# **Introduction**

Environmental sanitation outcomes are poor in rural India. Surveying villages in the four Southern states of the country, we find a shortfall in village cleaning: nearly a third of roads had some visible garbage on them, and one in ten drains was clogged. Sanitation infrastructure is also in poor shape: less than half the roads were paved, and just over a quarter had drains.

Typically local bodies are responsible for this anywhere in the world, as part of their task of providing basic civic amenities. These responsibilities include a multiplicity of tasks, including the maintenance and cleaning of various public facilities (including roads, drains, water supply, waste disposal sites, burial and cremation grounds), and “conservancy” (preventing unhealthy conditions by dealing with such matters as removing garbage, cutting back vegetation, and filling in areas where water accumulates). These tasks are necessarily performed at local level because they require a high level of local knowledge and engagement.

In India, local bodies have been given a clear mandate to provide these services. Moreover, funds are made available to these local bodies, such that it is not difficult to meet the modest costs of hiring someone for keeping roads and other public areas clean. Fund shortages are more of a problem for the capital-intensive tasks of paving roads and constructing drains.

Why then are outcomes so poor? There are several possible reasons. Firstly, the system of local governance may be poorly designed and implemented. In the next section we summarize some of the key gaps noted in the literature in the design and functioning of the system of local governance, and in the institutions to support local governments in the provision of sanitation and other basic services.

Secondly, citizens may lack information on sanitation. They may lack awareness of the benefits of better sanitation for reducing their own and their children’s exposure to disease, with its high levels of attendant morbidity and child mortality. They may not know which aspects of sanitation pose the greatest health threats. And they may lack awareness of their local government’s responsibility for ensuring sanitation. The latter is a reflection of systemic dysfunctionalities in local governance, while the former reflect more a broader lack of health education outreach.

Thirdly, elites may capture sanitation resources for themselves. A substantial body of work is devoted to the argument that local elites have disproportionately better access to the public goods provided by local governments.<sup>2</sup> The lack of effective accountability implied by elite capture is another reflection of systemic dysfunctionalities in local governance.

We analyze survey data collected in villages in the four South Indian states, to explore why sanitation outcomes are poor, and to explore the evidence for systemic dysfunctionalities which could contribute to poor sanitation outcomes. Our paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we summarize the main dysfunctionalities discussed in the literature on local governments. We then analyze our survey data and find considerable evidence of elite capture by political elites, but not by traditional social and economic elites. Strikingly, we find that elites’ decisions indicate a lack of understanding of the externalities and benefits of sanitation. More broadly, we find evidence of systemic governance failure which includes shortfalls in disseminating information on government responsibilities and the benefits of sanitation.

> 2 Araujo et al. 2008, Dasgupta and Beard 2007, Bardhan and Mookherjee 2000, 2006, Galasso and Ravallion 2005

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