The Existing Narratives of India’s Public Service Delivery Challenges

Abstract How does existing research explain India’s public service delivery challenges? This chapter provides an overview of how political economists and state capacity scholars have made sense of India’s governance problems, including a politicized bureaucracy, an overburdened administration, corruption, underwhelming monitoring and accountability structures, and poor decentralization. We argue that both the political economy and state capacity literature do not recognize the role of public financial management in fuelling many common problems. At the same time, literature on public finance is limiting because it fails to link fund flows to effective public service delivery. We bridge these varying streams of literature by explaining how the government’s expenditure capacity is critical for policy implementation.