India took an important step towards deepening democracy when it passed the 73rd Amendment in 1993 which put in place the elected gram panchayat (GP, or local elected body) at the village level. An important feature of this Amendment was reservation for women in GP seats and sarpanch (elected head of GP) posts. This was indeed a crucial step, considering the low status of women in India and their consequent low participation in public life. But what have been the impacts and implications of this policy? The anecdotal evidence is mixed. On the one hand it has been claimed that women sarpanchs are quite often just a front for male relatives; on the other, it has been argued that female sarpanchs are indeed proactive and bring about several positive changes in the village.
In this article, we offer some answers based on our research (Sathe et al., 2013 ). The purpose of our study was to examine if reservation for women for the post of sarpanch has had any significant impact on the perceived availability of basic public services for women in villages, especially with respect to the services that women are believed to value the most. It is the responsibility of the GP to provide basic public services such as drinking water, toilets, gutters etc., to villagers. Thus the well-being of villagers depends, to a great extent, on the efficacy of the GP. It is also expected that sarpanchs would play a crucial role in the provision of these services, by their initiative and interest. Further, we also examine whether the political participation of women in villages varies depending on the sarpanch's gender.
The implications of mandatory reservations for women in GPs are well-researched. However, the focus of most studies has been on investments made by GPs in services like roads, sanitation, etc. It is highly plausible that even if money is spent on public services, there are leakages (via corruption) in the system, which may impact the availability of the services provided in terms of quantity and quality. This aspect has not been captured in the other studies.
We conducted a survey of the intended beneficiaries to understand what kind of services they perceived they have access to. Using an appropriate sampling strategy, we selected 16 villages with a female sarpanch and 16 with a male sarpanch, in the Sangli district of Maharashtra. The state reserved 33 per cent of GP seats and sarpanch posts in 1994. The survey was conducted in October-November 2008. From each of these villages we randomly selected 20 female villagers and so we had a sample of 640 respondents. We developed an "Index of Services Availability", which captured the quantity and quality of services available to the women respondents living in the 32 villages.
The survey focussed on services and issues that are of particular relevance to women: Drinking water; toilets; gutters; schools; ration shops; self-help groups; implementation of welfare schemes, with special reference to Nirmal Gram Yojana and Janani Suraksha Yojana; and male alcoholism. Thus, although roads and electricity help women as well, we have not included them in this index.
To analyse the impact of the gender of the sarpanch on the political participation of female villagers, we asked questions with respect to voting patterns, knowledge about the responsibilities and workings of the GP, attendance and vociferousness in the gram sabhas (local public meetings), and political awareness. Based on these factors, we estimated the "Index of Democratic Partici-pation".
We found that male sarpanchs were somewhat superior in terms of socio-economic and educational status and had better political connections vis-a-vis female sarpanchs. In spite of this, female sarpanchs seemed to have had interesting and important impacts.
The availability of basic public services was found to be significantly higher in female-sarpanch villages as compared to male-sarpanch villages, in cases where the election had been held 3-3.5 years prior to the survey. However, this result is not obtained when the election had been held one year before the survey. This suggests that female sarpanchs become more effective relative to male sarpanchs over a period of time.
Equally importantly, we found that political participation of women is a significant factor in explaining the availability of services. Additionally, political participation of women is higher in female-sarpanch villages as compared to male-sarpanch villages, irrespective of the timing of the election in relation to the survey. Thus, having a female sarpanch affects the political participation of women in a village positively, and it is through this channel that the availability of services improves over a period of 3-3.5 years.
Our study implies that mandated reservation for women in sarpanch posts would work better if the tenure is increased from five years to, say, 10 years. This would be more effective than increasing the reservation for women to 50 per cent, as was done in April 2011 by the government of Maharashtra.
Dhanmanjiri Sathe is Professor, Department of Economics, Savitribai Phule Pune University; Stephan Klasen is Professor of Development Economics, University of Göttingen; Jan Priebe is Quantitative Lead Researcher with the PSF Analytics Team at the World Bank in Jakarta; Mithila Biniwale is a Doctoral candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Published with permission from Ideas For India (www.ideasforindia.in), an economics and policy portal
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