Michelle Shevin-Coetzee

Michelle Shevin-Coetzee is a Military Legislative Assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives. She previously worked in the think tank community, most recently as a Fulbright Schuman Fellow at Chatham House in London and the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin. Before that Michelle was a Research Assistant at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a Researcher at the Center for a New American Security, both in Washington, DC. 

Michelle received her M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University and her B.A. in International Affairs, summa cum laude, from the George Washington University. She was a Harold W. Rosenthal Fellow in International Relations at the Congressional Research Service during graduate school and an intern with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon throughout her undergraduate studies. Michelle has volunteered in leadership positions with the GW and Washington, DC chapters of Women in International Security.

Rural Road Connectivity & Its Effects on Access to Health Care: Evidence from India’s PMGSY Project

Author: McKenna Burelle
Date Published: 12 July 2021

McKenna Burelle’s full paper can be found in the Spring 2021 Issue of the International Affairs Review (IAR) here.

ABSTRACT

The Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) is a project designed by the Indian government in 2000 to bridge the large infrastructural inequalities that exist between rural and urban regions of India. The project’s goals are to construct all-weather roads in rural habitations throughout the majority of India. In 2013, a phase two, PMGSY-II, was initiated to put more emphasis on intra-village road systems and improve access to important village institutions, such as health centers. This paper studies the impact of PMGSY on accessibility to health care facilities in rural India using a difference-in-differences framework. 

Using data from the Women’s Questionnaire in the 2015-2016 Demographic and Health Surveys in India and district level information on roads from the PMGSY public database, I exploit the timing of PMGSY-II roads as a source of exogenous variation in access to health centers. To measure access to health facilities, I examine changes in health care utilization for births occurring from 2010 to 2016. I find that antenatal care and Tetanus vaccinations for mothers improved along with respondents’ ability to access vehicle transportation to health facilities in districts treated with PMGSY-II roads. However, while there has been some research conducted on road connectivity and its impacts, more research is needed to continue bolstering the growing body of literature on the effects of rural road development.

McKenna Burelle
McKenna Burelle

McKenna graduated Spring 2021 with a Bachelors of Arts in Economics and International Affairs. McKenna’s research in the Dean’s Scholars Program focused on the social and economic implications of improved road connectivity, provided by the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) project, in rural India.