TY - JOUR AU - Banerjee,Abhijit AU - Banerji,Rukmini AU - Duflo,Esther AU - Glennerster,Rachel AU - Khemani,Stuti TI - Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence From a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14311 PY - 2008 Y2 - September 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14311 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14311.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Abhijit Banerjee MIT Department of Economics E52-252d 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/253-8855 Fax: 617/253-1330 E-Mail: banerjee@mit.edu Rukmini Banerji MIT Department of Economics 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 E-Mail: tosha@mit.edu Esther Duflo Department of Economics MIT, E52-252G 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel: 617/258-7013 Fax: 617/253-6915 E-Mail: eduflo@mit.edu Rachel Glennerster Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab MIT Department of Economics E60-275 Cambridge MA 02139 Tel: 617 324 0098 E-Mail: rglenner@mit.edu Stuti Khemani The World Bank 1818 H Street N.W. Washington, DC 20433 E-Mail: skhemani@worldbank.org AB - Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes both locally elected leaders and parents of children enrolled in public schools into committees and gives these groups powers over resource allocation, and monitoring and management of school performance. However, in a baseline survey we found that people were not aware of the existence of these committees and their potential for improving education. This paper evaluates three different interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation through these committees: providing information, training community members in a new testing tool, and training and organizing volunteers to hold remedial reading camps for illiterate children. We find that these interventions had no impact on community involvement in public schools, and no impact on teacher effort or learning outcomes in those schools. However, we do find that the intervention that trained volunteers to teach children to read had a large impact on activity outside public schools -- local youths volunteered to be trained to teach, and children who attended these camps substantially improved their reading skills. These results suggest that citizens face substantial constraints in participating to improve the public education system, even when they care about education and are willing to do something to improve it. ER -