The Political Economy of Bureaucratic Overload: Evidence from Rural Development Officials in India

Speaker: Aditya Dasgupta (University of California, Merced)

Aditya Dasgupta presented his paper, “Political Economy of Bureaucratic Overload”, which is a study involving Block Development Officers (BDOs) in India. His study offers three key conclusions; first, that BDOs are often forced to multitask due to resource scarcity, second, their inability to focus on managerial activities affects the implementation of development programs, and lastly, bureaucratic overload is linked to political incentives for ruling parties to invest in the respective blocks.