The Curious Case of the Powerful yet Powerless Bureaucrat

Salimah Samji Welcome to the Building State Capability Talk series and welcome to all of you who are joining us online. We’re really excited to be able to have virtual participants for this talk as well. My name is Salimah Samji and I am the director of Building State Capability. I will be your moderator today. For those of you who want to know what Building State Capability is, who we are, what we do, there is a page on that pillar and that has a QR code that will give you all the information about us. Our next event will be on Wednesday, November 16th at 4 PM, and it will be on the agile responses to the Ukrainian humanitarian crisis, the power of cell phones. So we look forward to seeing you at that event. Today, we are delighted to have Yamini Aiyar with us to talk about the curious case of the powerful yet powerless bureaucrat. Yamini is the president and Chief Executive of the Center for Policy Research, CPR in India. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow and Founder of the Accountability Initiative, housed at CPR. And through the Accountability Initiative, she is credited with pioneering one of India’s largest expenditure-tracking surveys for elementary education. She is also a regular columnist in newspapers such as the Hindustan Times, Live Mint, and the Indian Express. Welcome, Yamini. The format of today’s session is Yamini is going to spend the first 20 to 30 minutes talking and then we will sit down and open it up for a Q&A. So if you have questions, just hold them to the end, hopefully on paper and pen so you can write them down.

