Yamini Aiyar Schools Us on Education Policy in India

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast where we examine academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan. Today my guest is Yamini Aiyar, who is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and the author of the recent book Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools. Her main research interests are contemporary politics, state capacity, welfare policy, and federalism.

We talked about the challenges of education policy and welfare in India, the lack of agency experienced by school administrators and teachers, the role of local governments in education, Delhi’s experiment with education reforms, portable benefits and school vouchers, and much more.

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts.

Hi, Yamini. Welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you here. I can’t believe we’ve not done this before.

YAMINI AIYAR: Hi, Shruti. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be on the show. I’ve listened to so many of the podcasts, so it’s a real privilege. I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

Delhi School Experiment

RAJAGOPALAN: There’s so many things that I want to speak with you about because you’ve been this prolific columnist; you’ve written so much about federalism, about education, about state capacity. I first want to start with your latest book, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools. This is such a well-written book, and I am amazed that you made me feel so much empathy for a government servant and a government school teacher, which is not my natural inclination.

At the end of it, you really flipped it around for me because we’re always thinking we need more accountability from government servants. They don’t do their job and things like that. We never really consider that there is a tradeoff between accountability and agency, at least the way the Indian state has set it up. Normally, accountability would come bottom-up, you’d be accountable to the people, which gives you agency from the people, but we’ve flipped it on its head.

There’s this accountability to the babus and the politicians at the top. That means a complete loss of agency and an inability to actually function the way they’re supposed to function with purpose. By the end of it, I was like, “Wow, we’ve flipped this on the head.” I never thought there’s an accountability agency tradeoff, but we have managed to create a bizarre artificial tradeoff. That’s another government innovation in India. For those unfamiliar with the Delhi school experiment, can you start us off with what that is, and then we can get into all of this.

AIYAR: Sure. It’s a well-known fact that public schools in India leave a lot to be desired. Over the last 20, 30 years, we have made some significant strides when it comes to the goal of universalization of education, particularly from the 2000s, when the government of India launched the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, which was a culmination of a whole set of things that had happened in school education policy from the late 1980s, with a focus on achieving universalization, by which broadly it meant to ensure that all the inputs for schooling were in place and accessible to all citizens.

The building of the school building, hiring of teachers, and a massive campaign to expand school enrollment, such that by the mid to late 2000s, we had achieved the goal of near universal school enrollment. Of course, there are some hard to reach places where there were still gaps, but broadly, more or less, in short, that there was a school building within a five-kilometer radius of every habitation. Anyone who wanted to go to school had access to school. This governmental expansion of the school system also coincides—and I use that word carefully, because I don’t think that it came from a bottom-up kind of social and political consensus.

There was a set of things that were happening that led to the government taking universalization of education seriously and making these strides. Almost parallel to that, society, too, was arriving at a point where the idea that education is central to social mobility and a potential better future for children, including crucially girl children, had been reached. The two came together, which is why you see huge expansion in enrollment in the public school system.

It was amply evident to anybody that walked around the periphery of a government school in India that even though on paper, it all looked like significant strides had been made, what happened inside the classroom left a lot to be desired. I must add, this was not just a challenge of the public school system, it’s more broad; it cuts across both public and private.

From the mid-2000s, the ASER survey led by the NGO Pratham, which really began to ask what happens inside the classroom and has our policy structure become so caught up in chasing the achievement of inputs that we have completely disregarded the actual process of learning. Lant Pritchett has that wonderful title of his book, Schooling Ain’t Learning. Indian policymaking had moved and made significant strides in the direction of schooling, and had almost, you could assume that schooling was learning, whereas anyone who began to look and peer inside the school began to recognize that schooling ain’t learning. There’s a lot more that needs to happen in the classroom, and that we need to understand.

Indian policymaking led largely through a combination of Pratham and ASER surveys that were bringing this out into the public domain on a regular basis, and opened up a larger conversation with academics, civil society organizations, parents, around the question of the quality of learning in schools, had begun to find its way into the discourse on education policy. Every now and again, you saw these sparks of state governments, school education is a concurrent subject, but largely, its implementation in the hands of state government. I know we’re going to talk about federalism in a bit.

State governments began different kinds of experiments, yet it never fully entered the political discourse. When I said that there’s two parallel things happening, government expanding to the goal of universalization, and parallelly, not in tune or in step, society is arriving at its own conclusions about the significance of school education as a means of social mobility. It really comes together in the political discourse on school education, where it rarely finds its place in the political dynamic or the terms of the political contract between citizens and state, which is not to say the broad welfare function of the state isn’t embedded in the dynamics of electoral politics.

Social security, midday meals, in the mid-2000s, the expansion of the welfare state around National Rural Employment Guarantee, the right to work, the right to food, all of that comes in and becomes part and parcel of the political, social consensus, yet education continues to remain at the periphery. This has always been this great puzzle for many, how is it that a vibrant democracy in which the welfare function of the state plays an important role in electoral dynamics, has rarely seen education and health come into the front and center of the political discourse, and particularly around the electoral discourse, so something that political parties deploy to seek political legitimacy and gain electoral gains from.

Here we are now in 2015, in Delhi. Anyone who’s familiar with Delhi is aware of the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party that burst into the political landscape in 2012, starting with India against corruption, morphed into a political party, comes into power in 2015 in Delhi and makes education or school education a really important piece of its offering, which, in my reading, wasn’t really the central piece of what Aam Aadmi Party was about. They were talking about corruption largely in public services, so ration and other aspects, contractors, and then big-ticket corruption.

What the social contract around education was never really part of the early discourse, yet once they come into power, they make school reform a big part of the story. They make school reform a big part of their story largely through the vision of the then Deputy Chief Minister and Education Minister Manish Sisodia, for whom I would argue this was a passion project.

Here we are sitting in my home city, where something really interesting is happening on schools, something that I had been working on for a very long time. I could hear when driving on the radio and through advertisements that were plastered all over the city that the reform package that was being debated in the public domain wasn’t just about how many teachers have we hired, how many school buildings have we made, how we are upgrading infrastructure, how we are painting the walls, all of which, of course, was part and parcel of this. There was also conversation about what children are learning.

Suddenly, the deputy chief minister is on the radio saying, “We did an assessment, and we found that 70% of children in standard 6 can barely read a paragraph and comprehend it and articulate it, and yet the class 6 curriculum is going way ahead.” Many of us who had been talking about the challenges of Indian school education had been highlighting these issues for quite some time. Suddenly, now it’s found its way into the political discourse of a political party as they are beginning their governance trajectory in the state.

Really, what we did in this book was to study this. We got the opportunity first, just as a documentation task, to see what was happening as an attempt is being made to reform the school system from the perspective of not just improving schooling inputs but also bringing the pedagogical changes that may be necessary to improve learning outcomes inside the school. We got a chance to see what was being done, how it was being done, and how the translation of the ideas and vision actually unfolded inside the classroom through the teachers and the headmasters, and all the other frontline officers tasked with the implementation.

Broadly, many things were happening. I mentioned infrastructure. There was a significant attempt to strengthen the infrastructure of the school. There was an attempt to, at least for the early years of this reform, experiment in different ways. There were some positives and some challenges with the experimentation, but experiment in different ways with trying to bring all students in classes 6, 7, and 8 as close to curriculum-level expectations as possible by emphasizing foundational literacy, numeracy, and getting them up to speed.

There was also embedded in this an attempt to identify what they called nonreaders. This is the sort of colloquial terms that were being used because they found that there were students in classes 6, 7, and 8 who were still not able to confidently read a paragraph and comprehend. There were also attempts at some reforms that were complex in class 9 and 10. Really, the bulk of what we were studying was this.

