Population ecology of interest groups in India: a basis for comparative framework

The interest groups’ population ecology studies have historically been heavily weighted towards Western democracies. Despite being one of the world’s largest country and democracy, with established qualitative research on business groups India remains relatively elusive in this field of research. Although interest groups are recognised elsewhere as an important voice on sociopolitical matters, our knowledge of interest groups system in India, groups’ number and activities, especially post 1991 reforms, is quite limited. Whilst there are individual analyses (e.g. on controversial coal projects and groups participation, or a predominant focus on business associations), their narrative approach to studying advocacy limits the reliability of the results. This article addresses this problem by deploying Western metric framework of studying interest groups population to the analysis of interest groups numbers in India. We test the approach searching for non-governmental organisations in India’s environmental policy across three neighbouring states: Chhattisgarh, Odisha and West Bengal. After the deployment of the framework, we elaborate on pitfalls of the approach, lessons we learned and how it can be improved to further facilitate the comparisons, but also to better understand the actors and the dynamics of groups’ activities?