Yamini Aiyar So Salimah and I ventured out into the big, bad world of trying to understand the impact of some of the accountability efforts that were unfolding on the ground in India around social service delivery, specifically the social audits. And I think we did one of the first studies on not so much the impact, but the process of the social audit and what kind of immediate effects it has on the ground. And it was particularly interesting because and actually a real privilege for us, because this was a very crucial moment in which the narrative of state capacity was building out in the Indian context, in the sense that it was the early 2000 or the mid-2000. So India was at a particularly different juncture at the time than it is today. There was a lot of enthusiasm, excitement, the economy was growing and bursting and the possibility of us overtaking China was very much in the mind space of all that ran the Indian economy, ran the Indian government. It was a time of hope, but it was also a time when that hope couldn’t ignore the reality of the failure of the Indian state, the abject failure of the Indian state to deliver even some of the most basic things to all Indians, and the questions of inequality, or more importantly, the questions of what it will take to ensure that there is equitable participation in the Indian economy, as it was growing, were front and foremost in minds of civil society activists of the Indian citizenry that dealt with the Indian state on a day to day basis. And it became impossible for the public discourse to completely ignore that, even though it would like to ignore it. And a lot of the framing around it was around the challenge of corruption. The Indian state fails because the Indian state is deeply corrupt. Petty corruption is a reality and certainly was a reality back in the 2000. And it built out indigenous, grassroots, public discourse around questions of accountability, questions of transparency, and really thinking about the challenge of state capacity from the point of view of the of the cutting edge of the citizen state interface. You know, at the core of this whole thing was the idea of citizenship, a concept that I’ll come back to through the course of my talk and the social audit was this sort of practical, tangible attempt at converting this imagination of these or these high level concepts of accountability, transparency into a very real experience of what it takes for citizens and state to interface with each other, to make claims of accountability, and for the state to respond to those claims of accountability in more ways than one. It was a heady and exciting moment, and I think it framed the challenge of state capability or state capacity. I’m going to use these two words interchangeably. I know that they are conceptually very different. I use them interchangeably because capacity is a better understood term in the Indian context, so it’s easier to just take capacity and get around the problem. But really what I mean is capability and we can talk about that in the course of the Q&A as well. But, but at the heart of all of this was the idea that deeper, more robust democracy with tangible tools of articulating democracy in its every day would be at the heart of what would build the Indian state. But I think in some of one of the consequences of that imagination, which we came to through the course of our work as well, was that it didn’t, it didn’t pursue a deep inquiry into the Indian state at all. And in the course of that early work with Salima, one of the questions that kept lingering in both our minds, if I may, you know, you can always absolve yourself of all all that I attribute to you later. But let me attribute away for the moment. But, you know, one of the things that was very tangible and visible was in these moments of direct contact, of directly making, there was a complete inability of the state to respond. So, you know, one example was at the time, we still hadn’t gone into this fancy mode of digital digital payments. Payments were being made under the National Employment Guarantee to those who were working in these programs through the post office system. But the Postal Office is a central bureaucracy and it is completely distanced from the rural development bureaucracy that was implementing the National Rural Empowerment Guarantee under which the social audit process was unfolding. So even though there would be a lot of complaints about delays of payments or possible fraud, ghost beneficiaries, etc., etc., those who were doing the social audit simply did not have the power to do very much with vis a vis the postal office except open a file and will come up. We have come to that as well. But, you know, all of this sort of reminded, reminded us or brought home to us the reality that any discourse on accountability, any discourse on state capacity or state capability needs to begin with an inquiry of how the state functions, its organization, its own internal sociology in order. To be able to better understand both why it feels to be accountable or is reluctant to be accountable, and what it will take to make it genuinely accountable. Salima then moved on to do bigger and better things, and I stayed on in India, but I had become curious. And so while Salima was here, I spent the next few years roaming around parts of North India doing work on expenditure tracking and elementary education, and in the course of that process, spent an inordinate amount of time with frontline bureaucrats. The block, which is the last mile of the administrative architecture in India, which has a block education officer and a block development officer. Extremely powerful people. Almost everyone I spoke to and you know, I’m talking about a range of states. So I spent a lot of time in Bihar, but Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh. At the time it was the undivided Andhra Pradesh and eventually broke into two states, but also saw subnational governments with different levels of capability defined in terms of the ability to actually deliver on service delivery outcomes. Yet across all of these places, I would encounter very similar kinds of people. These were largely men, but some women who had spent the bulk of their twenties applying, taking every conceivable examination that there is to be part of the Indian state. They all started with high hopes of the Holy Grail of the Indian Administrative Service taking the UPSC, and then ended up eventually in taking whatever jobs they got and eventually found themselves in the state cadre, which is extremely prestigious. And you know, when we would talk about why a government job matter to them, they said all the things that we know. It’s all about the power, it’s all about the status. And you could see that visible and palpable all the time. You know, every time we go in, there’s hordes of people. But the people would be treated in a particular way, shoved to the side. The bureaucrat was always really busy. The bureaucrat had really important phone calls to make. The bureaucrat is balking. I mean, it was all a very important projection of power. Yet in the conversations I had with them and we would sort of once we’d move beyond the sort of artifacts of power that were visible and talk to them about their daily work and what their daily lives were, it was always a conversation of powerlessness across all types of bureaucracy. Now it’s true that, you know, you go