The “treatment” consists, initially, of a two week program conducted by the Karnataka State Institute of Rural Development, which is responsible for all panchayat training in the state and has extensive experience in the field. The program trains citizens in participatory planning processes, deliberative decision making, and disseminates information about the programs and procedures of the panchayat. At the end of two weeks, a village meeting is held where priorities are finalized and presented to local bureaucrats. At a meeting with the bureaucrats an implementation agreement is reached wherein the bureaucrats commit to providing funding and technical support for the selected projects over the course of the year. Following this initial training, the GP is monitored with monthly two-day visits over a period of two years in order to ensure the program’s progress.

An extensive quantitative baseline survey was implemented in the 200 treatment and control villages randomly selected from the 100 selected GPs, and completed a month prior to the intervention. The survey instruments, developed after several weeks of investigative field work and pre-testing, included village-level modules measuring the quality and quantity of public goods, caste and land inequality in the village, and in-depth interviews with village politicians and local officials. Twenty households from each village were also randomly chosen for a household questionnaire assessing socio-economic status, preferences for public goods, political participation, social networks and other relevant variables. Two years later the same sample of villages and households were re-interviewed with identical survey instruments. These pre-test and post-test quantitative data provide a “gold-standard” quantitative assessment of impact using a randomized trial.

To understand “process” issues, however, equal attention was given to in-depth qualitative work. A subset of five treatment and five control GPs from the quantitative sample was selected purposively for the qualitative investigation. They were selected to compare areas with low and high literacy, and different types of administrative variation. A team of qualitative investigators visited these villages for a day or two every week over a two year period investigating important dimensions of change: political and social dynamics, corruption, economic changes, and network affiliation, among other things. Under the supervision of two sociologists, the investigators wrote monthly reports assessing these dimensions of change. These reports provide a valuable in-depth look at month to month changes in the treatment and control areas that allow the assessment of the quality of the treatment, changes introduced by the treatment, and other changes that have taken place that are unrelated to the treatment. Thus, the qualitative work provides an independent qualitative evaluation of the People’s Campaign, but also supplements findings of the quantitative data<sup>15</sup> .

An important challenge in understanding the nature of 73<sup>rd</sup> amendment is to study participation in public village meetings ( _gram sabhas_ ) held to discuss the problems faced by villagers with members of the governing committee. Increases in the quality of this form of village democracy would be a successful indicator of improvements in participation and accountability. To analyze this, a separate study was conducted on a sample of 300 randomly chosen villages across four South Indian states, including Kerala and Karnataka. Retrospective quantitative data on participation in the meetings, however, are very unreliable because people’s memories are limited about what may have transpired at a meeting they may have attended. To address this

> 15 This evaluation is still ongoing and results are not yet available.

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