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This paper explores the political incentives for infrastructural provision in India, primarily at the state level because--outside of national highways, ports, railways and a few other areas--the 28 states have the main responsibility for developing infrastructure. I argue that high levels of clientelism in politics as well as high levels of electoral volatility (the proportion of seats that turns over in each state election) combine to cause highly inefficient patterns of state spending on infrastructure. Politicians in competitive states try to build political support as well as channel money to their campaign coffers by announcing large numbers of infrastructural projects. But many of these projects are never completed or maintained once their immediate purpose of generating campaign funds or election support is met. Empirically I show that electoral volatility is related to both road spending and road construction, though much of this construction seems to be of very poor quality due to clientelistic leakages.

Despite these political incentives, the good news for the long term is that there is some evidence that clientelism—and the distortions it creates in infrastructural provision—will decline as India’s middle class reform constituency increases, the fiscal pressures to reform intensify and as the country’s media continues to highlight spending scandals (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2006).