from the politician, you go from the prime minister all the way down to the local panchayat in India, and you’ll find everybody blaming the other because they lack power. But it seemed to me interesting that as an outsider, I’m a visible outsider when I was talking when when we spend time in these offices and there is a lot of sort of projection of power and a very concerted attempt to make that power visible, tangible and expedient, especially for a party, the outsider. When we talk about what they do, it was always a narrative of I am just a post officer, what can I do? And my post office, they didn’t mean post office in the efficient sense of mail moving from one place to the next. They meant post office in the sense of moving people from one desk to the next. They spoke about how they spend all that time responding to orders. They come from the top. We respond. We respond at the bottom. Now, overbearing bureaucracy is defined on the back of rules and order. There’s a reason why these rules and orders exist, but they seem to have become prisoners of those orders and prisoners of them in more ways than one. But most importantly, we would push when you push the conversation and talk to them about what they can do. After all, they are the powerful state and this they because they are the cutting edge of the citizens state interface, they are the state where people come. I mean, the most visible bureaucrat for the average Indian is not the prime minister. It is a block education officer is the Punjab Secretariat and people depend on the state for many things. The state is all powerful, especially in rural areas in India. So people are coming in hordes and they like the people coming after all, that is also a way of exuding your power yet. So when you would say so, what can you do to improve education or what can you do to improve the state of healthcare? There would be this struggle on their shoulders and say, well, they say this in Hindi and then I translated into English because it’s more powerful in Hindi. Sarkar You hear the whole podcast that the mother magazine and others like that. So the government, one story of the state, one story, it can do a lot of things, but I cannot do these things. And I heard this so often that I’d become completely immune to it until a research associate of mine who would come with me to the rural Bihar for the first time and full of observations, was much more powerful than mine sort of said. But this is very odd. This guy is the state. So what is this notion of being the state, presenting yourself very much as a state and yet saying the state is something that can do a lot, but I’m not in a position to do it. Now it’s easy to dismiss all of this because it is a well-established fact that the frontline Indian bureaucracy barely shows up to work. They are deeply corrupt. They are very much part of the elite social structure. And in fact, significant part of the problem in the early days of our work at the World Bank Salimah and I, it was the early days when all the absenteeism studies were coming out. And, you know, we’ve drawn and used all this data are 25% teacher absenteeism, 40%, doctor absenteeism, 5050 chance of encountering a teacher in a school that’s actually teaching. These are all the lived realities of the Indian state. And so you would dismiss all that I heard as well. This is just yet another excuse of an apathetic bureaucrat trying to justify their own inability or unwillingness to do the job that they want. They only want the power. They do not want to acquire the responsibility of what it means to be the Indian state. But I heard this too often to allow myself to just let it go. It was what I felt a sense of a deeper inquiry, simply because I thought if someone comes to me as the head of an institution from the outside and asked me about my job, it is true that in my everyday life, no matter how much I try to get my colleagues to do things, they always walk all over me. So I am the face of the powerless head of an institution. But I wouldn’t want to tailor abject outsider to whom I wanted to project power that I have no capability to do the job I’m supposed to do. And it you know, my entire engagement with the question of state capacity, therefore, came precisely from these experiences, from these stories. And that’s why I like to think about the problem of state capacity very much from the bottom up. And I’m going to return to all of these in a few minutes. But let me frame how I see the problem. If you think of if you talk to all the years when Sallie Mae and I were first engaged with state capacity back in the 2000, the ones that had got legitimized and had entered into the lexicon of bureaucracy or thinking about the Indian state. Were ideas of transparency the right to information, accountability, social capital. These were words that bureaucrats had begun to use. I was once in a meeting where a bureaucrat said, “We are here to talk about social accountability”, because, again, that was a phrase that nobody fully understood. Nodded, especially me, and I’ve written papers on them. But it was part of it was something that people used to talk about, and they said it’s not like we’re not socially accountable, but now we have to be more socially accountable. Well, you know, these words had become part of how bureaucrats try to describe themselves. Over the decades the word state capacity has very much entered into the lexicon of bureaucrats, bureaucrats writing books about state capacity. The Indian state politicians talk about state capacity. And that’s why the state capacity initiative uses the phrase state capacity at CPR because everybody understands what it means. There is a widespread recognition. India, like most of the world, is deeply polarized in its politics today. But everyone will agree on one thing The Indian state lacks capacity to do what it’s supposed to do. The question is why? And what are people’s perceptions of where the problem lies? At one level, this is perceived or understood as a policy problem. Lance Lant Pritchett, the famous failing state, is used and abused by everybody and we all choose to interpret it our way. But the general perception that India has good policy but really poor implementation. So the challenges in the implementation, the challenges was is with that bureaucrat was pretending to be powerless, but what does that mean? Implementation is treated very much as a challenge of incentivisation. Can we change the terms of contract? These are full time employees. They don’t really have any motivation to do anything. No one’s monitoring them. Let’s change the terms of contract, improve the monitoring. That’s how you’re going to suddenly solve the problem. What does all of this mean and how it’s articulated? It’s articulated as a problem of plumbing. The pipelines exist, but they’re not working because they are blockages. You need to unblock them. So we need to do plumbing reform. Again, a word that is used commonly, although it’s a phrase that to me sounds a bit icky. Nonetheless, we have to do plumbing reform and it’s also all about disciplining the front line. The problem is not on the top. The problem is with the bottom. The bottom doesn’t show up to work and do their job. Let’s start disciplining them. And accountability is really all about that. Disciplining it is about accounting. As land would have rephrased it, it is about trying to ensure that there is a paper trail to