alongside my own theory. So ethnic fractionalization, there's a large literature in political economy. Much of what sort of suggests that there should be a negative association between levels of ethnic heterogeneity and outcomes in cooperation in public goods provision. So I measure ethnic fractionalization as in terms of caste, religion, and region of origin. Social capital, sort of the stock of trust and reciprocity in the community. Political variables like electoral competition at the ward and state level, the fragmentation of the partisan preferences of residents, and then controlling for lots of variables that we think would have some degree of influence on the level of development of a community. So settlement age, population, whether or not the community is notified, has it been actually acknowledged to exist by the local or state government? Average monthly household income, average education, the percentage of residents with land titles. So a measure of the strength of property rights. So just to give the very short, sort of bottom line takeaway, focus specifically on the variables of interest, but more than happy to sort of march through the other variables and sort of what my findings were. I find substantial statistical evidence that denser networks of party workers is associated with higher levels of public service provisions, specifically with regards to paved road coverage, streetlight coverage, trash collection, and the provision of government medical camps. I do not find a relationship between these sort of party networks and the provision of sewer and piped water coverage. Again, happy to talk more about that in the Q&A, but I think that very much has to do with the physically networked nature of those goods and services that doesn't matter how politically well organized you are. If the neighborhood next to you does not have a sewer line, you're not gonna get it either. So briefly before I conclude, of course this begs the question, where do these networks come from in the first place? So much of the book looks at the origins of these networks. How do they emerge over time within a community? How does someone become a slum leader? How does a slum leader become a party worker? And why is there this varying level of party worker density across settlements? So I find in my historical research and in terms of quantitative research, two variables that really drive unevenness in the density of these networks. The first is settlement population. So from a party's point of view, in the allocation of these limited party positions, they're more likely to steer these positions to slum leaders in larger settlements because they believe that they're gonna get in a larger electoral bank for their buck. There's some uncertainty about what the following of a slum leader will be, but in a settlement of 20,000 people, a popular slum leader is likely to be able to mobilize more people than one in a settlement of 500 people. Also from the bottom up, and you can really see this, spending time with informal leaders in the settlements, in larger slum settlements, the incentives to engage in Nathagiti, the incentives to engage in these leadership activities is much more intense because there's a larger potential vote bank that you could potentially lead if you become popular. So you get more fees for services, you get more patronage from political parties in a larger settlement, and many slum settlements are basically the exact same size as a municipal ward. And so if you're the popular slum leader in the settlements, you're likely to become a municipal counselor. And so what I argue in the book then is settlement population in large part flows from the idiosyncratic nature of the local urban space. So to give you a quick illustration of that, here's a satellite image of a settlement in northeast Jaipur, Ganesh Putty. This is a mountain range right here. This is an existing middle-class neighborhood, and this is a temple grounds. You can see the migrants initially moving into the settlement, 2005, more shanties. By 2010, this settlement has reached its maximum capacity of households. Now it has 1,500 people. The average settlement size in Jaipur is about 3,200 people. This community is never gonna be a big vote bank slum. It's not gonna command as much attention from parties in how they allocate these network positions because of the idiosyncratic nature of what was built up around them. The second variable that I find that is important in determining the spread of these networks is ethnic diversity. That ethnic diversity tends to increase the concentration of slum leaders because many residents do actually express a preference that in the hypothetical, I would prefer to go to a co-ethnic slum leader so that India's urban slums are really richly and impressively diverse in terms of caste, religion, and region of origin. So what I find is that more diverse settlements become settlements with denser party networks. And so this is a positive pathway through which ethnic diversity influences outcomes in public goods and service provision. So just to quickly conclude, I think there's a couple takeaways from the research in the book. The first is that there is substantial political agency among India's slum residents. And these are low-income voters residing in neighborhoods with weaker apps and formal property rights. These are precisely the types of sort of citizens that we should think would typify sort of the constrained client or the constrained citizen. But I find ample evidence that slum residents define and articulate sort of their claims in the state from the bottom up between the votes. They're not waiting for elections for things to be dangled in front of them. They engage in what Gabby refers to as active forms of citizenship on an everyday basis that extends far beyond voting to things like creating neighborhood associations. To my surprise, and actually one of our audience members has studied this as well, Biju Rao, it's quite common for residents to informally elect their slum leaders or hold deliberative meetings, deciding who is the best among us to lead. For studies of distributed politics, there's often this assumption that political brokers are basically uniformly present across neighborhoods. And what I try to show is the geography of brokerage and by extension the claim making capacity of neighborhoods shapes distributive outcomes. And then just the final ones, patron-client relationships, which is very much sort of these party networks, these machine politics. These are places that we really shouldn't expect a large degree of political accountability. But because of competition among these slum leaders and party workers for a following, I find that it does generate some degree of informal accountability that is meaningful in terms of the sort of the problem-solving efforts exerted by slum leaders. I've already sort of mentioned that last one. So just to sort of quickly conclude on a policy standpoint, much of the language of participation in community-driven developments has now bled into major urban development projects, or major urban development programs in India. So for instance, in Rajiv-Awasyajna, sort of Rajiv's housing scheme, a large urban development projects during the UPA2 government. If you read the literature on sort of community mobilization, they really emphasize participation. They also mention and encourage that municipalities create CBOs, community-based organizations. And they explicitly say that members of these CBOs should not be party workers. So I think one of the takeaways of my book is that these slum leaders and party workers are much more complex than how we typically think of them as sort of local elites that are going to capture the developmental process. Many