Abstract:
This paper examines the relationship between prevalence of water borne diseases and gender of the head of the village councils by exploiting a natural experiment in local governance in India. A constitutional amendment in early 1990s ensured that only women could contest the elections and be the head in at least one- third of the village councils selected through an exogenous process. Utilizing a unique sample survey, we show that having a woman as the council head seems to have no effect on the prevalence of water borne diseases. But if we look into the sub- categories of the female council heads, we find that the female council heads from the upper castes have indeed been able to reduce the prevalence of water borne diseases significantly, while villages which have women as the council heads from the disadvantaged sections of the society i.e. the Scheduled Castes/ Scheduled Tribes and the Backward Classes, show no such effect. We also show that the households in the villages headed by females from the upper castes are more likely to obtain drinking water from a safer source like tap compared to unsafe sources like surface water and uncovered well. Abstract: This paper is the first attempt to rigorously evaluate the short term effects of the `Janani Suraksha Yojna' (Safe Motherhood Scheme), a nationwide conditional cash transfer program in India, launched in April 2005. The objective of the scheme is to reduce maternal and infant mortality by increasing theproportion of child deliveries conducted in medical facilities, especially among the backward regions of the country. Under the scheme, a woman delivering her child in a medical facility is provided monetary rewards. By combining the pre-program and the post-program survey data, we compare changes in institutional deliveries among the households in the targeted and the non-targeted states. Our difference-in-difference results indicate that in the initial one and a half years of its operation, the scheme did not have any effect on the disparity between the targeted and non-targeted states. In fact, the gap between the two widened in this period, albeit marginally. But beginning from 2007, the targeted states have shown much larger improvements in the institutional deliveries, leading to a dramatic decline in the gap between the targeted and the non-targeted states. We also show that these results are not driven by any pre-existing trends, and are also unlikely to be driven by the differential increase in the availability and access to the medical facilities in the targeted and the non-targeted states. |