ensure that the you do what you are supposed to do as defined by me. People also recognize that it’s a political economy problem. The lack of political will comes up again and again. And I did a history of what Prime Ministers of India say about the bureaucracy. And there’s a really nice chapter in a book on Indian politics of the 1990 by James Manor. From Nehru onwards, we have always said everything. The Prime Minister, no matter what political color they come from, has always said the problem is with the Indian bureaucracy, it’s design, it’s the elite service. It doesn’t feel accountable, it’s completely distanced. And it was we need to reform the bureaucracy. So then…you know, at one level, all politicians say bureaucratic reform is essential. No politician actually does it. No Prime Minister has actually done it and done it well. And the bureaucrats will always say there is no political will and is complete political capture, by the way, which makes it even harder. For bureaucrats to do their job. The reality of denials, for instance, barely to two months, six months that you are a district magistrate, particularly in parts of North India. This has all been well-studied, well documented. So the problem is politics. And then the politicians will say the problem is not politics. The problem is bureaucratic wherewithal. Even today, our Prime Minister is known in the world as a sort of a quote unquote “doer” rather, he positions himself to be a doer. And you if you track his speeches in parliament, it’s always about the bureaucrats that are not doing their job. And a lot is being done to try and improve, quote unquote, “monitoring of the bureaucrat to be able to ensure that they do their job”. Because the assumption is that there is no bureaucratic weight in the bureaucrats will say absolutely not. Full of bureaucratic will is a politics…it’s a politician problem. And we go back and forth. And then last but not the least, the poverty problem. There are huge fiscal constraints. It does not, particularly now that we have fiscal rules and state governments have to pay for these permanent employees. Then we deal with wages and liabilities and long term pensions. It’s not worth investing in the chicken and egg. It’s not worth investing in a state that is too big and too inefficient and doesn’t do the job well. So let me congratulate the state. Let me reduce my investments. And then you get a remarkably thin state that is meant to do all of these massive amounts of things, because the average Indian deeply depends on the state for almost everything. This is how the problem is framed. But I think in framing the problem this way, we completely missed the reality of these powerful, powerless bureaucrats that I spoke about. They walk in. This is a nice picture. So it looks less like a slightly better office. And everything that you hear about digitization may well be true, but they are still only on paper. When you walk into a local government bureaucrats office and it’s full. Not just paper, it’s paper files and lots of dust, and they say things about themselves as being the post officers, being these people who are when you ask them, will you give any suggestions on how to improve things? And the first thing they say is “What suggestions can I give? Nobody asks me any questions. My job is to implement. I just follow orders.” We’ve been tracking the daily lives of many of these bureaucrats and really it is like that. They now work on order, they get on WhatsApp and then they do whatever they are asked to do based on that. And in fact, we also thought that there’s no such thing as I mean, it’s not you shouldn’t be surprised. But we tried to look for some reason for job descriptions of positions we have on government orders, but they don’t really say anything about the reality of what it means to be a bureaucrat. So, you know, we have all of this other discourse, but we’re not really talking about what the life of these bureaucrats are. And one of the critical issues with all of this is that if it if it justifies and legitimizes, I would argue, the absenteeism, the lack of the corruption and the inefficiency in the following way, it creates a narrative of disempowerment that enables bureaucrats to cast themselves as passive agents responding to orders rather than active agents responsible for change. So when the citizen walks in saying, as they did in the social audits that we were following back in the 2000s that money has been siphoned off or a work site has not been opened or the teacher doesn’t show up in the school. Frankly, the grassroots bureaucrat doesn’t really have much power to do anything. They are really busy responding to orders given to them from the top. If they don’t send that paper at the appointed moment, they really get shouted at by their District Magistrates and the District Magistrate doesn’t send the papers at the appropriate time they will get shouted at by their state officers. So it’s a chain of command that creates a particular perspective. And in all of this, the bureaucrat is sort of left convincing themselves that my role here is to be a passive agent responding to orders rather than an active agent trying to do something, because I really have very little under my control. When we used to track expenditures for government programs, you would find that this is a slightly dated three or four years ago. Things have improved, but only marginally so. Bulk of money for what you have to implement will show up towards the end of the financial year on March 31st. My institution gets some money from government and I know that we have to rush to to plan what to do with this money, because it shows up on March 29th and we have to give a utilization certificate on April 1st. Otherwise, the next year’s money will not come. So you’re going to do some useless conferences, and that’s the end of everything. So and that happens very much as part of the daily life of bureaucrats. So how do you actually convert yourself into an active agent, even if you’re willing? And that’s also part of why reforms get resisted, distorted at the grassroots, because the bureaucrats are not actually empowered to do what they are, what you would expect to do, at least in your imagination, of the role of the state. So how do we try to solve this? And this is where the biggest challenge for me comes, because we have framed the problem, as I said, as a problem of policy, as a problem of political economy, as a problem of fiscal constraint. We spend all the time not trying to solve the problem from the perspective of the individuals or the system or the organization, but from the point of view of how can you fix the policy problem. So we end up trying to do all kinds of things that, in my opinion, sort of reinforce the rules or reinforce the low equilibrium model in which the Indian state is stuck. Here are the things we love to do right now—Outsourcing. We are outsourcing the Indian state in ways that are unimaginable to me as somebody who has been in and out of Indian bureaucracy now for the last two decades. The biggest change at the top. So if you go to the state headquarters or if you go to Government of India, is that you see this IAS and it’s very tangible. You can see the difference basically in the form of the dress. The IAS is all it looks, you know, much more in Indian dress, at least the women and the men are wearing suits or shirts and pants. And then there’s this whole