of them enjoy a considerable amount of legitimacy within their communities. And I think it's potentially a short-sighted to think that you can even circumvent them even if you want to. And at most, maybe even engaging in some sort of co-production because many of them have emerged in ways that are seen as quite legitimate by residents. But yeah, thank you so much. And I look forward to questions and comments on the book. Thank you. So thank you so much, Mellon, for the invitation. And it's a particular honor to be here alongside Adam. It's been really fun in fact to sort of revisit my book project alongside Adam and sort of realize some of the common ground but also some really interesting points of divergence that I hope we'll get to talk about. So I'm going to start out with an image and a quote. This is a woman that I met very early on in my field work in Rajasthan. And you unfortunately can't see it in the picture but what was so striking about her was she had a mobile phone on a chain kind of cord around her neck. And with great glee, she was showing me and some of the people with all the numbers she had saved in her phone. So she had the district collector's phone number. She had all these different block officials' phone numbers. She had the local panchayat or village council phone numbers. And she said, I know the system, I know who to call and they will not ignore my call. And so everyone comes to me with their problems. Even men who think a woman could not do this work know that I can assist them. So this woman, I call her Chandibai. She's on page one of my book. She kind of blew my mind. She kind of gives light to so much of the social science literature on democratic participation. She lives in a rural area, Rajasthan, rural village. She comes from a tribal community. She's functioning a little literate. She's female. She lives in poverty. So all these indicators sort of indicate that this is not the type of citizen that the broader literature on democratic participation suggests should be this kind of active demand maker, kind of actively engaging government at these very frontline levels. And so I wondered, does she just defy the odds? Is she just unusual? And in fact, she was kind of unusual. And she's a particularly punchy kind of person. But she, in fact, wasn't that unusual at all in her political behavior. As I dug more into my work, I realized that there were many, many, many instances of people actively engaging the state on a day to day, everyday basis to try to make claims on their local governments for rights, entitlements, and service provision, something in the book that I call Active Citizenship. And I realized that this is something we just don't know that much about. It's kind of a black box. It happens between and beyond elections. India, the world's largest electoral democracy. But we don't know too much about what happens when elections are over and what happens in between. And so this motivated the book. I wanted to ask three questions. First of all, just a descriptive question. What's happening between and beyond elections? So how is it that ordinary citizens are making claims on the state for social welfare? What are they actually doing? What are the actual channels and practices being employed? Secondly, sort of stemming from this first descriptive question is a puzzle, an empirical puzzle. There's a lot of variation. Some people are actively engaging and making claims on the state for services. Some people are not doing that at all. And why? And when this variation cuts across a lot of the usual suspects that we've considered, it can't be explained entirely by caste, as Millen indicated in the beginning. It can't entirely be explained away by gender or by socioeconomic status or by what kind of village you live in. And so there was a really puzzling variation to be explained, why some people are more actively engaging the state than others. And third, a kind of more theoretical set of questions is, well, why does this matter? Why does this matter for citizenship practice, for participation, for how we think about democratic practice between and beyond electoral politics? So I tackle those questions in Rajasthan. And I spent about 18 months in four different districts, Kota, Ajmer, Jodhpur, and Ulaipur, which are very different districts in terms of their geography, their level of development, their colonial histories, their caste and tribal compositions. And during that time, I carried out with myself, personally, and a small team of research assistants about 500 interviews in and around these villages. And in addition, a survey, a citizen survey of 2,210 respondents across about 100 villages spread out over these four districts. So that's the data broadly that I'll be drawing on. I want to point to just a few things here. This is the descriptive how question. What are people actually doing? So the first thing is a lot. So in the survey, I have a whole bunch of metrics to sort of determine whether or not people are active claim-makers, whether they are across a variety of different goods and services through different channels, both direct, kind of a direct face-to-face contact with an official or a politician, or through mediated channels through the kinds of political brokers that Adam just described, or through a whole range of different mediating associations at the village level, whether or not individuals report engaging in claim-making activity. And the fundamental finding is, yes, lots, lots of it. More than three quarters of my sample report that they themselves are engaging in this kind of behavior. There's some interesting things to pull out from here very briefly without getting too far into the weeds. The first one is the grumpunchiet, which is the local elected council. And this is far and above the first port of call. It's head and shoulders above any other channel. And when you think about the fact that these panchayats, these village councils, were instituted following constitutional amendments in 1992, 1993. They have not that long of a history, and yet they've become rapidly, very deeply institutionalized to the point where they've really emerged at the forefront of this kind of local arena for claim-making. The second interesting thing is that political parties pale by comparison. Far fewer people doing the thing that you would expect if this is the patronage democracy, if this is partisanship. Far fewer people directly engaging with political parties, party workers, politicians. And in direct contrast to what Adam finds in the urban setting, if you can see here at the bottom, a relatively small number of people who are engaging with fixers or brokers or these sort of intermediary cast of characters that Adam just so wonderfully described for us in the urban setting. They're not absent in the rural setting, but there's not that much of that going on. So a pretty different landscape. Now the interesting thing here though is that these are not mutually exclusive. People are combining all these strategies into these sort of diverse repertoires of action. So I'm interested in a couple of things. I'm interested in do people make claims? Yes or no, kind of the incidence of claim-making. I'm interested in which of these strategies they employ, and I'm interested in how many strategies, kind of what is the breadth of that repertoire. And what I find is that a lot of the things that we typically, at least in our limited political science world, the things that we're trained to look at, don't give us that much traction. So for example, indicators of socioeconomic status, for example, land ownership, do not explain really anything in terms of how likely an individual is to engage in this kind of claim-making behavior. Those with the least land and those with the most land are indistinguishable in terms of the probability or the likelihood that they'll engage in claim-making. Likewise, caste. Members of the scheduled tribe and scheduled cast and members of the so-called upper cast are, again, indistinguishable in the likelihood of engaging in claim-making. This doesn't by any stretch of the imagination mean that these features simply disappear. They're still there. We find that it influences how people engage the state, not if they engage the state, but how they engage the state. So finding that the repertoire, the breadth of strategies being employed are much narrower, significantly narrower, for those with less land and those from the lower cast and tribes. Unsurprisingly, to anyone who spent any time in rural Rajasthan, there is a very large gender gap. Women are less likely to engage in claim-making and do so through a narrower range of strategies than men. This is completely unsurprising. But to me, the surprising thing was, despite that gap, there are still really active claim-makers. 