Model villages like Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar not the best, finds study

A new study conducted of Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar, both model villages in Maharashtra, suggests that people from these villages are no different from other villages when it comes to voluntary contributions for public causes, especially when they are kept anonymous.

The study Culture, Community and Institutions: Voluntary Provision of Public Goods in Maharashtra conducted by the economics department of Mumbai University bursts the sunshine bubble associated with these two model villages.Using an experimental economics model, the researchers compared the behaviour of the residents of Ralegan Sidhi and Hiware Bazar with two control villages, Nagewadi (Satara) and Avasari (Ambegaon) which have a similar geographical and social constitution, but without any cooperative movement.

“We wanted to see if communities with long-established social norms of cooperation make anonymous individuals behave more cooperatively, even when there is no punishment for selfish behaviour. To our surprise, this wasn’t true,” said Neeraj Hatekar, lead researcher and professor of economics at the university.

Hatekar said according to mainstream economic theory, people are usually self-involved.

However, prolonged campaigns of cooperativeness have been successful in changing individual preferences and in making people pro-social. Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar have both attracted a great deal of attention from the media and have won several state and national awards for their development. People from several countries have also visited these villages to study their development model.

Ralgan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar are situated in the drought-prone areas of Maharashtra. In the ‘70s, both villages were just one of the several poverty-stricken, water scarce villages in the area.

Anna Hazare and Popatrao Pawar took the lead in the respective villages and encouraged people to voluntarily contribute efforts (labour and money) for the betterment of the villages in the ‘80s.

Explaining the public good experiment, Savita Kulkarni, another researcher says, “All the participants are given an equal amount of money and a freedom to keep the given endowment in a private fund or contribute in a group fund partly or fully. Return from the private fund equals unity.

The contribution collected through the group fund is doubled by the experimenter and divided equally among all the participants irrespective of their contributions.” Thus, the social returns from contributing in public good are 2 per unit contributed, while a subject earns only 0.5 units for each unit contributed. Zero contribution to the group fund shows strong free riding.

The researchers formed three groups comprising four people in each village. The experimental endowment was Rs20 per head per round to split in private and public good. “Anonymity about group members was maintained to control ‘strategic motivation’. The group contribution was doubled by the experimenter before dividing equally among the players. 20 rounds of this game were played in 2-3 hours,” says Kulkarni.

In Ralegan Siddhi, the experiments were conducted in a temple in the village whereas in Hiware Bazar, it was administered in the Gramsansad building, both places from where the two villages run their panchayat.

The contribution for public fund in Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar was higher compared to control villages in all the rounds. However, the contribution declined in later iterations in both the villages; and rate of decay was higher in model villages suggesting heavy free-riding.

“The findings suggest that the norm of cooperation and collective action is more fragile; their stability depends crucially on monitoring and punishment mechanisms. It, therefore, appears that the established history of the norms may not always inculcate the stable preference of ‘unconditional cooperation’ in an individual’s value system,” says Hatekar.