To enable this, an effort was made to reorient the training, to create a cadre of what we call mentor teachers who are going to be the diplomats of this reform effort, to try and support and enable teachers inside the classrooms to adopt some of the reform ideas in their everyday pedagogy inside the classroom and a set of basic baseline assessments to track improvements inside the school that were put in. These were the key things that we focused on. There were other things that were happening, but this was the core of what was attempted to shift the learning trajectory inside schools in Delhi.

Education in a Welfare State

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s super helpful. Before I ask you to talk about the kinds of reforms and how you track them and the effectiveness, one of the things that struck me when I was reading the book is India becomes a welfare state pretty late in the game. It’s only like in the mid-’90s. First, it’s after 1991 for a couple of reasons. We have this big push towards decentralization in local government, but we also have a big push through the market. Suddenly, through economic growth, the government has the revenues to be a welfare state for the first time, which it didn’t before.

A planning state is already a welfare state. You don’t need to do welfare above the central five-year plan, in some sense. It’s only post-liberalization that the penny really drops. What I realized is, India has been giving welfare in a very upside-down way, like we’ve been doing fertilizer subsidies and LPG subsidies and all sorts of widgets, sometimes direct cash benefits, all of those things. Those things are necessarily different from education and health, which are very iterative. The same participants keep running into each other over and over and over again.

The possibilities in health and education are quite different than what you have in, say, an LPG subsidy. The possibilities of corruption are also quite different. Once we became a welfare state, the way I see that story play out is most of the money used to leak out, so we needed some smart way of tracking and accountability. Now, this was already the mid to late ’90s. India is amazing at building software. We’ve leapfrogged into the digital age, so we will digitally track everything. Right now, through UPI is the final step of that.

We managed to remove all leakages, but education is not a leakage problem. Education is just fundamentally different. One, can you walk us through how education is a different welfare service from everything else that the government tries to do and some of the challenges that come from this kind of top-down accountability, where the central or the state government bureaucrats at top are constantly issuing notices and metrics and measures? It’s not going to give you quite the same result as tracking the number of LPG gas cylinders, if the number that left the warehouse or the number that reached the village.

AIYAR: Thanks. Let me, before I get into the education story, just say two things on the broader framing that you lay out. I recently read and reviewed Louise Tillin’s book titled Making India Work. It offers a really interesting kind of contribution to what we know about the Indian welfare state. Actually, it fills in a huge gap about what we don’t know. I always thought of myself as somebody who knew quite a bit about India’s welfare state, only to realize I knew very little from reading a book, because there were a lot of things that happened that we simply didn’t know about.

One of the really interesting things, Louise describes India’s welfare state as a precocious welfare state, and I was like, “This is sounding very strange.” She goes back into the archival history to discover that we brought in an employment ESI, the Employment State Insurance Act, in 1948 on the back of a set of things, including interregional competition between industrial workers that eventually led to a demand for nationalization of the economy, and the ESI was the first step to that.

From what I learned from Louise’s work is that India actually was way ahead of its time and was one of the first countries that did so before becoming a full-fledged democracy. I think we were one of the first countries to be part and parcel of ILO discussions as well. We put in an ESI before the United States. All of this was news to me. We have had attempts at trying to build some kind of foundations of a welfare state that run deep into even a pre-independence history.

One of the things with the Indian welfare state is that while it created a set of laws and welfare protections for the formal economy, which we know is a very, very, very tiny sliver, and over time made it so rigid that it serves the purposes of neither labor nor capital. There was a big gaping hole in the informal economy, which is where the bulk of India lives and works. Despite a lot of calls to welfare.

RAJAGOPALAN: Maybe because of it; that’s what’s endogenous to it, right? The informal sector is endogenous to the crazy amounts of welfare imposed on what is largely a very unskilled pool of labor.

AIYAR: The whole question of how best to ensure the social and economic rights of the informal workers, which in our constitution were placed firmly within the directive principles, left a big gap. While it always came up in electoral politics in different ways and forms, it never necessarily translated into a serious and significant attempt at building a welfare state. Health and education, of course, were part and parcel of that, which was left out of the package. It really does only come to bear in the late 1990s, after the first phase of liberalization.

I think here social movements played a very important role in bringing up and creating that mobilization pressure for the state to respond and build at least a broad kind of overtime foundation of what would be some sets of universal rights and protections for all citizens. It’s long and chequered history, but you’re absolutely right that it really only comes to bear post-liberalization and with the attempt at building this rights-based welfare state in the mid-2000s, when the UPA came to power. However, of course, state governments were experimenting in different ways. Much of what India has built up comes from the bottom up.

In all of this, corruption and accountability have always been at the heart of the challenge. The challenges of corruption are very much part and parcel of the power asymmetries of the Indian state, particularly at the cutting edge, and the capacities of citizens to have sites where they are empowered to raise accountability claims on the state. I think the rights-based movement was interesting, precisely because it sought to address this challenge through a citizen empowerment framework, but the structures of the state have never been effectively responsive to that.

I think in our impatience and frustration with this, the digitization emerged as an alternative. It emerged as an alternative that could, in the best-case scenario, bypass the layers of the state altogether. In a worst-case scenario, where you can’t bypass the state, you seek to find solutions that are aligned to the tools that you have. The solution is, how best can you perfect the panopticon to extract accountability out of the state? If I can create a command-and-control center that is going to see that the teacher is showing up in school on time, I think that the teacher is accountable—

RAJAGOPALAN: The video timestamping, the panopticon example, you’re not really exaggerating when you call it a panopticon.

AIYAR: No, literally, they are command-and-control centers. I kid you not that I’m doing this. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Teachers have to take a picture with the students and a textbook timestamped, and the biometric entry into classrooms. Oh, good God.

AIYAR: That brings me to the education question. In some ways, I think education is a perfect site to ask some of these larger questions about the role and function of the state. Lant in his work. Akshay Mangla, in his recent book, Making Bureaucracy Work, Akshay building on Lant’s work, takes a surgical view of the different tasks that the state actually performs and says, “Let’s break these down and try and understand how to map these tasks. What is the nature of that function? Therefore, what is the nature of the solution that we may need to bring in to ensure that that function is actually fulfilled to the purpose of what it is?”

Broadly, the important thing that they point out is that functions that are transaction-intensive, functions that require certain degrees of discretion, require agents on the ground to be empowered. You can potentially monitor the delivery of cash into a bank account from sitting far away in your command-and-control center because you can see step by step by step how it’s going through the layers of the system into the bank itself. You could potentially even see what day it’s taken out, but you’re unlikely to know who is taking it out, and you’re certainly, definitely not going to be able to track to what purpose it is being used.

If the goal of the state is just the transfer of money, this works fine. If the goal of the state is to ensure that you’re providing quality education, then you can go all the way to see that the money has been taken out. You could potentially, if you really want to try, track whether the individual is using that money to put their child into a private school aligned to your goal, but there’s no way you’re going to be able to know what’s actually going on. The nature of that task itself is much more discretionary.

It requires, for instance, the teacher to have a much more nuanced understanding of what students know and what they don’t. It requires the teacher, therefore, if she has to achieve her goal of teaching to whatever competency goal has been set, to reorient and reshape her teaching, depending on how the child is. Indeed, if the child comes to school having not slept very well the night before, their concentration levels would be different. If the subject today is boring to the child because the child is more interested in some analytical concept, and this one requires you to just learn up your tables no matter what, then the way you teach has to change.

It’s a much more complex, much more nuanced, much more embedded set of actions. Those embedded set of actions also need you to be very embedded in the context, so embedded and engaged with society. Interacting, deliberating, organizing around the particular local context in which you are and the local power dynamics and power relations will also shape then how the individual acts.

If you’re going to convert this transaction-intensive discretionary task into something that has to be tracked and traced, because you can track and trace things easily and you apply the same method that you’re applying to the transfer of cash into an account to holding the teacher accountable for learning, inevitably you’re going to convert what is a fairly complex process into the easiest and most easily identified, verifiable set of outputs that you seek.