60% of women in my survey reporting that they personally are engaging in this kind of activity. So if past socioeconomic status, gender, doesn't get us far enough if they can't explain enough of this interesting variation that I want to account for, then what can explain it? In the book, I argue that claim-making practice, both whether individuals engage the state, how they engage the state, the breadth of strategies that they're employing, is both state produced and socially induced. So this means that we learn about the state. We learn about what's being provided. We learn about service provision. We learn about strategies for contacting and yelling at local officials. We learn that through lived experience, through encounters with government actors and agencies, and through the narrated accounts of other people. So the argument, therefore, has two parts. The first part is from the top down that citizens are responding to what I call the terrain of the state. This means, quite simply, the reach, the visibility, the breadth of what ordinary people see the state doing in their lives all around them, water pumps, schools, pave roads, school teachers, and the visibility and the local reach of these services informing the landscape upon which people decide whether and how and when to engage in claim-making behavior. And so what I end up arguing, and I'll dig into this in just a moment, is that you need a combination of both breadth. You need to be able to see and kind of smell and feel the state all around you providing services, but also unevenness, a degree of inequality. And this provokes both expectations. I can see a functioning water pump over there, but also grievances when the state doesn't provide. And it's its combination of expectation and grievance, of breadth and of evenness that sets the stage for claim-making. That's the top down story. The bottom up story is that certain individuals are positioned to learn more about the state than others. And this is because of their social and spatial mobility. It's about the degree to which they're crossing or traversing boundaries of village, of neighborhood, of caste, of occupation, of gender. And those individuals who are able to cross those boundaries of community and locality are going to encounter the state in more spaces and more forms, hear more narratives of other people about successful or unsuccessful claim-making strategies, and so build up these repertoires of knowledge that they can then put into action in making claims on the state, so these two pieces. Let me illustrate it with a couple quotes just to make it a little more intuitive. So the first part of the argument is this top down one about the terrain of the state conditioning and setting the stage for claim-making behavior. So this is a quote from a schedule cast man in Udaipur who says, and this is very typical of a lot of encounters and interviews, you would have to be blind not to see. There are so many schemes, government programs. Over there, they have a paved road. The panchayah brought water connections to every house. Where's our road? Where's our water? So this sense of kind of comparative grievance. I can see other people getting stuff. Where's mine, right? The second part of the argument, the bottom up part, which is about social and spatial exposure outside your immediate community and locality, and the resources and information and knowledge that that provides for people to engage in claim-making is illustrated in this quote from a schedule cast woman, again in Udaipur in Rajasthan. And she says, I move about and meet people. I talk to people on the way in the fields. And this way come to learn about who's good, who will help you. So when someone will say, oh, so and so. He's jagruk, aware. He can get things done. And so when the water pump was broken, I knew where to turn. So it's her mobility, kind of moving out of the home, into the workplace, into the fields as an agricultural laborer that sort of exposed her to this knowledge of a claim-making strategy of who she might turn to. Let me dig into each of these explanations just a little bit more and provide some evidence for them. But first, on the institutional terrain of the state, I want you just to imagine for a moment a world where there are relatively abundant resources. You turn on the tap and clean water, drinking water just comes out. There's relatively rule-bound, programmatic delivery of goods and services. So we're kind of up here in this quadrant, in which case, all this claim-making stuff, it's really not that necessary. You don't need to do it. Services are just provided when you need them. Imagine, though, that we're over on the other side of this table, and you have either very, very scarce resources or very predatory state actors. In which case, claim-making may not seem that worthwhile, right? I mean, you can make claims in demand so you're blue in the face, but if there aren't many resources to be had or your government is absolutely unresponsive, what's the point? Claim-making is most likely, I argue, when you exist down here in this quadrant, right? This combination of breadth, visible service provision, but unevenness, not everybody's benefiting. And this is what's happening in Rajasthan. So let me show you with a few images. First, breadth. This is a national trend. It's replicated in the Rajasthani case. An absolute ground shift in social spending in relative terms, still very low, still inadequate, but in relative terms, a ground shift in social spending starting in the late 1980s into the 1990s and onwards. In large part through programs like this one, the National Rural Employment Guarantee providing income support to rural laborers, right? So this shock, this influx of new programs, new schemes, new resources, the state, quite simply, is just becoming more visible in rural villages because of these new patterns of social spending. Secondly and critically, it's local. A lot of this is being channeled through the Gram Panchayats, the local elected councils. And so this is very striking. There has been in a relatively short period of time an institutionalization of these Panchayats. In the beginning, the Panchayats were kind of like paper tiger institutions, right? Just sort of not that useful, corrupt, captured. They're still often corrupt and captured, right? But there's this real change in how people are interacting with the Panchayat. Anurud Krishna, political scientist at Duke, did some research in the same state in Rajasthan right after the first round of Panchayat elections in the late 1990s and found that almost nobody thought that the Panchayat was a useful place to go if you had to solve a problem, like 18% of a sample, really small