IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/dur/durham/2025_02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Political Economy of Sanitation in India

Author

Listed:
  • Anurag N Banerjee

    (University of Durham)

  • Nilanjan Banik

    (Mahindra University)

  • Pranjal Chandrakar

    (Mahindra University)

Abstract

We model the implementation of India's federal sanitation initiative (Swachh Bharat Mission or SBM) within its devolved, competitive multiparty democracy, characterized by intense regional electoral competition. The success of SBM depends on social and physical capital provided by the federal government but executed by the regional authorities. Through a political thought experiment, we analyze the impact of changes in the regional governance model. Transitioning from federally aligned to non-aligned political parties (or vice versa) results in a 1.7% decrease (or 2.0% increase) in household toilet access, with the least wealthy (bottom 10%) disproportionately affected. Regional trends in sanitation-related diseases empirically corroborate these findings.

Suggested Citation

  • Anurag N Banerjee & Nilanjan Banik & Pranjal Chandrakar, 2022. "Political Economy of Sanitation in India," Department of Economics Working Papers 2025_02, Durham University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:dur:durham:2025_02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.durham.ac.uk/business/media/durham-university-business-school/EconWP25_02.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Multilevel governance; Political strategy; Social messaging; Sanitation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C5 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • O11 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dur:durham:2025_02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tatiana Damjanovic (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deduruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.