Competing interests: Subsidized Housing and Local Service Delivery in Urban India

• In Event: Cash Transfers and Subsidies in Developing Democracies and Indigenous States (Recorded)

Abstract

What are the political effects of policies transferring housing subsidies to low-income households in urban India? In previous work I found that beneficiaries of these homeownership policies are more politically active than non-beneficiaries. In this paper, I study the aggregate effects of such policies on local politics. That effects on individual behavior might lead one to predict that these policies create a class of citizens who, as research on the United States has found, dominate the local political and planning agenda. I argue that in urban India, however, non-homeowners, particularly those living in informal settlements, also maintain local political power due to their sheer numbers and representation by powerful local leaders and brokers. I analyze the text of, and responses to, over 300,000 public complaints lodged with the municipal government of Mumbai from 2016-2019. In line with the findings on homeowners described above, I find that complaints are more likely to come from those living in formal housing than those living in informal settlements, even in areas where the informal population is large. Next, I show that public officials almost always resolve complaints that do not impinge upon the lives of those living informal settlements, such as those concerning garbage in the streets or leaking pipes. In contrast, complaints concerning land use, unauthorized tapping of water, squatter settlements, hawkers, and encroachments are frequently shunted from department to department, given meaningless responses, or simply ignored. Through interviews with public officials, I find politicians view addressing such complaints as politically costly due to the fact that it requires physically evicting important voting blocs from municipal or private land. I argue, therefore, that the political effects of subsidized housing policies vary by policy sector and are conditional on the density of informal settlements within a given ward. This argument is supported by interviews with local representatives and satellite data on the prevalence of informal settlements within Mumbai.

Author

• Tanu Kumar, College of William and Mary