fraction. And I find in the data that I showed you a couple of minutes ago, that almost two thirds of my sample report turning to the same institution, right? So there's a real profound shift in the centrality of the Panchayat to people's lives. Here's the unevenness part. This is what an NGO staff member in one of my interviews called Yellow Paint Promises. And what he's referring to is the fact that there's this kind of standard issue Yellow Paint that you find on almost any government office. So this is a Panchayat, a local council building, plastered with this Yellow Paint, but also plastered with these billboards that lists schemes, programs, beneficiaries. So you can literally see who's getting what. You're really visibly aware of all these programs. And so he said in this great quote, there's a whiff of paint in the air. The walls are dripping with Yellow Paint Promises, but what this indicates, he said it kind of wryly, what it indicates is promises that are largely unfulfilled for many people, right? So yes, there are more resources, but not everyone is benefiting and the beneficiaries are not evenly spread across space. So what this suggests is there's more stuff to be had. People are aware of it. And this provokes the sense of kind of grievance that sets the stage for claim-making. Not everybody's equally aware. This is the second part of the argument, right? These networks of exposure, social and spatial exposure that influence how people think about their position vis-a-vis the state. And I'm gonna illustrate this quickly, excuse me, with an example of two Hamlets. These are two Hamlets. They are tribal communities that are set sort of at a small distance a few kilometers away from the center of their villages. The two villages are located in the same administrative block in the same district. They're about five kilometers apart in distance. Same tribe, the Bielic tribe. The men in these communities are all employed under the same government scheme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. And so in these kind of structural terms, right, tribe, income, source of employment, geography, administration, they're very, very similar. And you can see that they're expressing very different stances towards the state. So in this first community, what I call Hamlet K, it's this very despondent articulation of their relationship to the state. Why waste your breath? The state does nothing for us. They come at elections, they eat the votes, then they go away again and we're forgotten. And then just five kilometers away, again, structurally very, very similar. We ask and ask, we went every which way telling people about our need. This is a Rajasthan drought pro and everyone's talking about water. So in both of these cases, these are claims about water provision. This is how work gets done by raising the issue to anyone who has an ear, right? So these very different articulations of their relationship to the state and about what they might do when faced with a problem. And what I find sort of digging into this is despite all their similarities, there are some key differences. And these key differences are related to the social and spatial exposure of those residents. So Hamlet K, the really despondent place, is a profoundly isolated place, right? It's a place where you have to travel by foot, the roads are simply washed away. It's socially isolated, there are no kind of familial or kinship ties to the main village and it's economically isolated. So even though men are employed in this work fair program, the government program, they're employed building boundary walls in private agricultural fields. In contrast, Hamlet B, the one that had the sort of more active, we go everywhere and talk to everyone and make our claims heard sort of stance, right? This is a place that's marked by mobility and connectivity. So again, it's a dirt road, sometimes gets washed away in the rainy season, but you can take small vehicles and in fact, someone has started a small motorcycle taxi service to get back and forth out of this, out of this small Hamlet. There are members of the same tribe living in the main village, so they have familial and kinship ties to the main village. And in addition, I think most interestingly, their employment on the government work fair program under Norega is on worksites that are on the main highway. So they're out kind of in the thick of things seeing people going by next to a marketplace and also in the main village. And in addition, a number of men in the village are employed in masonry and construction jobs that take them out of the village and into nearby towns, right? So this much deeper sense of connectivity and movement. And this in turn is expressed in these really different aspirations, right? So talking about sort of God willing, what can we do? We survive in the first more despondent, disconnected Hamlet and secondly, in the more connected and more active Hamlet, so saying things about the sort of knowledge of rights and entitlements. So we know our rights, we know these programs, it's a matter of voice. Okay, so I'm gonna lay this out in my last couple of minutes, just a little bit more schematically. This is the argument that I make in the book and it's the argument that I then test using statistical data from my citizen survey. And what I argue is that these networks of exposure to the state are going to be reflected in differences in whether citizens engage in claim making and how they do it, the breadth of the claim making repertoire. And the mechanisms here, sort of how this works is through developing greater aspirations for service provision and entitlements and greater capabilities, information, knowledge, know how access linkages. And that this in turn is driven by social and spatial boundaries. Now in some places these boundaries of caste, of village, of gender, of occupation are very, very rigid. It's hard to move outside them. And what I argue is that where rigid exposure is narrower, aspirations and capabilities become more constrained and the likelihood of claim making and the breadth of claim making activity is also more limited. And quite the opposite is true where those boundaries are more porous, where people are able to cross those boundaries, you get broader exposure, more expansive aspirations and capabilities and a greater likelihood and a greater breadth of claim making activity. I have like one minute left so I'll show you very quickly what I actually measure. So I have a bunch of indicators of different kinds of drivers of exposure, whether you have social relationships with people and other neighborhoods within your own village, whether you take place in kind of cultural activities that cross caste boundaries, whether you work in a setting that's mixed caste and whether you migrate beyond the village, which in this case it's a very circular sense of migration that's sort of going out from the village for a period of time and coming back to the village again. And what I find is that this is indeed associated, strongly correlated, significantly correlated with a greater likelihood of claim making and a broader claim making repertoire and in the absence of these indicators of exposure both individually but also as an index, I find that it's associated with a lower likelihood of claim making and a narrower claim making repertoire. In the Q&A for the numbers people in the room, I would be happy to walk through kind of what this looks like in terms of the models employed and the size of the effects, but what you can basically see here are the sort of the greater likelihood of claim making associated with these different indicators of exposure and a very similar story, those different indicators of exposure associated with a greater breadth of claim