You will take a classroom and you’ll say, “A, I want to ensure that the teacher is in the classroom for 45 minutes, completes the syllabus based on whatever prescribed syllabus has been given, and the measure by which I’m going to ensure that I can track learning is to see what the pass percentage inside the classroom is.” Now, what does that do for the teacher?

The teacher is going to sit in the classroom and say, “My goal is to complete my syllabus, so whether the child in the back of the classroom is getting it or not, not my problem. I’m going to complete the syllabus because if I don’t, I will not be doing my job. Secondly, because I’m going to be asked about the pass percentage, I’m going to focus on those children that I can see who are largely in the front of the classroom, metaphorically speaking, who are closer to whatever it is that the syllabus requires us to achieve, and I’m going to focus on them.”

Like one teacher who we were interviewing put it really nicely when she said, “Look, I know what level the children are in my class, but often I tell them, just rote learn this.” We say in Hindi, ratta maro. Just learn it up, memorize it, put it out, you’ll pass the exam, you will be happy, I will be happy, we can all get on with it. 

We’ve basically converted the process of teaching and learning, which is a transaction lens, a discretionary process, dynamic in its very localized context, into something that can be tracked and traceable because, in the hierarchical culture of bureaucracy, all bureaucracies are hierarchical. The Indian bureaucracy reifies its hierarchy to a fault, and so looks for tools to measure and hold its system accountable within that framework. 

It reduces everything to that, and makes the entire purpose for which you are holding the system accountable, reduced to the very narrow, specific, verifiable output goals that you can identify, to the extent that you’re holding anything accountable at all, creating a system that looks like a perfectly functional system on the surface, but inside is completely broken and dysfunctional.

RAJAGOPALAN: I think most people who are listening will not be surprised by this. You and I have been to really posh schools in Delhi, and even we had to do some version of this rote learning at some point in our lives. Some of it is just the incentives, and some of it is what’s happening inside a government school. There were two additional things that I learned from your book, which truly surprised me. 

I’ll give you what was my version of a government school teacher. It’s typically this unionized government worker who shows up in the class because they must show up in the class. They’re not very sensitive to the needs of the students. Sometimes they teach the same students in private tuitions after and do a really good job, but when they’re inside the government school, they don’t do very much. I just thought of these people as these overpaid, entitled, government servants who don’t do very much, which is, I guess, I’m not unusual in that.

What I didn’t know is two things. One, I didn’t realize how much other crap they are made to do. If the government wants to push Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, there will be Swachh Bharat Abhiyan sessions and days in that school, and there’ll be some mandate and someone will show up to check. If it is yoga day, then someone will show up to see if yoga is being done in the school. If it’s midday meal or the midday meal has changed, whatever is the flavor of that month, they need to actually not just execute and incorporate it in the curriculum, they need to actually implement it. Teachers are responsible now for yoga and midday meals and nonsense like that. That was one part that genuinely surprised me.

The second part that genuinely surprised me was how you managed to track that these folks, teachers and administration, they don’t feel like they have much agency. They feel completely powerless in the system. This is the shocker for me, because we think of these petty bureaucrats as all powerful, who can hold up our 10 standard school certificate if they wish, and can keep a kid out of school, or can keep a student behind in class. I never think of these people necessarily as powerless. Can you walk us through these two? I know these two things are interlinked. Can you just walk us through what this is, especially what you saw in schools before and after this reform was conducted, or during even?

Incompetent Petty Tyrants

AIYAR: Shruti, you’re absolutely right about how we think about the frontline bureaucracy, basically, as petty tyrants, at their worst, and mostly completely incompetent. They’re incompetent petty tyrants who have ensured that they deploy the powers of the state that they are so keen to acquire. Once they do, they get drunk on it and use that power to coerce, harass, and express the violence of the state upon the ordinary citizen. And the more marginalized you are, the poorer you are, gender, caste, all play into how the state unleashes its violence on the citizen.

Over years in different ways and forms, being in the field, interacting with frontline officers, there was always this consistent narrative that one would hear from them about their own powerlessness, that we don’t really know where and how we can fix this problem. Just one example, in early days of a research initiative that I had begun in the Center for Policy Research, this was 2008-’09, a group of us, my colleague Avni, me, colleagues from Pratham, Satyam and others, all got together to work in a set of villages in rural Madhya Pradesh, not very far away from Bhopal, the right to education had just been passed. There was a mandate within the right to education for parent-teacher associations to play a much more active role in school-level decision-making. It was commonly recognized and understood that the big binding constraint to strengthening parental participation in schools was a lack of awareness, and a kind of bureaucratic system with all these petty tyrants who didn’t want to be held accountable by ordinary citizens.

Our “mission” was to mobilize the parent-teacher associations, that we would run information campaigns, engage with parents whose children are going to the government school, mobilize them, organize meetings, so that a process which was baked into the legislation of the right to education, that parents would develop a school development plan, could actually be actualized and then taken up through the system. With a semi-research hat on, this was for me a very nice paper that I could write and get peer-reviewed, published.

I had double incentive of actually documenting this experiment and getting it all right, both for its broader good to center the developmental process, but also personally for my own gains of having a nice peer-reviewed paper published. Once we got in, reality hit, and in very simple ways. You go through this process, in fact, parents are very keen to engage with the school, they get mobilized quickly, but the first question they ask is, “Where is the money? How much money is actually devolved to the school in ways that we can actually make a plan?”

You discover along the way that, in fact, very little funding is actually allocated in a discretionary way to the school, for reasons we just talked about, because we believe that accounting is accountability. In fact, we found one rule book that told the school that they need to spend 100 rupees on the sweeper for the school, sitting in some village far, far away. It just makes no sense whatsoever, but a tightly designed structure.

Parents then are a bit disappointed, but they work something out, and we find halfway through the school year, no money has reached the bank account. What was the point of having the plan? Nothing could be done, it’s a very simple thing, there was a broken roof, they wanted to repair the roof so that during the monsoon, you could actually have classes, teachers could show up, children could show up and sit inside the classroom. You travel through the system, ask the cluster officer who was in charge of the school, ask the block officer who’s closer to the cluster and the school, go all the way up to the district, no one had any information. They would always shrug their shoulders and say, “We are powerless. We don’t know.”

In very real ways, one began to experience this powerlessness that we heard frontline officers talk about. It all came to a head when once we were sitting and interviewing, I think it was a district education officer in Bihar, and in the course of our conversation, we said, “All things considered, if you had the space and opportunity to really do something to improve the learning in your area, what would you do?” The man was very much presenting himself as a government officer drunk on power, he came two hours late for the meeting, five minions were carrying his bag, somebody else was answering his phone, lots of people were shouting. It’s all there. When I asked him why you became a government officer, he said many good things, and he also said, “I have the power.” When it came to talking about what he can do, he spoke of this in the third person: “If the government wants, it can do a lot of things. - Agar sarkaar chahti hai toh bohot kuch kar sakti hai.” I began then to say, “Let’s start taking this powerlessness claim a little more seriously.”

In some early work that predates this book with our friend and colleague Shrayana Bhattacharya, we call this the post office paradox. That you often hear frontline officers talk about themselves as post officers, not in efficiency terms, I can move paper from place X to place Y, but very much in the sense of disempowered, I move paper from place A to Y. That is all I do. You push them, then they’ll say a new form comes, we have to fill it up.

You mentioned yoga. We were once sitting in Madhya Pradesh with a block education officer who also showed up in his Ray Bans two hours late, looking very harassed with three phones, because he had been told that morning that he has to call up all the schools to make sure that the Surya Namaskar had actually been conducted during the assembly session.

