Why is it so difficult to hold politicians accountable for what they actually deliver?

Indian voters throw incumbents out all the time, and yet poor policy persists. That paradox is the heart of the problem. Research by the Carnegie Endowment finds that since 1967, returning members have made up only about 38 per cent of the Lok Sabha, and nearly half of the MPs elected in 2024 were first-timers, a higher rate of turnover than in most comparable democracies. Whatever else is wrong, it is not that voters are passive.

The problem is that electoral accountability and performance accountability are not the same thing. Voters punish governments, but not always for the right reasons. A government may lose an election because of a drought it could not control, and win one despite systematically failing to improve public services, because it ran effective patronage networks. Elections measure satisfaction and alliance, not whether a government actually delivered.

Part of why is that responsibility is genuinely hard to locate. Indian governance runs across three levels, central, state, and local, with overlapping mandates. When schools underperform, roads crumble, or the water supply fails, a voter often cannot tell who is to blame, and politicians exploit the confusion. Positive outcomes are claimed; negative ones are attributed to a predecessor, to another level of government, or to circumstances beyond anyone’s control.

Underneath this sits an information problem. Citizens can see outcomes but rarely how decisions were made, and the record that would tell them sits in hundreds of pages of public documents that no individual has any reason to read. So a government can report rising school enrolment while learning outcomes fall. It can announce thousands of new health centres while the quality of care inside them declines. The thing that is easy to measure and claim credit for, buildings, enrolment, and launches, is rarely the thing that actually matters, and the gap between the two is where accountability quietly disappears.

This is why elections alone are not enough. Accountability for performance works only when it is built into the rules of the game, through independent measurement of the outcomes that count. Left to depend on politicians measuring themselves, it does not happen, because no one is rewarded for publishing the number that ends their own career.