making repertoire. So what does that mean at the end of the day? If I can leave you with two sentences, what I think are sort of the two broader substantive takeaways. Greater exposure helps citizens learn about the state, but it matters what they're learning. And so the state is playing this fundamental role. A more responsive state can activate citizenship practice. I think these are the sort of broader lessons that we can take away. Some open questions about both the material and political consequences of all of this. I show in the book that there's a significant, a small but significant correlation between all this kind of making activity and the actual goods and services that people get. It's a small association because claim service provision is enormously complicated and there are many other factors that come into play. And I also find that claim making moves in tandem with other kinds of political activity, with campaigning, with protesting, with attending local deliberative meetings, the Gram Sabha. So I'll leave you all with the open question that I end my book with because I really don't know the answer. It's an untold, unfinished story, right? Is this a democratic success story? Right, on the one hand, active citizenship. This might be a sign of a robust local democracy. On the other hand, an unprogrammatic, uneven and sometimes unresponsive state, making all these high levels of claim making necessary in the first place. So what are the long-term consequences of this? Will citizens continue to do it? At a certain point, will citizens opt out? These are the sort of long-term unfinished story questions that we need to keep our eyes on. I have a lot of questions, but I'll just open it up. There are a few mics going around. So if you just raise your hand and just tell us who you are, where you're from, just keep your questions really short if possible. There's two here on the front, Tom, and then we'll start. Tom Timberg, consultant. Very exciting studies. And as usual, the question I want to ask is sort of about the next book that you will write based on this, which is the thing. They've just finished one and you already have one. Right, yeah. There is, the basic is that we know that there's an enormous variance in social performance between villages, between states. Everything works in some. Nothing works in another. And you're dealing with part of the reason that this is the case. However, and it's also in the case, anybody who's been living for a period will know that there is a village that was great and suddenly everybody in the village is going to a blue school, the irrigation is working and so on and so forth. And then 20 years later, you go back and all of this has fallen apart. So the first question is, have you looked a little bit about how sustainable these factors are? And the second issue is, of course, and this is the limitation of a study of certain sample areas, it's a big country. There are movements right now. There are all kinds of people demonstrating in the streets about issues you don't get into. To what extent do these have influence? Certainly the independence movement and Gandhianism left a considerable impact, but I think there have been other movements. So those two questions of time and the political environment context. Anit Mukherjee from Scientific Global Development. First of all, fascinating. I hope you write many books, not two. So please have a pipeline ready. Question to Gabrielle specifically. I'm very curious as to how you defined claim-making, right? And also Adam, there was a discussion where Arvind Subramaniam had come to CGD maybe two weeks ago and he said that there is over the last five years something interesting has happened in the delivery of these kind of public goods and services. The claim-making is much more on the public side, like water and roads. The private claim-making, like applying for a ration card or a gas connection, has kind of been taken away by much more of a data-driven social economic cost-senses-based kind of approach, where and that the government this time, I mean, it has started years ago, but the private part of that claim-making is now kind of out of the hands and the government seems to have been doing well in that, like delivering gas connections and electricity and things like that. So how do you see this dichotomy in the claim-making itself between the two sides? And please, I know less about the urban side. The second point, which I was very curious was the first image of the lady that you mentioned. I work a little bit on digital governance. And that, to me, was a really good indicator of what has changed over the last 10 years, the lady can directly call whoever, district collector or whatever. Does that lessen the distance between the claimant and the state or does it increase the power of the panchayat and the power of an intermediary given that the claimant can directly call somebody and expects an answer back? Adam, why don't you, you're continuing to go back from your current work to the same places you went to, do you see sustainability? Yeah, thank you so much for that fascinating question. I think there's a real tension in this question around sustainability. Much of my book focuses on outcomes that are obviously immensely important. You want paved roads, you want piped water, you want electricity. One of the things that is sort of amazing, the politicians are actually quite frank in saying is the last thing that they're sort of oftentimes willing to give is property rights because that will snap the dependency relationship. So I would have MLAs and word counselors sort of just come right out and say, yeah, give them jalao, give them pakarasta, but giving them a land title, they're not gonna come out and vote. So why would I do that? So there's issues of sustainability in terms of what is this all mounting to in the absence of defined formal property rights. The other big question is, many of these communities are settled on extremely sensitive lands, on things like riverbeds, as I mentioned in my presentation. And so sort of geographically, the sustainability is called in a question. Starting with JN and URM in the mid 2000s up through Jiva Waseojin and Amrut, you can see the sort of evolution in approaches to the provision of property rights. Should we resettle slum dwellers in situ and build new apartment buildings right there? Do we resettle them on the outskirts of cities? So it's been fascinating, continuing to go back to Bhopal and Jaipur over the last decade at this point and seeing a lot of these resettlement programs, which really seem to have fallen flat. They're extremely disruptive to the formation of social networks in these communities when you're sort of having these lotteries and sending people in the outskirts of town. Many of the resettlements sort of communities in the outskirts of town. So for instance, a couple of years ago, I was in Bhopal during the monsoon rains and one of the apartment buildings collapsed during the rain. Thank God nobody had moved in yet. So people are sort of reasonably so skeptical about what resettlement is going to look like and so they don't want to participate in it. So all this is where I bound up in this question of sustainability and what that would mean. So I mean, another way of phrasing your first point is that basically by its systemic fixes and they take themselves out of the equation. Yeah, and you can see when you trace public spending in these communities, you'll see decentralization happens. The first elections in Jaipur and Bhopal in 1994, roads will come to some settlements. Then five years later, the ones with roads, maybe we'll get some streetlights and ones without roads. It's this piecemeal sort of thing back and forth. So I think getting