This is just before the exam season in the schools, and there were many other things that a block education officer could perhaps focus on, but his whole day was set aside because he had to make these phone calls, and it was literally, “Ho gaya?” “Yes.” “Okay, next phone call. “Hua?” “Hanji.”“Theek hai.” Then he would call up his boss and say, “Yes, sir, it’s happened in 15 schools,” who would probably have had to call up his boss, and so on and so forth.

And in this, their whole telling of what their job is no longer about the classroom, the students, the teaching; it is very much about this set of post office-related paperwork forms, now coming in the form of digitized MIS, that they have to fill up to pass on upwards. Because it gets passed on into a hierarchical structure, into what Akshay Mangla so beautifully calls the legalistic norms, where the rules override the culture of what it means to get things done, that nobody asks to what end, or how can I even use this information and data towards the goal of fulfilling the purpose of the whole education bureaucracy, which is to educate our children.

All this translates into the classroom, in a really interesting, what I call in the book, this cognitive dissonance, because through the course of these reforms and similar attempts at trying to work with teachers to find different ways of interacting with children outside of the age-grade matrix and the constraints of the curriculum to get them to curriculum level expectations have been tried out in different parts of the country. Pratham has pioneered this model called teaching at the right level.

Again and again, one would hear teachers, when you ask them, “What are your constraints in the classroom?” they would speak of their constraints in this framework of the post-office state, of lacking agency, of constantly having to respond to demands from above, and of course, a broader society, and the social distance between students and teachers would come out in that context. But really as disempowered actors, never in the context of what they’re actually teaching in the classroom.

When the same teacher go through experiments like teaching at the right level, are pulled outside of the context of the classroom, and start interacting with the children on, in a framework of what children know, and how I can teach them to move them to the level that we expect them to be at a certain point in their learning trajectory, they actually teach differently. They’re using different tools and methods, and engaging.

And in fact, that’s where this whole puzzle for me had started, because every time the same teacher, and we know even through some RCTs that this happens consistently, you take the same teacher and the same children and take them back into the formal classroom setting, and you’re back to business as usual. You don’t see that rapid change. When I’m talking to teachers, they’re telling me there’s all these problems that are linked to their lack of agency and this post-office paradox.

They step outside of the classroom and they talk about what they learn, but when you try to close the circle back and say, “What is the real challenge? Why is it that children are coming to school and not learning?” They will go back to the post-office paradox and not to what they actually learned through the experience of focusing on teaching. This cognitive dissonance is the real challenge, and it is what keeps a dysfunctional system entrenched in its dysfunctionality. That’s where reform, any effort that is trying to entrench a shift in the education system to move—we like to use these phrases, now they’ve become catchphrases, outputs to outcomes. Everyone wants to focus on that.

We need data, real-time data, we say, to track and monitor, to ensure we get outcomes. We don’t get outcomes because what gets measured gets done. We don’t measure the right things. It’s none of that actually. It’s about taking this dysfunctional system and engaging with this cognitive dissonance in the way by which you can break the post-office paradox and bring the core purpose of the system back to what it’s supposed to do, which is to focus on education. Then the measurement systems will start working.

Federalism and Education

RAJAGOPALAN: When I talk to my friends who are actually school teachers, and they’re typically schoolteachers in these posh private schools, or college teachers, and things like that, they never talk about headaches coming from the principal and the administration and the prime minister. Their headaches are, “Oh, my God, parents these days have gone bananas. I’m on 15 WhatsApp groups. Every course I teach and every grade I teach has a WhatsApp group with all the parents of the kids, and they’re driving me crazy.”

Usually, the conversation’s focused around, “Remember when we were kids, our parents barely knew what grade we’re in and they never really spoke to our teachers except once a year,” and things like that. To connect this to some of your other work, it seems to me that one huge part of the puzzle is they are accountable. They’re just not accountable to the people they’re supposed to be serving. Why is the solution not dramatic federalism? Why aren’t we moving into a world where education is really provided by local government?

Now, once upon a time, I realized that villages were supposed to be these dens of parochialism and things like that. They never really had any funding. Now we’re in a different world where, for 30 years, we’ve had panchayati raj and urban local bodies. Now slowly there’s some devolution of funds going on, though not as fast as one would like. These institutions are increasingly accountable. Why aren’t we converting our frontline bureaucrats to truly be frontline bureaucrats as opposed to the branch extension of the top dog bureaucrat?

AIYAR: That’s a lovely way of bringing federalism into this conversation. Thanks, Shruti. Two things. I think, one, in my book, I call it the classroom consensus. I think you’re absolutely right. In elite circles, we talk about it as a “helicopter parent.” I have this wonderful set of notes in our observation field notes from the days we were tracking schools in Delhi of when we were sitting in the headmaster’s office in the early days of the Delhi reform.

An effort had been made to do a basic assessment of basic learning levels of students and then reorganize classrooms according to student learning levels. A group of parents just barged into the headmaster’s office. This was the day of the parent-teacher meeting. They were really angry and upset. The best ways on which you would like to see citizen-led accountability, empowered parents walking into the headmaster’s office, asking them questions, and the headmaster being like, “Oops, and now I have to respond.”

What they were saying was the following. They were saying, “how can you take a test of my child without telling me in advance that I can prepare the child for the test?” The classroom consensus is anchored both in a societal understanding of education as being about passing the examination. Heck, I do this too. We were talking just before we started recording of me and my kids, and how obsessed I get during the exams for them to just rote learn and get some good marks. “How can my child not be in the top 10 in the class?” My daughter’s looking at me, rolling her eyes, age 30, and like, “You’re just nuts, mom. Get out of here.” 

That is the broader kind of social context in which we have built out the education system. The reason I’m highlighting this, even though my work looks much less in the education space as the broader societal and parental elements of it, I do think it links back to the federalism question in two ways, in that the whole evolution of the education policy happened outside the political context, and society was moving in a different direction, finding any means that they could to educate their children.

We haven’t actually arrived at a collective, broad-based political consensus about the nature and form of public education. Public education is meant to do many things, including harness society in some ways. It is ironic that, in our founding moment, in so many ways, the imagination was that the democratic norms and transition that society would have to go through would go through the tools of the state, and yet school education was never really at the heart of that process. 

To me, that’s been one big gap that has to be bridged. It links to the local government question, because also as part and parcel of the founding moment imagination of the state being the vehicle through which democratic norms and societal transition would be infused, the state necessarily had to be at a distance from the people. In that sense, the local government has never been the anchor of many things in education, including that are at the heart of the tools that, in most polities, the state uses to build the social contract and transition society. I think that bridge has always been quite central to the challenge of education in India.

Linked to this then, if you start looking at the evolution of school education policy, particularly when we take off in the direction of mass education in the early 1990s, which coincides, as you say, with the 73rd and 74th Amendments that were passed in ’92, the original structure on which the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan actually is based came through a very important ground-level civil society mobilization. Embedded in that was the imagination that was framed in the 73rd and 74th Amendments of a very decentralized structure for delivering school education.

One of the things that we did through the course of researching this book is to really try and understand the history of school education policy. The thing that really struck us again and again is, as we are moving in the direction of mass education, the policy imagination is in fact trying to decentralize education. It is meant to go through the parent-teacher associations, the school committees, and the panchayats into the government structure. But the consensus around that, both amongst the actors on the ground, the frontline bureaucracy that is supposed to initiate this transition, and broadly society itself, was never built.

I think the reason it was never built was this absence of politics in the whole process of building out our public school system, and so there’s always been this huge gap, to the extent that panchayats came in, their deployment was instrumental. There was broad thinking that teacher accountability can best be had through teacher hiring and firing at the local government level. You and I will certainly not quibble with that understanding. Most state governments picked up this policy, this broad idea and vision, and converted it into an instrumental policy to address fiscal constraints.

