Bidding for roads

This project aims to understand how to make it harder for local politicians to capture small-scale infrastructure projects.

By analysing detailed data on the bidding process we aim to understand how politicians have been able to intervene and what could be done to prevent such manipulation in future. In particular, we aim to answer 3 questions related to political influence:

1) Is there political influence over the allocation of PMGSY contracts?
2) How do local politicians and officials use the bidding process to manipulate the allocation of road projects on behalf of specific contractors?
3) How does the regulatory, political, and security environment affect the pool of bidders, the structure of the bid amounts, and the allocation of road contracts? A sub-question of particular importance is how collusion is affected by differences in bidding rules between states or funding agencies.