As part of the Ford Fellowship, the PPRG team worked on the relationship between finances and service delivery taking the case of Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Kolkata. The team gathered all relevant financial and physical data pertaining to various local urban services such as water supply, sewerage, sanitation, solid waste management, municipal roads and street lights in the four cities. The finding was that spending on various local public services and cost recovery from them in the cities of study is below the national average for other metropolitan cities, as well as when compared with widely accepted norms, and the service level measured in terms of population coverage, is also worse in the selected cities than for other metropolitan cities in the country with respect to water supply and sewerage, with the exception of Ahmedabad. Even with respect to labor intensive services like solid waste and sanitation, a direct relationship is found between spending and service delivery in all the cities of study. With respect to roads, it is found that the lack of adequate spending along with other institutional factors lead to poor service delivery such as too many vehicles on roads (which could be an issue of regulation as much as infrastructure) or poor quality of roads. Street lights are the only service where spending and service levels are not directly related. Rather they are inversely related. All the selected cities of the study were spending less than nationally required norms on street lights, but were able to provide more than acceptable level of the service, even judged by international norms.

The final report (co-authored by Kala S Sridhar and Venugopala Reddy) will be brought out as a book (State of India’s urban services: Spending and financing) by Oxford University Press India in July 2010. The team has submitted on an extracted paper out of this as chapter for a Handbook of Urban Development in India, to be brought out by Oxford University Press.