As we are moving in the direction of mass education and hiring teachers at scale, teachers, teachers’ unions are powerful political lobbies, government teachers’ wages at least 10 times higher than market wages. Lant and I have done this work in a paper that was published on the CGD website that looks at this very closely, as have several others. State governments adopted this panchayat shikshak route as a way of contractualizing the teaching profession, but it was done with the goal of managing the fiscal deficit and contractualizing.

In the process of contractualizing the teacher cadre, it broke three things. It broke the professionalization of the cadre. That is really crucial. It created an internal dynamic and a power hierarchy between the permanent teachers who were getting paid significantly higher than the contractual teachers, and it failed to understand the social contract of government jobs, which in India’s political economy is very closely linked to permanency and wages. Therefore, these contract teachers in many parts of the country unionized and went to court, and the entire teacher hiring process gets stalled.

It created the worst kind of outcome, where now you have real shortages, even though you have a very large number of teachers. The allocation of teachers is completely irrational to schools. A whole set of things are happening as a consequence of using panchayats instrumentally rather than considering local governments as being at the heart of the accountability system of governance, and recognizing that education is actually a deliberative process. It requires, what Akshay says in his fabulous work of Himachal Pradesh, deliberative norms to be infused in how bureaucracy works. That can best be achieved, in my understanding, through the infusion of these norms at the local government level.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, and there are a couple of additional weird things. In India, we use the local government almost like this branch post office, which is exactly what you’ve talked about in your work, where a letter will be delivered from above. A post office analogy is great for multiple reasons. We have education, which is a state subject, but there is a huge central outlay for it. There are centrally sponsored schemes for education. There are state schemes for education.

Both of them are actually deployed at the local government level, but no one wants to be a local government employee because that’s less money and less status, so you’d prefer to be a state government employee, even though it is a mess, right? All these teachers, they feel like they have no agency and accountability, but they would still rather be a state government or a central government employee. That’s one bizarre part. The other tragedy I see in all of this is, when I exit the big metropolitan areas, and going to UP and going to Bihar, people really value education. That’s the reason I think we need to switch.

When the framers of the constitution were sitting together and deliberating, their baseline assumption was that there isn’t a demand for education bottom up. There isn’t a demand for equality. There isn’t a demand for a lot of the things that a liberal democracy requires bottom up, which is why we are not going to focus on local government, right? Now, I think this was a flawed assumption then, it’s a flawed assumption now, but everything has changed now.

The most regressive places in India, where you have khap panchayat saying all kinds of ridiculous, misogynist things, even they care about girl-child education, right? I mean, they don’t want the girls to wear a miniskirt, but they want the girls to go to school, because even they get it.

AIYAR: Oh, one of the most beautiful sights in India that started with Nitish Kumar’s experiment with the cycles back in the day—

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes.

AIYAR: —is that everywhere you go now, there are girls—

RAJAGOPALAN: There are girls on cycles.

AIYAR: —in school uniforms with their hair in ribbons, riding their cycles, going somewhere. That tells you a lot about the phenomenon that, as you described, everybody values education.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Once upon a time, they may have thought, “Oh, if it’s the village, panchayat that does the education system, Dalits may be left out, women may be left out and so on.” We don’t have that problem anymore. We’ve come a very long way. What is stopping us from switching that up and saying, “Hey, local governments are best placed to decide what are the learning disadvantages of their students? What is the local language? Do they want to focus on math? Do they need three extra math tutors or an extra sweeper?” What is getting in the way of this imagination?

How to Build Empowerment

AIYAR: There’s many explanations, and many of your listeners will be familiar to many of them, particularly the broader politics and the nature of power-sharing and how that’s played out. But there’s something that I learnt that I think was different, through the years of studying school systems and trying to ask and answer this question, because it was a puzzle for me too.

The puzzle for me began with the district education officer that I mentioned earlier, who would talk about the sarkar wistfully when it came to what it can do to improve education as something that was far away, but embodied all the power of the sarkar in his behavior with everybody, including us, as me and my colleague were sitting there, and he kind of presses his buzzer and tells his chaprasi, his peon who walks in, “Tell everybody to be quiet because the Delhi madams have come.” Like he wanted to show that I am an important person, these two madams from Delhi have come.

He spoke to us as most government officers will, very cognizant and conscious of the power that he commands by virtue of being a government officer. Yet the sarkar, when it comes to doing things, is something so far away. That raised for me this important question of - when we talk about agency and empowerment of a system that is caught in a set of hierarchical norms and an organizational culture that has beaten out its own agency from it, how does empowerment actually work? We did, in various different ways, try to ask headmasters, frontline officers, panchayats, “If you had an untied pool of money for the development of your village, what would you do with it?”

They were all kind of scratching their heads. You don’t get a good answer. I remember, in some early conversations with Manish Sisodia, when they had begun the experiment, two things stood out, one was that they created an untied pool of, I forget exactly how much money it was, five or 15 lakhs. There’s a huge difference between five or 15, but it was a substantive amount of money for infrastructure in their schools. He was puzzled as to why it wasn’t being used. 

Or in meetings that he would have with headmasters, where he would say, “Look, I’m the education minister. I’m here genuinely wanting to do something. Tell me what you want. I will make it happen,” and there’s complete silence in the room. One way of responding to this is just to dismiss it, by saying, “Look, this is a system that just is incapable of doing,” and so in our frustration, we will say, “I’m here sitting in the secretariat, I know the five things that need to be done. I’m just going to push them all down below,” which is basically what happens. But if you start interrogating it a little bit more, something new dawned on me.

It is about the culture of the system. If the system has been designed to organize itself and build its own organizational ethos such that it defines its sense of performance by virtue of being responsive to sets of orders, it finds it very hard when you kind of with a butcher’s knife say, “Okay, I’m going to cut through the tyranny of the hierarchy and hand over power to you. Now go do.”

It just doesn’t know what to do. It gets stymied. That often creates a vicious cycle. Another example of this in a different sector, National Rural Health Mission, which was launched in 2006, with great power, says, “We want to do local-governance-led health systems building, and so we will create these pools of untied money that, at the district and the panchayat level, could be used for local-level planning to improve health systems, for anything.” There was complete flexibility. They were called untied pools of money. When we used to track these funds, we would find them completely unspent. Many explanations.

One core part of that explanation was the fact that the system just didn’t know how to react. Now, we often consider this to be a capacity constraint. “Let’s do training on how to implement things so that people can start making plans.” To me, it isn’t a capacity constraint. It is the capability element of state capacity that was missing, which is an organization that is so embedded in a particular ethos of functioning in a certain way, being asked without changing the rest of the system in any substantive way to do something that it simply is not designed to do, then finds itself completely unable to do it, creating the justification and legitimacy for further centralizing powers.

There is politics, there’s power-sharing, and the politics that comes out of power-sharing and the lack of willingness of the system to really decentralize and devolve, but to me, there’s also this bit that we don’t talk about enough. That’s why the need to reorient our discourse on state capacity away from more training, more MIS, more panopticon to beat down the discipline and try and get things done, to start saying, “you cannot infuse agency overnight.”

In fact, when reviewing my book, Rajesh Veeraraghavan used a very nice term, which I was kicking myself, saying, “I wish I had thought of that.” He called it the tyranny of the “flexible circular,” because in the early days of the Delhi reform, again, a similar attempt was made to try and give flexibility to all the actors. When we would walk into schools, the system that is used to functioning based on whatever circular or order it receives in the morning of, is puzzling over, it says “and/or,” so what is it? Is it “and,” or is it “or”? Because we don’t want to be hauled up for doing something that was meant to be “and,” but we took it as “or.” 

Really what the language of the circular was trying to do was to say, “You can decide because this whole reform is about empowering the teacher,” and the teacher is going like, “Ah-ah, this is making no sense to me,” so you can’t do it that way. You have to gently, carefully, and slowly nurture agency and change, from which I think the genuine demand for decentralization will come from the bottom up. Let me close by saying this, I think the 73rd and 74th Amendment were in some senses a top-down effort at creating decentralization, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

AIYAR: It happens in parliament, and then it says that states should or could or may. It doesn’t demand that states do it, because local governments is a state subject; it says, “It may do it.” That was one of the tricky things of the language of the 73rd and 74th Amendment, and states do different things. 