gang of consultants who all look like suits. And he is very business, very, you know, private sector, fully purposeful. But that difference is very tangible because they all come from very different ecosystems. They look different. They are different in the most basic things of how they approach work, what they wear, and therefore then how they work. And they are everywhere. They mostly come from the big four—PwC, BCG. Many of you here, I’m sure, have work for them. I think Rohan here who studied this big question. But I mean, essentially the Indian state is completely outsourced and it’s not outsourced because the Indian state doesn’t want to do what it’s supposed to do. The Indian state is outsourcing because the bureaucrats at the top have a very short window in which they can do anything. And the only option they have then is to try and outsource because they have completely after the state below have completely atrophy. So so there is this large presence of the private sector and in addition, there is a large presence of institutions outside of the state as a means of getting around the problems of the state. So they’re project management units, TSUs (Technical Support Units). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, God bless them. They support all of us, but they are hugely part of all of this. Create these institutions outside of the states to do the job of the state. We then love technology. After all, if the answer to all our problems, it’s really cool to have the Digi Locker identity. But they didn’t allow me to use that to enter here. We use technology-based phone apps now that have our ID. Every problem that the Indian state confronts is now being solved by an app. There are more apps and more startup versions inside the Indian state than they are in Bangalore City, which is a city of startups in India. We assume that you can solve the problems of the Indian state, which to my mind the very real problems of active individuals. So algorithms, without asking the question about who’s making the algorithm and who has to use the algorithm for decision making. So in some of the work we do with states, it’s our job to actually start analyzing the data. But there’s nobody inside the system who has the power or ability to absorb the data that you’re collecting all these apps and all this use of technology. But it also creates an imagination that I can solve the problem of the grassroots Indian state by creating, quote unquote, command and control centers. They actually exist that are with CCTVs, with biometrics, with all kinds of things, actively monitoring the everyday life of the local bureaucracy. Now, that’s fine. If the problem is to run an election, you need to make sure somebody is there. But it certainly is not going to help you with talking about classrooms and health centers and the complex political economy realities in which the average Indian bureaucrat who has been cast as a passive agent actually functions. All you really get are people who are going to try and get around the system rather than people who are going to convert from being passive to active. And in my view, the passivity is a bigger challenge. And what does it do to the idea of citizenship for all the failures of the attempt at deepening democracy of the thousands? The fact is that I see it as at least some attempt at creating an imagination of the state and the citizen, which is embedded in a notion of citizenship, where the citizen is an active agent and not a passive recipient. The minute you bring in elements of technology and the minute and this is not to make an argument to say we shouldn’t have it, but we should recognize its limitations. The citizen is spoken off as an ineligible beneficiary. To get them out. They need to verify themselves to be part of a data system. The citizen becomes becomes a number, the citizen becomes a data, a data point. The language we use for the citizen. The citizen becomes a beneficiary in our politics. Now, the welfare state is being the citizen in the welfare state is being articulated as a in the word collaborative, which essentially means beneficiary. It’s not a problem when we talk about beneficiaries in classrooms like this. It is a problem if you step away from that and think about the welfare state is about a relationship between citizen and state and you reduce the citizen to a passive beneficiary that has to receive things through technology as the cash flowing all the way down. And if it goes to the wrong person, then that person is an ineligible beneficiary who needs to be deleted from a list. But that person is an actual citizen, and the act of entering into the state system through these so-called lists is also in, in and of. Itself an act of democracy. So this framing of technology and the beneficiary also shapes how we think about welfare, the Indian state and the citizen. And I’ve said a lot in a very short moment. There’s a lot to unpack here, but I hope we can talk about this particular point in the Q&A. So now I’ll come to a little bit of what does it mean if you think about the Indian State capacity challenge in the way that I just describe to try and change things around from our perspective as a research institution, as a think tank that is actively trying to work on the question of state capacity. It’s really easy for us to fall into the possibility that they are both available, that they are the demand of the moment, and they are somewhat where bureaucrats want you, which is to come in and fill in a gap that the bureaucrat wants to fill in in the immediate. But as a think tank that is not a consulting institution, the question for us always has been is that our role and our role is not just to do research, it’s to do research that is relevant, that tries to influence or change things. So it’s not just about asking the high level question of what is state capacity, but also actively trying to ask ourselves, where is that last chapter? How do you build it? If you define state capacity as something about reimagining purpose of bureaucrats away from passivity to active to being an active agent, what does that actually mean? How do you build a professional identity away from responding to orders and towards actually being able to respond to the purpose for which the bureaucracy exists, which in my understanding is to deliver public services to citizens rather than just beneficiaries. So what does all of this mean for us? The way we’ve been thinking about it, we feel that it’s important to start conversations about institutional norms and values and really try to push these ideas of purpose inside the bureaucracy. Sounds really fuzzy, and no bureaucrat has the time for this. So when we convert it into practical thinking, what we trying to do is to shift the way we think about civil service training and produce regular surveys that become sites of discussion for bureaucrats to talk about themselves. During COVID, we did a survey of the IRS on how they think about challenges of public health, the role of civil society, private sector media. I mean, you know, perception based surveys have all the limitations. So it’s not good research. But it became a fight for a conversation among the IRS officers. And many said to us, this is a good opportunity for us to talk about ourselves, otherwise we get support in the day of firefighting for the IRS naturally. So given the nature of the job, the short term is the long