Ecological provision across the regions of India as a function of local cultural capital

This paper aims to review the cultural reasons behind the different water access across the regions of India using the data from National Family Health Survey for the years 2019-2021 and combining it with the cultural data from the Survey on Literacy and Culture of India for the year 2014. I compiles the dataset that allows me to test the working hypothesis that is in the presence of economic controls. The local cultural capital plays a significant role in explaining which type of water source is predominantly used by households. In order to quantify the local cultural capital, the current study employs the Culture Based Development (CBD) paradigm and obtains the cultural heritage (CH) and living culture (LC) components for every region. In addition, cultural heritage and living culture are next used to calculate the local cultural entropy (CE). The results show that the cultural variables always matter yet using only CH and LC have inconclusive directions, while cultural entropy has a persistent positive association with the use of higher quality of sources of water.