I have often puzzled about the following. You have written so much about this. If the government of India were to say today, “I am not going to set up the central finance commission,” don’t you think even BJP states will be out on the streets, demanding and commanding that the fundamental constitutional right that you have as a state of having a constitutional body determine on the basis of a formulae, which we can fight over, but a formulae, how taxes will be devolved and shared between center and state were not to be put in place, the whole system would break down? Yet, when it comes to local governments, most states have stopped setting up state finance commissions, and surprisingly, even though—

RAJAGOPALAN: And ones that haven’t are disastrous.

AIYAR: Totally disastrous. Even though we have these very hotly contested local government elections, local governments are not on the streets fighting their state governments for not setting up state finance commissions or not fulfilling the recommendations of the state finance commissions, because I think this exposure of the possibilities of what local governance can actually do and building the terms of the social contract between citizens and the state as local governments are expanding the surface area of the state and creating sites for this everyday engagement happens through the top rather than emerges carefully, slowly, and in a nurtured fashion from the bottom up.

Where you get civil society mobilizing, engaging, consistently doing things outside of the training classroom, you’ll see occasional sites of change, but that’s small and in small quarters. Ultimately, this is going to be a political battle, that can only be achieved when the demand comes from the sites itself, which have been consistently disempowered. I think that’s where we need to move the conversation.

RAJAGOPALAN: I couldn’t agree with you more, and I wouldn’t even use the word disempowered. I think they weren’t empowered in the first place.

AIYAR: Yes, exactly. Yes, you’re right.

RAJAGOPALAN: I get this from the great Richard Wagner, who taught me public finance and federalism and pretty much most of what I know. He always made a distinction between federalism and decentralization. He said, “If you say decentralization, it means there is a higher node of power, and they are giving up their power and authority to a lower level. Federalism means there are multiple nodes of power that can’t be taken away or given.”

To that extent, you’re absolutely right. India is not truly federal, because we are not fiscally federal, and all of it is pointless, it becomes a pointless decentralization exercise, where people will decentralize responsibility and accountability, but they won’t decentralize the funds. Eventually, we just need to do this bottom up, you’re right, local governments and panchayati raj government should be out with pitchforks, saying, “We demand 5% of all GST to be LGST or something like that.” Like why are we not saying that all consumption taxes are local? You consume locally. Right?

AIYAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Why aren’t we just moving towards something like that, even within a centralized system? I have no idea. Forget the devolution and the state legislature passing law to say, “You can raise property taxes and collect stamp duty or user fees or something.” Something’s got to give. I find this so tragic, is India has scale. Even the smallest villages can actually have a fully functional school, which is not true in Europe and the United States and vast parts of Africa. They’re very unevenly distributed. The cities have lots of people and have scale, and the villages don’t. India has just an enormous amount of scale, you could have multiple schools in every village, and it would still break even in some sense. The fact that we just don’t do this just breaks my heart.

AIYAR: There are interesting tensions. I, honestly, don’t quite know how to sensibly think about this, but let me throw it out there. Let’s stay with education for a minute. Also, let’s take the local government out of the equation for a minute and just talk about center states. Because the local government story adds a whole other dynamic here. If you look at education policy in India, at one level, you could argue that it is genuinely federal in that much of the innovation, which eventually becomes national policy comes from innovation at the state government.

If you step outside of education, whether it’s health, whether it’s rural employment, much of what the government has done at a national scale has been experimented subnationally, and then made its way all the way up to the state. If you look at many of these early experiments that shape national policy, in some cases, like the midday meals, it came through politics. But in many other cases, it was actually organized civil society, sometimes elite civil society forging alliances with bureaucrats to experiment and try different things out, and then slowly build this up into a national conversation, which eventually makes its way into national policy.

In some ways, I think that that’s a genuine federal achievement. Yet, when it gets to becoming national policy, the tools of national policy are so deeply centralizing that the very idea that comes from the ground becomes a centralized choke on any kind of innovation at the state level. 

One silly and simple example. Now, I’m talking somewhere between 2010-2015, when I was doing a lot of field work in Bihar. I was chatting with the school teacher and the head of the SAG, who was making the midday meal. Her big grouse was that the district gives you the menu, the menu was coming from the state, the state was preparing the menu because some orders had come from the national government or some such.

RAJAGOPALAN: Of course.

AIYAR: The menu required you to prepare certain types of vegetables on certain days. Some vegetables on certain days were easily available in the local haat. Other vegetables were not available on those days in the local haat. It’s a village in rural Bihar, so there’s highly unlikely probability that there’s a fridge in the school kitchen. She had this complete confusion. She would mostly do her own thing, but there were a couple of cases of bad food and—

RAJAGOPALAN: Food poisoning.

AIYAR: —food poisoning, et cetera in many parts, and I think some parts of Bihar too, which kind of put the whole system on alert. For that period, there were inspections happening. She was like, “Well, I’m supposed to ensure that I give good-quality fresh food so that there’s no food poisoning, but on the other hand, I’m supposed to make lauki on a day that there’s no lauki available here. I can’t go all the way to the district market in the morning and come back in time to cook it.” 

It’s just like this whole something that was meant to be so genuinely decentralized hangs like a noose on the neck of the entire system. There is this tension, right? As I try to unpack this puzzle, one part of it also is that, as you see post liberalization, there is also inherent centralization at the state level too and how states are operating. The chief minister’s office becomes the power center, and everything else has to buzz around it. Across the system, something about how our politics has evolved, and the dynamics of bureaucracy have evolved, that it has created this culture where even genuinely federalizing moments in our history have often become victims of centralization, almost like the minute you get too successful, centralization becomes the means by which your success will start getting unraveled.

How to handle this tension in India is something that we need to think a lot harder about. Because after all, isn’t it a genuinely good thing that an experiment in Tamil Nadu became national policy? There is broad-based consensus around this.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes and no. I would love if an experiment in Tamil Nadu became policy in Bihar, because the Biharis went to Tamil Nadu, came back and said, “Hey, that’s a great experiment.” 

AIYAR: But you need something to bridge it, no?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, that experiment becomes—

AIYAR: That’s the role of the government of India.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, that I think is the problem, because these are schools that don’t have a fridge. Now you can’t implement a midday meal scheme quite the same way, right? You can’t do eggs quite the same way you do in Tamil Nadu in like parts of Uttar Pradesh. I know what you mean by there’s a tension there. But to me, all of it points towards “We need to step away from this crazy centralization.” That’s the Gordian knot, like how do we do that?

AIYAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: Because, again, you’re right, the politics has to enable that. Like bureaucrats and civil society and experts writing papers is not going to make anyone give up their power and budgets. Right?

AIYAR: Yes.

Is the Delhi Experiment Generalizable? 

RAJAGOPALAN: Okay. Now, Delhi is super interesting for a couple of reasons. Normally, what you describe, the deputy chief minister or the education minister just sort of rolling up their sleeves and getting involved, it can’t happen at the state level, because they can’t travel through the states, there are too many schools. Now, Delhi is fairly compact. It’s a very large city with lots of people, but it’s still a city, so they’re kind of operating almost like a mayoral function as opposed to education ministers in a large state. Question one is, what were the reforms they tried in Delhi, that you document, and could this have been possible anywhere other than Delhi? As you try to generalize this outside of Delhi, can it be done?

AIYAR: Yes, because the broad principles of what was attempted, and the broad principles of what we learnt of what actually eventually kind of starts moving the system. Let me preface my remarks by saying the following. What we were trying to do in Delhi was purposefully not an evaluation of the reform. Because we wanted to document the process through which an idea converts into action on the ground, where political will, at least for the time that we were in those schools, was intact. Because usually, very often, these studies will tell you that there was no political will or the political will changes.