term. But really for a policy research institution, the question of policy, think of all of you who are going to go out into the world of practice. You have to push hard to say what is the long term and how should how do we work a short term in a way that it doesn’t undermine the long term? So that’s what we’ve been thinking about civil service training. I’ll give you just two examples and stuff. We’ve been working very closely with the government of Meghalaya on trying to implement some of these ideas. We’ve been doing this through training for the Meghalaya Civil Service Office. So there’s the state level civil service officers by introducing into the pedagogy idea the values and skills for what a 21st century civil servant would be. It is it was fascinating for us to learn how much the state training institutions actually have been completely undermined or rather just left to atrophy because there has been no active thinking on this. Too much of the thinking is on the IAF, so we work at the top end of the administrative training, but too little is done at the bottom, which is why you need the BCG is and the PwCs to come in and fill gaps. But really there is a whole cadre of state officers who need training and no one goes there. So can we spend more time reactivating, re-energizing these crucial in public institutions that we have ignored so far? We’ve also introduced in there elements of studies. We are doing a cohort study of the medical service officers. It’s a long term study. We’re going to track these officers over a ten year period, really trying to understand how their motivations evolve, how they see norms and values evolve as they go from being trainees into the bureaucracy and so on. And we hope that all of this would be ways of enabling conversations. Even in actual fact, research on the Indian state is remarkably thin. The field of public administration has been reduced to the field of what technical app I can produce without any knowledge base. So there is no conversation apart from the thinkings or the the the writings of former bureaucrats who write their biographies. So can we create a whole body of this active knowledge that would allow for discourse and dialog to take place? How do you embed all of this into institutional and organizational design? We’ve been working to redesign the training institution. We’ve been learning, working to create centers of excellence, and we’ve set up with the government to make a state capability forum that we hope will be, again, a site that takes the focus away from New Delhi into state capitals where these discussions and dialogs are most necessary. So I’ll end by saying all of this together. How do I define state capacity and how do I place this powerful, powerless state into an analytical framework for me? I want to give you four. Proposition State capacity is about policy and implementation. So it’s not just the flailing state, it’s about how we imagine the state and how we think of the state as something that has to implement things. It’s about the design as well as the regulatory practice of the state. Let me state capacity is about systems that fix their own pipes, not systems that require BCG or Center for policy research to fix its fights. It’s not a plumbing problem, but it is about public institutions and systems. We in India have allowed public institutions to fall apart. Then we complain about them and the solution is to outsource their roles to others. So what does it require in the 21st century? The state has to be active. It has to be nimble. It has to be innovative. It has to be integrated. Very nice words. None of them mean very much, but it essentially means you have to think of rules as more flexible that allow for a organizational structure to have structure, but at the same time ensure that there’s inbuilt enough discretion and technology becomes both an opportunity and a challenge because technology by definition is centralizing and it called discretion, which is helpful from an efficiency point of view. But there is a tradeoff of capacity, capability, accountability and most importantly, democracy point field So it’s something that we need to be more alert or alive to and think about as we develop apps, strong institutions, organizations and systems get the incentives right. But these incentives do not come from biometric monitoring and command and control centers. These incentives come from reimagining their purpose. I am here talking to you today. Not because someone’s monitoring me. I’m here talking to you today because it is my sense of purpose to share my ideas with a group of thinkers like you. You will talk to me. You will shape my ideas. You will improve how I think, and hopefully you like some of what I say and talk about it in other places, and hence I feel a stronger sense of motivation. And so that that is my incentive and purpose. But you know, if someone was monitoring my every move with a GPS tracker, I’d probably just come here and give my phone to Salima so that she could come to the Kennedy School. And I could say to my bosses back home that I came here while I’m out shopping or enjoying myself. State capacity cannot be an if only then, story, and I think this is really important. Much of the policy discussion in India is centered around the fact that the Indian state fails. Therefore, we should not be doing things. You cannot expand the state in the way in which you want to because the state is too efficient and inefficient and therefore it’s much better to put your money somewhere else. Or we’ll just cash and we’ll do the bare minimum we want, build out our public health systems. We won’t build out our education systems. We are the most privatized health and education system of any country at our level of GDP anywhere in the world. We are completely disenchanted as a population with the ability of the state. The only people who believe the state can actually deliver high quality education, mostly when a bureaucrat does mean on them, but it’s their job to do it right. So how do you break this sense of complete disenchantment and move away from the idea that it’s in you know, we get things done in spite of the state. We get things done because we are able to do a few things right, but not everything else. And we should limit ourselves there to really getting rid of this disenchantment and exposing our first to the possibilities of what the state can do. Because I still don’t know of a state that has been able to improve the economic opportunities of its citizens without being able to produce high quality public schools and high quality public health systems. The private sector exists. I’m I my children go to a private school. I go to private healthcare. I will continue to do so. But having said that, with that caveat, I do not believe that that is the answer for a country where a vast majority of our young need to have greater economic opportunity. In the end, the problem of the state capacity is closely and entirely linked to the problem of the or the challenges of the Indian economy. We used to say in the 1990s, India grows while the states sleep at night. That was a nice phrase in 2022. India will only grow when the state has purpose. The public has to be its citizens and the public has to be driven by the citizens aspirations for being part of a growing, burgeoning economy. And this framing has to come right back in for us to move ahead as a nation. Thank you.