to Gabby's sort of final question around thinking about is this a success story or not? Obviously all of these things are immensely important but the deeper sort of structural factors that are reproducing these inequalities and intensifying in India cities, I think it's quite worrisome. So Gabby, on its points about the kind of public or private goods and the technology and the role. Yeah, no, these are great questions. Thank you so much for that. So quickly on the definition of claim-making. So what I presented here is a kind of an aggregate of all kinds of claim-making for both in the book, what I call sort of collective goods and selective goods. In the book, I disaggregate those. I find in keeping with your point that more claim-making is around collective infrastructure and collective service provision. That said, the broad patterns persist regardless of if it's collective or selective. So kind of cutting things up that way did not fundamentally alter the story. That said, I think something has shifted since the time of this research. So the speed of academic publishing. So the research is 10 years old. And in those 10 years, you've seen this rise in digital governance. I'm not sure I fully share your optimism. I think there's indicators of success in some areas. I think your question's a really great one. Does this shorten the distance, the ability to make an online complaint or send a WhatsApp? Does this shorten the distance between citizens and the state? Maybe. Or maybe it makes the state more faceless. And actually sort of erodes some of that actual kind of human interaction, which is, in Adam's story, a sort of very key that human interaction is very, very key. So I think the jury's out. So probably I'd have to write another book. There's some questions living on this side. Hey, I'm Saskia Brechtemacher. I'm a fellow here in the Democracy Program. Thank you both for your presentations. Really interesting. My questions were more about your research. So first, and this goes to what you were talking about. I was curious if any of the Islam leaders you were talking to were women. And if so, did that shape how effective they were? Or who would come to them with their claims? Whether there were any sort of gender differences worth noting? And then the second thing, similarly, did you notice a similar positive feedback cycle where that you found in your research that when the parties or the state would be responsive, then that people would demand more. And it would be sort of a cycle over time of greater mobilization and greater responsiveness. Or was that not really the case? I had two questions. I was wondering if WhatsApp and these digital technologies, I know you said that your research happened a little while ago, but I'm wondering if that's shaping citizen expectations because you don't even need to see these other communities. You might just see a photo of street lights or something like that. Does that shape citizen expectations? And then the second thing, if not quantitatively, could you qualitatively give some color to how religion shapes these practices? I know that there's a lot of talk on religious division detracting from development in India right now, and I want to see if you saw those patterns. Come back to you then, Brad, Nick. So Adam, slum leaders, the role of women. Yeah, thank you so much for that question. And actually, in my answer to that, I'll be drawing on some of the collaborative work that I've been doing with the co-author Tarik Tachal where across these exact same 111 settlements, we surveyed 630 of these slum leaders that we think is arguably representative. About 12% were women. I mean, I can tell you from my ethnographic fieldwork, a lot of the most firebrand slum leaders were women. Interestingly, they're disproportionately widows, women that go into slum leadership. And our hunch of that is this is a means of providing for their family, the sources of fees and patronage. But one thing that I think through when I'm thinking about who is identified as a slum leader, if you use the term, say, busting it to a slum leader, I think oftentimes residents are more likely to name a male figure, even if there are many women in the communities that are doing a lot of these problem-solving activities that aren't being identified as a slum leader. So I actually think that number is probably systematically under-reported. In many of my case studies, there are women that would take on these leadership roles and collectively act, oftentimes on issues of water, and sanitation, and education. But again, if you go in and you're sitting at the chai shop and asking people, who's the native here? They oftentimes would not be named. But if you spend time in the community, you notice that many of the women are taking up the mantle of slum leader, although they're not being acknowledged as such. So this is one of the projects that I'm really hoping to launch into. To be able to better identify who the problem solvers are and cast a net wider, it escapes some of these discursive traps of how you describe who's doing what. Yeah, I think that most certainly was happening. One of the fascinating things about some of those petitions that I showed you images of was these petitions make their rounds in different government bureaucracies. And oftentimes, when they would ultimately get back to the slum leader and they would show them to me, in the margins, you would see the Waterworks engineer and then this officer at the municipal building making these notes in the margins. And so you can see these cycles happening where if there is responsiveness, there's gonna be more of a flurry of petitioning going on. Our claims are actually being heard. And so this is a particularly sort of fortuitous time for us to be trying to advance our material interests. David, for you, I know you kind of addressed the digital question, but I wonder if other work that you're doing now, you see... Yeah, so I am doing some work now sort of speaking to your question that's looking at citizen journalism using video technology and using things like WhatsApp to sort of circulate videos and things like that. So hopefully I'll, you know, and new research have more to say about that soon, but I do have sort of maybe a cautionary note on this, sort of thinking about some of the work of the sociologist Mark Granavetter, sort of how we consume information, right? And one of the things Granavetter argues, and I think it's very true, is that we consume information and believe it when it's socially embedded. So in this research, and WhatsApp was not around, right? But in this research, you know, someone could read something in a newspaper about roads being built here or there or a new school here or there, and it's just a piece of information. You kind of read it and it, yeah, there's a school and it kind of goes in one ear and out the other. But if you personally know someone or you've actually been there and you see it with your own eyes or you hear this kind of narrated account, so I think that information in and of itself is important and WhatsApp and video kind of provides that, but what's going on in the story that I'm telling here is something about kind of the social embeddedness of that information that people get through these networks of exposure. And I think that's something that's a little bit thicker than what can be provided through WhatsApp. Yeah, absolutely. You especially looked at the diversity question and how that impacted. Absolutely, and I think this, yeah, that's a really, really fascinating question. Both of the cities that I focus on, Jaipur and Bhopal experience intense Hindu-Muslim riots, particularly in the early 1990s. And so there's this larger sort of, you know, discourse around, you know, discord