We think of the cleanup of water pollution in the Ganges river in India as a local public good and ask whether this cleanup ought to be decentralized or centralized. We depart from the existing literature on this subject in two important ways. First, we allow the heterogeneous spillovers from cleaning up water pollution to be positive or negative. Second, we focus on water pollution cleanup in three cities—Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi—through which the Ganges flows. Our model sheds light on two broad issues. First, we characterize efficient water pollution cleanup in the three cities, we describe how much water pollution is cleaned up under decentralization, we describe the set of cleanup amounts under decentralization, and we discuss why pollution cleanup under decentralization is unlikely to be efficient. Second, we focus on centralization. We derive the tax paid by the inhabitants of the three cities for pollution cleanup, the benefit to a city inhabitant from water pollution cleanup, how majority voting determines how much pollution is cleaned up when the spillovers from cleanup are uniform, and finally, we compare the amounts of pollution cleaned up with majority voting with the efficient pollution cleanup amounts.

我们将印度恒河水污染的清理视为当地的公共利益，并询问这种清理应该分散还是集中。我们在两个重要方面偏离了有关该主题的现有文献。首先，我们允许清理水污染所产生的异质溢出效应是正面的还是负面的。其次，我们重点关注恒河流经的三个城市——坎普尔、普拉亚格拉吉、瓦拉纳西的水污染治理。我们的模型揭示了两个广泛的问题。首先，我们描述了三个城市的有效水污染清理工作，描述了分权下清理了多少水污染，描述了分权下的清理量集合，并讨论了为什么分权下的污染清理不太可能有效。第二，我们注重集中化。我们推导出三个城市居民为污染治理所缴纳的税费、城市居民从水污染治理中获得的收益、在治理溢出效应均匀的情况下，多数投票如何决定治理污染的数量，最后，我们进行比较多数表决的污染清除量与有效污染清除量。