Here we get a fairly substantive period of five to seven years where political will is firmly in place and the government has eked out space to do whatever it wants to do. We said, here is where the rubber hits the road and I want to understand how the rubber is hitting the road. I’m not looking to see whether five years of intervention is necessarily improving the quality of schools and taking them from A to B.

I’m trying to understand how the change unfolds and what it does to the school. Over time, and there’s lots of chaos that unfolds, and there are many challenges, there are some good ideas, there are some not-so-good ideas, as is the real world of reform. Like you’ll always get this mixture of many things going on. To me, over time, what I saw was not a perfect and beautiful process that leads to the best outcome, but a very, very slow, yet substantive, very, very small, yet very, very significant change, which I best document through staffroom conversations between teachers. 

Teachers are still complaining about everything under the sun. They still feel like they’re being beaten down by our system, they have no agency, this whole reform is like one more headache. They don’t fully understand what is being asked of them. They are being told that they have to come to meetings to interact and engage in a way that is on paper participatory, but the hierarchy always means that that doesn’t quite work like that.

The best form of democracy in some ways is democracy where the leader is thinking that I’m talking to everybody and bringing them on board, but basically, I want everybody to do what I’m saying. A version of that is all unfolding over here as well. Resistance, distortion, pushback, everything is going on, but because it has happened over time consistently, and in the process of experimentation, one thing stayed steady, which is we all have to get with the program of saying, “We need to start asking ourselves what’s actually happening in the classroom.”

Through all the craziness and the mess, suddenly teachers are talking about their students, within the frameworks of examinations, no doubt, and within the framework of rote learning and everything else, but they’re talking about their students and what their students know and don’t know. Then suddenly we hit COVID. The whole school system closes down for two years. When schools reopen, there’s a kind of moment where all of this comes together. It comes together because COVID means that there’s nobody to blame for the fact that children have had certain amounts of learning loss.

Teachers are then able to deploy all the things that they heard, they learnt, they engaged with into this collective task of saying, “We need to bridge the learning loss.” We did one short survey right after schools opened post-COVID. Late 2022 we started talking to teachers, and we got a sense that something is happening here. In early 2023, we did the survey. Really, teachers were talking about the last child in the classroom in a much more nuanced way than they had ever done before. To me, that is what can be learnt and deployed at scale, which is, no reform is going to give you a magic bullet immediately.

It is a slow and long-term process, so you have to be patient. Sounds trite, but it’s essential. In the process of being patient, going back to what I was talking about earlier, when you try and rip the Band-Aid off and say, “I’m giving the local government agency, do something, it doesn’t know what to do with it, then we get confused and start doing capacity. Then we create new rules to tell them what to do, and we’re back to square one.” What we need to do is to, what I call in the book, identify the interstitial spaces within the system and try and nurture them, so you’re exposing the system to sites of possibility.

In Delhi, one of the things that stayed consistent over time was the presence of the mentor teacher. They did a lot of administration. They were often challenged in many other ways. Sometimes the power elements of bureaucracy also found its place in how the mentor teachers were behaving with other teachers. They were constantly repeating the mantra of learning and foundational literacy and numeracy to teachers in conversations.

The second thing that stayed consistent was that they kept doing camps and missions, reading camps, foundational literacy and numeracy camps, what became eventually something called Mission Buniyaad over like three, four, five years. The teacher was taken out of the context of the classroom, exposed to this. She went back. She still finds the classroom very constraining. She’ll still complain about the exams and the excessive syllabus and all else that is sort of mess that we have created in our education system and in the classroom. 

Yet, because this interstitial space has been identified and nurtured, she’s going back into the classroom and saying, “Okay, maybe I have to think about the fourth row, not just the third row. Maybe that kid is behind not because that kid is naughty but because that kid needs a little bit of remedial on English,” and so the dynamics are changing. It’s very subtle, it’s very small, it is not going to give you the fancy number of evaluation that you’re looking for, but that you see change.

I think that is something that is possible to do at scale. We are seeing in different states in India examples of this. When you clearly articulate the goal, which I think on foundational literacy and numeracy, the National Education Policy does a good job. It very clearly articulates foundational literacy and numeracy as the goal. It brings in NIPUN Bharat, and it mobilizes the bureaucracy to say, “Okay, this is a goal. Let’s all collectively start moving towards it.” You see very small but some change towards a direction.

Where I fear on NEP and the achievements that have been made, is that, as usual, we are now beginning to make the assessment, the be all and end all. That foundational literacy is the be all and end all. You achieve this, that is education, and you stop there. Of course not. It’s a trajectory, it’s a pathway, it’s step one in a larger imagination of what education is.

RAJAGOPALAN: That was the floor. Right?

AIYAR: Yes. All we are doing now is just saying, “Let’s concentrate on the floor and build it up,” but if you only focus on the floor, without thinking about everything else, you’re not going to get anywhere. That’s where the gap is. Just to say, to answer your question, Delhi is an unusual and small place. It was perhaps momentary. The biggest test is going to be now with the change of government.

Anyone who is even deeply critical of AAP and AAP’s work, and in fact critical of things that they try to do in schools, there’ll always be debate and that’s healthy and good, will agree that this is one political party that, amongst many other things, also sought to gain political legitimacy by centering education. For good, bad, it created action in schools. Does that action in schools and bringing through mega PTMs, et cetera parents into the school system a little bit more shift the social contract so that as citizens, we ask what is basically a local government, and especially now with the NCT Act, Delhi is really just a local government, sadly.

Does it create that bottom-up pressure for some kind of continued focus on the goal of improving the quality of schooling in government schools to continue over time? I think that’s the test. I don’t have a positive feeling just yet, but it’s early days, and we will see. To the extent that there are learnings from Delhi, that can be extended broadly to India as a whole, but beyond India, to how we think about the challenge of state capacity and how we debate the state, questions of accountability, questions of agency, and most importantly, bringing the whole norms and structures of the state into the conversation on state capacity, I think there’s a lot that Delhi taught us, which is why I called it Lessons in State Capacity.

RAJAGOPALAN: You and I have grown up in Delhi, right? We remember Delhi as this very bureaucratic central government, trees are lining paved roads kind of place, to it exploded in size, and there was a lot of migration and there was influx of people from all different states and communities. Then suddenly, there was no real compact between even the citizens, forget the citizens and the state.

It became one of those places where people come to earn a living and it’s quite transient. One lovely thing that I think this experiment has at the very least achieved in Delhi is, there is some consensus that schooling and schools are supposed to be places where you learn. I think that’s a big deal. That sounds really obvious, but we’ve always treated schools as a place to credential. Right?

AIYAR: Yes.

RAJAGOPALAN: People finish their 10th so that they can get a pass certificate, because they didn’t have a birth certificate or some other form of legibility. Schools have performed a selection function, a legibility function, a credentialing function. At least we can now agree that they are supposed to perform a learning function and that’s kind of the core of it, and the citizens are deeply part of it and the administration is part of it. That I think is not a tiny thing, as you point out. That’s a pretty big deal, all said and done. Hopefully, the institutional memory carries them through.

AIYAR: Yes. Some of the other experiments that they did, which I initially was skeptical about, I think the implementation was slightly half-baked. There’s a lot more that needs to be done there. Everyday politics always takes over in different ways. The Happiness Curriculum, the Enterprise Curriculum, vocational, they identified schools of excellence in the second term and signed with the IB for a set of schools to do the IB briefly. There were many strengths and weaknesses to all of this. One of the weaknesses was that too many things were being thrown at it.