between these two groups in the cities. However, in the slum settlements themselves that I was studying, the average one was actually quite diverse in terms of religion. So, you know, following back on a measure called the fractionalization score, there was a 17% chance in the average settlement in my sample that if you randomly picked two people, they would have been from a different religion. So most settlements do have Hindus and Muslims sort of splitting side by side. And yeah, I mean, you know, going back to, you know, how interesting this question is and some of the work that I'm doing with my current co-author, it's extremely common for Hindus to go to Muslim slum leaders, for Muslim residents to go to Hindu slum leaders. Just under a quarter of our sampled Muslim slum leaders out of these 630 slum leaders that we sampled, were party workers for the BJP. And so I think a lot of the assumptions that I sort of went in, how this was gonna be sort of very rigidly fixed along either religious lines or lines of caste or lines of the state that people were coming from. And I think a lot of the explanation of this is, you know, these settlements are very new. There's an incredible amount of uncertainty and need and issues of ethnicity and religion oftentimes take a backseat to the compulsions of solving problems. I think one of the interesting questions that's out there that I don't tackle is there is a significant amount of variation in support for the BJP amongst Muslims. Fine in some states including the drought back more than 20% of the Muslim population. So what accounts for that? I think it's a question out there for the taking. Lady here in the blue, can you just wait for the mic? Hi, I'm Tanvi Nakpal, I'm at SICE next door and I work specifically, Adam, I've heard you make presentations about your research over two years and then two years later and three years later. Hopefully it's getting better. Yes, it is. And my question's about collective claims, but that can be divided up. So for instance, you make a collective claim for water infrastructure, but what you really want is a tap in your house, right? So did you find, Adam, that instead of those collective claims can't be met because you can't bring a pipe in, but then you bring in water trucks? So that you satisfy the collective claim, but at the same time, you don't actually have to provide the collective good. That's on one side. And secondly, given the huge push for Swachparat and this huge toilet building campaign that's going on, obviously that collective claim for water just becomes much more loud and clear and something that's understood. And did you find that there were any sort of changes to water provision? And I'm asking just because I work on water and sanitation, so I'm a bit obsessive. This gentleman here, and then we'll come back to this side. Hi, I'm Akshay Valya. Thank you for your great talk. So a couple of questions like you mentioned basically about like particular costs or class groups have different claims. So I was wondering that the claims that they make maybe then are differing because of the particular circumstances of the cases that you were considering, whether like if they have like particular political parties catering to them, then those might differ like especially the cases in like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are the few states in India where there are only basically two political parties competing for what's there compared to other states. And my other question was like, so you mentioned like about these claims are being made for like goods from like schemes and policies that have already been enacted. But how strong is like the political network described here to push for like broader political goals which haven't been enacted yet but are like an aspiration for people. And on the flip side, like we had like for the general election last year, like the Congress party, one of its main things on his platform was this right to healthcare act which wanted to expand on a public national healthcare system, which based on reports, it didn't seem to get promoted that much. And that was like one of the reasons the Congress party was not able to be successful. So how would you say like the impact of these national high level plans getting promoted by the local activists of the party in the neighborhoods you studied like how does that work? And what are the problems in getting the message down to the grassroots? Thank you. Yeah, I love that question about sort of petitioning for collective goods. I mean, particularly in the context in which I was studying shared infrastructure and shared services was a front and center ambition and aim for residents. And so I spent part of the book looking at the contours of that claim making. And I find predominantly claims for public goods are done in terms of a group. You'll get the common thing that you'll see is a group of residents, 15, 20, 25 people alongside their slum leader going to the particular office or politician to ask for that. And I would start asking people sort of, why aren't you just sending one person? Why are 25 people going? And I would always get the response, we need to show Lokshakti. We need to show people power. And even if it's 20 people, this is gonna sort of remind the bureaucrat or politician in front of us that we are a group of voters that can sort of cause greater disruptions if you don't sort of follow through. So yeah, the focus on collective goods is sort of very, very front and center. Water particularly in Jaipur is always at the center of problem solving. Many of the settlements rely on those truck fed water tanks and this is an ongoing crisis in a lot of these settlements. My colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, Alison Post is doing really fascinating work on water intermittency. You have these scenes of usually women and children sitting around, is the water truck gonna come at 9 a.m.? Is it gonna come at 2 p.m.? Might it not come at all today? And you can just imagine the incredible sort of detrimental effects that has on time use. So yeah, I think water is very at the center of a lot of these claims, much of which are being articulated by groups under and being spearheaded by these informal slum leaders that I described. And do you think it's, because of the second part of the question, increasing water sources? I mean, when you come back, do you see any changes? I mean, thinking, that's a great question. I mean, thinking back to when I sort of really started the pulmonary work till this until about this, even this past year, I think even more than that, it's just the rapidly depleting water table in Jaipur, way more than any of these schemes. Tube wells, bore wells, that sort of spring up out of the ground in a lot of these communities, they're increasingly just hitting sort of dry rock beds underneath. And so it's a immensely pressing crisis that I think sort of dwarfs sort of the demands of a central scheme. One clarification, and we talked about this before, the session that cast may not necessarily determine whether you make a claim or not. So a delet is just as likely as a good juror or whatever, whatever, but it does in fact impact what kinds of claims you make, is that fair assessment? So it impacts the claim making channels, the practices, right? So are you going to go through direct engagement with someone from the panchayat? Are you going to turn to a political party or a party worker? Are you going to turn to some kind of intermediary? And so what I do find is that that cast does play a role in determining the kinds of strategies and speaking to this question of political parties, they're strikingly absent in the story in the rural setting. This is a big divergence from Adam's work