Salimah Samji Thank you very much. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to take questions. The nominees giving us a lot to think about here. And the way we’re going to do that is we have a microphone that will come around. We’ll take three questions at a time. And if you could just be sure, you should introduce yourself briefly before you ask your question.

Salimah Samji Super. Microphone. And then there’s.

Attendee 1 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am Noor Ghazali from Malaysia. I’m a Fulbright visiting person here. You speak 99.9%. What is Malaysia? If I want to say 100%. It might be because for one thing, there is a regime of bureaucrats coming from British to India to Malaysia. Hmm. Mm hmm. I just want to make it quick. Two questions. You mentioned about political problems. In the case of India. What is that? Borderline between the bureaucrats and the political masters? You know, I mean, we have the experience. Political masters tend to stay for a certain point of period and therefore reform and change are not much of a priority. Number two is that where do you think the roots of the problems? What makes them I mean, yes, I agree with you. They are very powerful. But when you talk behind the doors, this. What can I do? Yeah. Thank you. You speak Malaysian? Thank you.

Salimah Samji Thank you. More and then we’ll…

Attendee 2 Hi. Thanks for the talk. My name is Pranay. MPP one candidate here. My first question is very similar. One of the phrases that I’ve heard time and again is bureaucrats. Politicians are completely bureaucrats, but bureaucrats and politicians. So this actually and this actually puts a bureaucrat as all powerful being up in the air when it comes to policymaking in India. So I would like to understand your perspective is a little better. My second question is you you mentioned about the role of the BCGs and PwCs etc. in terms of in-house for us is our post policymaking. And I, I particularly see themselves organizations like BCG, organizations like PwCs, not only as a banking solution but also as a solution which is, which is more outcome driven and which is more which is more results driven. So is is that a particular problem in the sustainability of the solution as a fix to policymaking? Do we not see this as a new norm that is going to emerge in 21st century policymaking?

Salimah Samji Thank you.

Attendee 3 Hi, I’m Alwyn from Indonesia. I am an MBA student here at HKS. My question is on empowering young bureaucrats in public institutions. I work for the public sector in Indonesia. I’m a young bureaucrat, but sometimes I may feel that I have good ideas, but I can’t convey this to higher ups within the organization because of my ranking. Do you have any suggestions? Resolutions? How can a public organization empower or delegate more to its young employees? Thank you.

Salimah Samji Thank you very much. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for these wonderful question.

Salimah Samji Oh, sorry. Any from Zoom? Yes, thank you. We’ll start with them for the next round. Thank you, Najwa.

Yamini Aiyar Okay. Okay. To the issue of politics. The relationship between the politician and the bureaucrat. It is, as both your questions I think highlighted, an extremely complex one, because there is truth to both the politician being the problem for the bureaucrat and the policy and the bureaucrats being the problem for the politician. And but but but I think that so I think we need. For me, the starting point is to just accept that reality. Because if we spend too much time inquiring that reality, which I think is where a lot of political science literature has focused, there is a lot of literature there already. We’re not going to be able to get past that problem. And I think that at an analytical level and at a practical level, it serves as a really effective tool for, you know, for passing the buck on accountability. So, you know, like I said, if you go through the whole sort of narrative of prime ministers and how they talk about their bureaucrats, they always complain. I mean, that’s the that’s the the the in the end, that’s the final bottleneck. I want to do all of these things. I’m not be able to because Prime Minister Manmohan said the instruments. I forget exactly the terms that he used. But basically the idea that, you know, he had this phrase about no country can progressive the instruments that are of the state are not aligned or designed to respond to the challenges it confronts. Prime Minister Modi had this very nice phrase because he’s all about really nice phrases. 21st Century India is now dealing with 21st century problems with a 19th century bureaucracy. And in speech after speech, there’s a lot about how the bureaucrat is the problem. And when you talk to bureaucrats, they will rightly say, I’m simply not able to do very many things. There’s a huge problem with tenure. I’m being pushed to sign things on fire that I’m not supposed to. And and the bureaucracy, by definition, at least in how the Indian Constitution frames it and I think it’s the same for for most post-colonial bureaucracies, is that you’re essentially expected to serve under the will of your political master. I mean, it is a job of the bureaucrat bureaucrat to implement. It isn’t the job of the bureaucrat to make policy. That’s where politics comes in. That’s where accountability of voters comes in. Right. So it’s not to run away from the problem, but it is the thing. If we keep focused on that problem, we won’t get to what I think is one of the critical aspects of what could make the bureaucrat political politician relationship a far more functional one, which is in empowering the capacity of the actors within the bureaucracy to do the job that they’re supposed to do, rather than disempowering them to make them only accountable to the orders that they have. So, you know, in some of the work I’ve done, just to give you an example of what I’m trying to say and some of the work I’ve done on the city state of Delhi, which is where I live, got a new government in, I think it was 2015. And one of the aspects, one of the political agendas of that government was to do massive reforms in secondary schools in the city, in the government, secondary schools in the city state. And it had all the elements of what political science would look for political will, top bureaucratic will and, you know, a long term agenda, because this is a government that came in with almost no opposition that was going to be there for the better part of five years. And so I was really curious to try and understand how does all of this then unfold on the ground? And, you know, you really the minister was really into this like I’d be driving to work and put on the radio and all I would hear is the minister telling me things that used to be music to my ears. We’ve done a survey in schools. 70% of children in on standard six can barely read the standard six textbook. We need to do a lot to improve learning quality. These are all the things that we had worked on, studied, talked about for for nearly five or six years, until suddenly here was a politician who was trying to build public consensus around this. So we went into these schools and the everyday life of the school was very much driven by the tools of bureaucracy. We tracked the database of over 8000 government circulars, 8000 government circulars, and this is only half of what was actually issued over a period of three years to try and get the local school bureaucrats and to them, the teachers and the head teachers to implement parts of the reform, because this is the only language that the bureaucrats knew. So then circle back. It allows the political masters to say how well we want to do all of this reform, but it all gets distorted on the ground because a bureaucrat doesn’t do it. But frankly, the bureaucrat only knows this tool. So I think it’s really important for us, without losing sight of the challenge of politics, to also understand that the dynamics of internal dynamics of organizations shape the narrative that politics then picks up and builds on. So how can we change that internal dynamics? Because you and I can change politics all we can, but we can change it this way. And I think it’ll be more powerful. Sorry, there were a bunch of others, but I think let’s take a few more and then I’ll come back to some of these others as we go. Wonderful.

