Working Papers

This paper investigates public accountability in Public-Private Partnerships (PPP), for transport projects in India. So far, urban and regional studies scholars examining liberalisation in India have mainly critiqued structural macro-level shifts in policy to argue that an entrepreneurial Indian state, seeking private investment in large-infrastructure projects through mechanisms such as PPPs, has withdrawn from its role as a provider, reducing its accountabilities to performance control and fragmented governance. But this literature rarely views accountabilities of public and private partnering agencies as mutually constitutive in PPPs. Shifting attention to micro-level of projects and by carefully examining state-business relationships in long-term PPP contracts, this paper shows how the state’s deep entrenchment with its private partner’s risks produces not fixed, but contingent accountabilities. Champaka Rajagopal employs the incomplete-contracts lens, to examine how contracting parties in transport infrastructure projects claim residual control rights when specific contractual conditions are absent in long-term PPP contracts. Through five litigation cases in airport and national highway modernisation projects, Rajagopal questions perspectives on simplistic binaries of public versus private interest within PPPs where self, organisational and public interest are often intertwined. The paper demonstrates how third-party interference, bureaucratic resolution, competition, control and risk-hedging in contractual governance, shape a variety of state-business responses to public accountability. Rajagopal concludes by arguing that ‘contingent accountability’ produced in incomplete-contracts leads to contentious outcomes where not just the state, but all parties, public, private and the tax payer, tend to lose. The paper offers litigation as a compelling research methodology for examining state-business relations in opaque contractual governance of PPP projects.