There is no evidence that reservation for women, scheduled castes and tribes in politics leads to massive incompetence, said Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee on Friday, adding that independent women legislators are emerging because of it.

Delivering the 27th Justice Sunanda Bhandare Memorial Lecture on the topic “Democracy on the Ground: What works, what doesn’t and why”, Banerjee countered the criticism that reservation is anti-merit. “While there are often claims that somehow this (reservation) will lead to massive incompetence, you see no evidence of it. What you see, over a period of time is independent women legislators emerging as a result of it.”

“There is very compelling evidence that reservation, both for SC/ST and women, has had a salutary effect,” the Indian-origin American economist said.

He added that these were the findings based on studies conducted by experts, including his wife Esther Duflo who has researched in this area,

Both Banerjee and Duflo were named co-winners of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel. The duo, who are professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge shared this honour with Harvard University economist Michael Kremer for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

On Friday, Banerjee also termed reservation as a “failure by design” in democracy.

Due to reservation in local bodies, he said, “A lot of persons elected to local self-government bodies do not get a second run due to rotation of seats to accommodate reservation. So we want local democracy but we also want reservation. That’s a failure by design.”

Banerjee said that an average constituency in India is quite big compared to electoral constituencies abroad. This impacts elections as voters hardly get information about their elected representatives and whatever little the elected leaders do, satisfies a small portion of the electorate.

“If we want democracy to work, we should have smaller constituencies,” Banerjee said.

Making a comparison, he said that Indian Lok Sabha has 540 seats while the British House of Commons has 650 Members of Parliament. The population here is 20 times that of the United Kingdom with each constituency being 24 times larger than those existing there, he noted.

“When constituencies are large, it is hard to get information about legislators. Leaders on ground matter very little for individuals. We do not have a direct mechanism for rewarding legislators. Whatever they do, affects a little segment in their constituency. This breeds indifference among people. This ultimately impacts voting patterns,” he said.

Sharing from his experimental work carried out in India, Banerjee explained that when voters are told about their legislators, it impacts their choices. In the absence of this information, he said, “Voters begin to think that ‘the system does not deliver much in any case, so why don’t I vote for my caste or someone who sounds similar to my name’….This is partly because they have no idea what their legislators do.”

Sharing data from Uttar Pradesh for the years between 1980 and 1996, Banerjee said that as more people from a particular caste were elected, corruption among them rose.

“There is tolerance of people from your own caste of people who are corrupt. They say that they come from ‘their’ party. The more dominant (caste) that you are, the worse legislators you elect. This is the striking thing that ethno-centricity does. You are ethno-centric because you have no stake in politics.”

He also touched upon other structural problems in education, health where the priority of elected leaders is different from that of voters. “How does one change the distribution of power within the system so that democracy can function within the system is a thought I leave you with,” he added.

The lecture was given in honour of former Delhi high court judge, Justice Sunanda Bhandare who died at the age of 52 in 1994. The event was presided by Supreme Court judge, justice Hima Kohli and attended by justice Sidharth Mridul of the Delhi high court and former Supreme Court judge, Justice Madan B Lokur.

The gathering, comprising mostly of former judges, academicians, social workers and legal luminaries, observed a minute’s silence to remember another champion of women’s rights and SEWA founder Elaben Bhatt who passed away on November 2.