Project, a woman-centered poverty alleviation program funded by the World Bank.<sup>9</sup> For this paper, we focus only on villages in the control group to describe what deliberation looks like, absent any additional policy interventions. Tese 50 villages are spread across 9 districts, chosen to ensure geographic representation.<sup>10</sup> From these 50 villages, we collected two forms of data: (1) full audio recordings of the _gram sabha_ , and (2) a standardized questionnaire to collect information on the atendance of citizens and local officials, on the nature of issues raised by citizens, and demographic data on who raised these issues (gender and caste). Tis survey data also included a roster of state and local government officials in atendance, how information on the timing of the _gram sabha_ was communicated, the physical location of the assembly, and atendance at regular intervals.

In order to implement both the assembly recording and collection of surveys, two field enumerators were assigned to each village — one from outside the village to record data on the issues raised, and another, who was local, to collect atendance data and help identify the speaker.<sup>11</sup> Given that the average atendance across our _gram sabhas_ was nearly 120 people, the introduction of a single enumerator from a neighboring village was unlikely to affect local citizens’ behavior. Te local enumerator, who was necessary to correctly provide information on the participants’ positions, only recorded atendance data and assisted the outside enumerator with information on the identities of speakers. Official atendance data in such meetings are typically recorded 9Village selection for the impact evaluation leveraged our knowledge of program implementation to reconstruct the selection process, thereby creating a matched sample of comparable treatment and control villages. More specifically, within the set of eligible districts (chosen for geograhpic representativeness, blocks were selected for assignment based on two sets of criterion: (1) a population criterion that equally weighted the SC and the ST population proportions and the number of below poverty line (BPL) households from census data; (2) a set of block level infrastructural variables that measure the quality of infrastructure, public services and industrial backwardness. We generate our matched sample by matching project and non-project blocks within 9 active project districts on these two factors. Tis process allowed us to nearly replicate the original assignment process for PVP.

10Districts include: Cuddalore, Kancheepuram, Nagapa inam, Namakkal, urvallur, Tirunelveli, Tiruppur, Tiruvannamalai, and Vuluppuram.

11Since all data had to be collected on a single day, this required a team of at least 200 enumerators — a number larger than any survey firm could provide. Moreover, familiarity with the _gram sabha_ meetings was essential to our being able to collect this data accurately and in real time. In order to address both these constraints, we hired and trained local women as our field enumerators. Using these enumerators was advantageous in being able to record the _gram sabha_ proceedings without the disruption having an “outside” observer. To maintain independence of the data collection process, however, we ensured that field enumerators who recorded the proceedings of the meeting were assigned collect data from a village in her neighboring, rather than home, district. Enumerators who helped identify the speakers were local residents, as local knowledge is essential in order to do this accurately.

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