From public service access to service quality: The distributive politics of piped water in Bangalore

Public service access in low- and middle- income countries is shaped by how much governments spend on services and where they choose to prioritize delivery. Accordingly, the local public goods and distributive politics literatures are largely focused on government spending and patterns of access. We argue that, even after access is granted, service quality can vary dramatically, and may vary with socioeconomic and political characteristics. We provide one of the first analyses of a key dimension of service quality: intermittency, which affects vital services such as water and electricity for hundreds of millions of people. We illustrate how to study it by highlighting the specific facets of intermittency that must be managed within the network; we show that these dimensions may be manipulated separately, and that infrastructure network structure shapes the allocation of intermittency. The literature from urban India shows that access to water connections (like access to many other local public goods) is typically associated with higher socio-economic status. In contrast, we find that in our study sites in Bangalore, water flows through pipes more frequently and predictably in low-income areas—thereby underscoring the importance of studying intermittency, and service quality more generally, as phenomena distinct from access.This project was funded by the Development Impact Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley (USAID Cooperative Agreement AID-OAA-A13- 00002). We thank C. Sharada Prasad and Zachary Burt for their contributions, Guadalupe Tunón, Eugenia Giraudy, Pranav Gupta, and Galen Tsongas for superb research assistance, and Joel Middleton, Malini Ranganathan, and Laura Stoker for advice. We also thank NextDrop, the Public Affairs Foundation, and the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board for their collaboration. Finally, we thank Adam Auerbach, David Gordon, Robin Harding, Alyssa Huberts, Katerina Linos, Aila Matanock, Pia Raffler, Milan Vaishnav, and seminar participants at Georgetown, Harvard, the L.S.E., Seoul National University, the University of Iowa, and U.C. Berkeley for comments on previous drafts. The project has been approved through IRB protocol 2014-04-6259.Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::1 - Fi de la PobresaObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::6 - Aigua Neta i SanejamentObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::11 - Ciutats i Comunitats SosteniblesPostprint (author's final draft