But whatever all that may have been, I think the fundamental core spirit that we can take to any part of India and any kind of politics, political party could adopt, which is the idea that you also want to show that government schools can offer to parents what private schools offer. Elite Delhi is all moving away from CBSE, ICSE to IB, if you can afford it. Should a child that goes to a public school not have that opportunity? If not, then should we have a social conversation about why IB is probably not the best thing for students. It may be, it may not be, I don’t know.

I’m just throwing this out as how you can generate a societal conversation. That is where I think the public discourse that is largely led by elites needs to also adopt and adapt to bringing these issues into conversation. Because after all, how will we arrive at these conclusions if it stays within domains of rarefied policy conversations or what educationists talk about behind closed doors? We need to bring this discourse out. Unfortunately, there are also many real challenges with the particular contemporary political moment in India where everyone is preoccupied dealing with that.

Some of these very fundamental terms of the social contract that actually frame the nature and form of democracy are getting left out. I wonder if the Indian state actually delivered on these core rights to citizens that the urge to occasionally experiment with more authoritarian possibilities may not occur. Because remember, there’s always that underlying thing of, “Well, the trains can run on time.”

Portability and Education 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Before I let you go, I want to make one more connection with some of your other work. You’ve written, I don’t even know for how long at this point, about portability of benefits, and how a lot of the federalism and migration and social protection, which are all deeply intertwined in India, suffer because we didn’t have portability. The poorest among us were actually leaving their villages to go find seasonal employment in cities where they had no safety net. Thanks in part to some of your work, we’ve had some introduction of portable benefits like food rations and things like that.

Why is portability not a good experiment when it comes to schooling? This can, of course, be done through vouchers, which is fairly straightforward. This is an old idea. It’s there in the developed world. It’s there in the developing world. Give students and families the money which can only be used at a school and they go to whichever school they want. A different kind of portability is, there are different buckets of budgets that are given to the local government and they can port within those budgets, but they have to be accountable to the people.

Are you going to spend the money on extra tutors for math or are you going to spend it on textbooks or are you going to spend it on making sure the roof doesn’t leak? There’s an element of which vendor you use and who’s empaneled, that kind of portability. Why is that not a good idea? Like why wouldn’t you bring your work from there into schooling?

AIYAR: Well, in a sense, I do because any conversation about genuine local government participation in the school system essentially requires greater agency for the local government to determine how best to allocate funds in ways that make more sense at the local government level. But of course, it has to be a little bit more nuanced than that, right? I think, again, going back to Lant’s work of looking at the different types of tasks that come together to make education, there are certain sets of standards and norms that have to be created. In order for a system to be genuinely portable, everyone has to be able to align towards that basic set of standards and norms.

That is, in some senses, an expert-oriented national function that we arrive at through a deliberative societal conversation. Essentially, the role of the expert is to convert that societal consensus into a set of standards and norms that need to be fulfilled across the board. Then there is this set of actions that need to come together for the actual act of schooling to unfold, where degrees of discretion are required, such that a school could say, “I am deploying a bunch of first-generation students who have X, Y, Z need, and so I would like to use my funds in certain ways.”

Tribal communities, migrant communities, everybody’s education needs will be different within that larger framework of standards and norms. It is, to me, a challenge of decentralization, or deepening federalism, to draw on the very important caveat that you gave to the use of the term decentralization. Precisely that, if we are genuinely to move towards greater federalism, the idea is not to say that the school in Jangpura can teach the way it wants to and the school in Burari should teach in a different way, it is to say that there’s a broad set of standards that we societally agree upon that are acceptable of basic sets of competencies and learning trajectories that we expect all students to achieve.

That’s why you have boards, like the boards set that standard, and how you teach has to have degrees of flexibility, which is very much within the ambit and powers of what ought to be at the local government level. The US is a really good example of this with school district sites, which are these heavily contested parts of what makes for the local government. There are challenges, there are questions of equity, regional inequality, which in very federal structures we have, but there are ways of dealing with that without undermining the fundamental principles of federalism.

RAJAGOPALAN: The US system is the opposite of portable, right? You’re kind of trapped within your own school district, unless you can physically move your location and buy a house somewhere else and things like that.

AIYAR: Yes, that’s how you enter into the system.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, the PDS kind of portability, how would we design that for local schools? Let’s stick with government schools for now. Let’s not say just get a voucher and go to a private school. Because I know the passion project is to improve government schools, so I don’t want to shift your goalpost and say you should have a different goal. Even within that goal, given that India has scale, why not say that these are five villages where your school voucher is portable between any of these five villages and go to the school that you wish to go to?

AIYAR: I don’t necessarily have any response to that apart from saying that that requires degrees of decentralization that we simply don’t have in the system. In some senses, the logic for why the school had to come to the village was defined in a context facing back to now 30-35 years, where mobility was a challenge, and portability was not something that they thought of as much, and so we always assume that if the school is closest to where the student is, the ease with which the student can actually access the school is strengthened. Of course, there has been a lot of change in local context now.

Infrastructure has improved. Accessibility has improved. The cycle scheme was, in fact, a very good example of precisely a version of that portability, that school bachche ke pass nahi hai [if the school is not near the student] then why not give them mobility so that they can go to the school. That was exactly the thinking behind that. I think these are experiments that can be achieved within a framework that recognizes that what can be done best at that level of government must and should be done best. The principle of subsidiarity that needs to be baked into the system.

There’s one other last point I want to make, which is quite central to both the portability question and more broadly, how we’ve always thought about welfare, which is that there’s been some part of universalization of welfare now around a certain set of benefits, pensions, maternity benefits, et cetera, but largely, we haven’t built the welfare state as deeply intertwined into an enabler of the structural transformation. Because in our early days, we made this kind of separation between formal and informal, where to the extent that there were labor protections baked in, it was largely in the formal sector, and we took it to an extreme that was unhelpful for both.

Then we ignored the informal, which was largely in the rural and only built this up post liberalization. But again, it was built around the context of precarity and a floor of universalization of certain sets of benefits and their resource constraints were always used as an excuse to ensure that this was limited and targeted. And it was a big fight to even get us to start thinking about these as universal benefits. I think now with cash transfers, we are moving in that direction a little bit, but again, as we have moved towards cash transfers, welfare has become very much a compensation for an economy to draw on. Rathin Roy’s famous way of kind of putting it as a compensation for a state that is simply not able to be a genuine developmental state and create an economic opportunity for all. So we’re not thinking about welfare in that way, which is one of the reasons why education and health often gets set aside too. 

And I think that’s really the challenge, a genuinely 21st-century welfare state that supports all Indians and is in all ways universal is a state where welfare is integrated into the structural transformation of the economy, such that it actually generates economic opportunity and shared prosperity for all. And that’s where we are lacking. So we just don’t have the imagination for that. And increasingly we are just treating this along with this digitization as not much else than a new cash transfer of 2,000 rupees and 3,000 rupees, all of which are really pittance in the larger scheme of things. You are addressing basic distress. You’re not dealing with the larger challenges that need to be addressed. 

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s a little bit depressing, but still a great note to end on and thank you for the book. I’ve read you for so long, Yamini, but it still surprised me in the following sense - that we know that building state capacity is a huge thing and it’s not easy and it’s taken a hundred years in many other places and things like that. But I think you really open the hood and show us the mechanics of how state capacity and capability can be built, how bureaucrats can learn, how we can all learn. And so that’s pretty interesting. Now how far we go with this is a separate matter, but it’s very useful and it’s so refreshing to read this compared to the RCTs and I don’t know, people scraping big data on Python and doing some measurement exercise, which is pointless. So this is just super refreshing and very well written. Thank you so much for the book. 

AIYAR: Thank you. Thank you so much. So delighted to hear you say that you made my week, my month, my year. So really appreciate it. As always, it’s such fun talking to you. Your questions open up all such a wide range of areas of thinking and you kind of push one to pull it all together to try and tell a comprehensive story. Really appreciate and really enjoyed this chat, so thank you.