in the urban setting. And it speaks I think to the sort of something that's long been observed about Indian politics, which is that political parties are not very rooted in the rural sector. And so in my survey, people would report, when's the last time you saw a party worker? And this was an election year and they'd reported like on average once in the year and this was an election year, right? So this doesn't mean that parties aren't there. They're active largely through the panchayat. The panchayats are nominally nonpartisan in Rajasthan. They're not running on party platforms. They do have informal party affiliations. Everybody knows it. So parties are still there, but the panchayat and the speaks to that institutionalization of the panchayat is sort of playing that gatekeeper role to the party. So the party's sort of a little bit more removed. In particular, you asked about caste, right? You don't see the same dynamics that Adam sees in the rural sector, sorry, in the urban sector, where particular parties are coming and trying to cater to particular caste communities in the rural setting. It's just too remote and removed. And again, that might become mediated through the panchayat, but not through parties in particular. What's interesting to what you just said, Gabby, your observation is that it's kind of contrary to the conventional wisdom, which is all polished and cared about as rural voters and why they dispense free electricity, free water to farmers, spend all this time on MSPs and subsidies. But in fact, on the ground, political parties don't actually seem that well-rooted. Right, so parties care a lot about the votes. They'll show up at election time, right? But think about recent research that's shown how much of the MLA labs, the local area development schemes, are left on the table and are actually unspent, right? So this is a chance, if politicians really cared about trying to attract rural votes through kind of longer term infrastructural spending that goes beyond just the election season, they would be spending more of these local area development funds, which are often just left on the table. Just a suggestion. Thank you, my name is Prem Garga, used to be at the World Bank for many years and then more recently have been associated with a local Washington-based organization, India Development and Relief Fund, which works through local NGOs in helping improve the delivery of public services. Only on a voluntary basis. You know, in both of those presentations, an excellent presentation, I think, I had your insights. But one thing I did not hear mentioned in either of the two presentations, the role of the CSOs in this, political parties are fine, but what about maybe even non-resident CSOs coming to those slums and trying to either through awareness creation or through awareness, as well as empowerment of how to access their rights. Are they playing any, in your empirical findings, do you find anything that CSOs are making a contribution in helping the poor navigate on how to get those services or really their role is overblown, even though there are one paper, two million local CSOs, but they really don't do much. So what was your finding empirically would be interesting to hear. Lady in red, and then I think, let's cut it off so you guys have enough time and we end on time. Okay, thank you, Cinnamon, Dorn Sif. I'm also right next door at SICE. And this is a question for Gabby. I was following up on the point that you made about the gender gap and about the repertoire of claims. And you said that women were particularly active but that the repertoire was relatively more limited. But I'm wondering were the kinds of claims that they made, the strategies, did you find that mirrored in the general population of claims that were made by both men and women? And what were they? Thank you. And do you want to take the Civil Society organization point back to her? Yeah, that's a really important question. NGOs were conspicuously absent in Jaipur and Bhopal. And I came in anticipating that they were going to be very visible. You had the sort of fleeting NGO that would come in and do sort of a reading program. But embedded NGOs sort of facilitating, claim-making, engaging in service provision themselves was really absent. The only one, and I don't really consider this an NGO in sort of the sense that I imagine your question was about Sava Barthi was all over the place. One of the sort of Song Parivar, BJP, sort of social service units. But in terms of sort of your conventional NGO, they were really absent. And I think if I had done my field work in Delhi or Mumbai, I think they would have been more apparent, at least from what I gleaned from the literature. But one of the reasons why I sort of steered away from one of these larger sort of mega cities in India is most people living in some settlements do not live in Delhi or Mumbai or Bengal or Chennai. They're living in tier two cities that are often, of course, enormous themselves in this huge constellation of smaller towns that have much lower levels of state capacity and much lower levels of sort of civil society organization that's going on that would provide these sort of services for the urban poor. Yeah, sure. And I'll just say a quick word on NGOs too, because also in the rural story, they're largely absent as well. And so I think it's not an accident that you didn't hear talk of CSOs or NGOs much in either presentation. My entry point was a large rural NGO, Sevamandir based in Udaipur in Rajasthan, obviously doing excellent work and really active, but when you think just about these vast terrains of geography, very, very thinly spread. And so what I did find, about 4% of my sample had any knowledge of an active NGO in their area. Where an NGO was present, they were crucial. They were a really important channel of claim making, but they just weren't that present. They're just very, very thinly spread. The gender gap is really interesting. By and large, the one port of call for women, and this is something across the board was again the Gram Panchayat. So this again, the Gram Panchayat, the local elected council, is the one channel claim making that everybody does. And so women are part of that mix. And I think there's a story here about gender reservations in the Panchayat, but there are 50% of seats reserved for women. This is a very captured enterprise. I can't count the number of a sadhpant pati that I met, the husband of the elected counselor. Halfway through an interview, I would realize, wait, you're not actually elected counselor, you're her husband, right? So it's a very captured enterprise, but it still really matters because over time, and we're talking 15, 20 years now, you've had cycles and cycles of elections where women have been brought into the public sphere at first as puppets and very nominally, but over time that has deepened. Even in a state like Rajasthan, I think Viji Rao has done some work in South India where these dynamics are quite different. North India is a different story, but even in the North, right, you see this deepening over time. So the Panchayat really had in shoulders above any other channel of particular importance to women. And there's some interesting work now that shows that this is in fact, women's reservations, being a pipeline of women politicians who then go up and contested MLAs and eventually. I'm afraid we're out of time, but I just wanna do before we close, thank both Adam and Gabi. I mean, this was like a combined two decades of research that we had to pack into 90 minutes, so it was never enough to go into all the nuances, but thanks for sharing your thoughts, and hopefully you can stick around for a few minutes if people have questions. All of you for coming. Thank you. Thank you.