Salimah Samji Let’s take them from our virtual participants Najwa.

BSC Team Yeah, thanks. Someone ask, what? Why is that? Indian bureaucracy is always looking for orders. Rule-based states should promote opposite. Is it only based on merit of transfers? How much is corruption or corruption part of the problem? Another one is. You slip, you slip back and forth between using the dome’s capacity and capability. Do you use these words interchangeably or do they have different meanings? What is a good distinction between the two, alternatively or alternative? The mean the same thing should be settled on one. What do you see as the role of public policy schools such as HKS and their graduates in this debate? In what ways do they currently contribute or fail to contribute towards building state capability? One more question is how do you envision civil service implementation from. Another.

Salimah Samji A lot of them.

Yamini Aiyar Okay. Let me try. Let me try and respond to a few of these. So I think one question was about rules in a rule based system. Why does the rule become the problem? And is it about incentives and is it about corruption? In some senses, I think corruption. I think that to be provocative. I think that we have framed too much of the discourse on state capacity around the challenge of corruption without trying to get to the root of why corruption happens in the first place. And that’s what leads us to solutions that are about command and control, biometric monitoring and everything else. Without getting into the complexity of the political economy or the reality, or rather the realities in which bureaucrats find themselves. And that’s what sort of generates this. So so the internal hierarchy is one of the reasons why the order has become a problem. It’s not about the audit itself. It’s about the way the order commands you to do things. So indeed, 8000 orders that we were looking at, it was very regular for the order to say things that you must all you should do, you have to do. Otherwise you will be penalized. If you don’t do it, it’ll come into your records. And so from the perspective of the bureaucrat at the grassroots, they recognize that if anything, they will be monitored on. It’s going to be this. So I better get my act together. And also that, you know, I am part of a hierarchy where somebody is basically doing me down and not doing me up. So, you know, when you ask them questions around, you know, what can you do to improve the pedagogy in your classroom? For example, in the instance of, of, of, of, of teachers, they will say, well, I would like to teach, but I’m not being able to teach because this order has come in. The order has taken over my day. And it’s really put me in a more in a frame of mind where I came into the government, I came into becoming a schoolteacher because that is a job that has great amounts of social status and social mobility. And it gave me a sense of identity of myself. But my everyday life is being told what to do. So it costs you as somebody who is basically responding rather than as somebody who has genuine agency. It reduces your identity and purpose to nothing but being a cog in a wheel of a system that’s so deeply hierarchical that it really sort of beats out a lot out of you. So that’s too much. Got too much thinking around carrots and sticks, in my view, based on the story. The reality of corruption shaped that and too little thinking about what it what will it take to develop genuine agency. And I think part of the problem is also because our constitutional imagination of the Indian state created its own hierarchical caste system in the Indian state, that the state was going to be the agent of large scale social change. And in order to be the agent of large scale social change, it needed to have a balance of outsider insight. So you get a lot of this that comes from the outside into states. And really their job is to try and keep the distance between the complex social realities of the embedded state and then be the anchor of social reform and social change of all kinds. I think it created a dynamic or historical dynamic of an internal hierarchical caste system which made the use of can do, should do, must do. You will be penalized if you don’t do grandma very much part and parcel of the grammar of bureaucracy. So it’s fascinating to me that most discussions at the district level with the office are discussions about a system that doesn’t function are also discussions about a system that is the problem. And as somebody who does my project, I know that if I don’t get my team to go along with me, nothing would happen. But the hierarchy doesn’t allow for those conversations to happen. And where you see change, you see change. When ideas, leadership suddenly decides to make that local bureaucrat part of the feedback mechanism, bring them into a meeting and do something very simple, like saying, Don’t tell me where you are on targets. Tell me what you need from me to help you achieve those targets. Now, this seems like rocket science doesn’t seem like rocket science to most of us, but when you are embedded in a culture of hierarchy, it becomes that much harder. So I’m really pushing for us to change the terms that we use when we think about the Indian state not ignoring the reality of politics or the reality of corruption, but trying to ask ourselves whether that has set limits on the imagination of the Indian state and can we look at the problem somewhat differently? Otherwise, we might end up in this dystopia of command and control centers with characters all the way at the bottom who are running far away from any command and control that you would want to have. But you will create a data system that will tell you a good story and reality be damned. So, so. And that’s where the capacity and capability question comes up to me. I think that the Indian state both lacks capacity and capability. By that I mean capacity is often understood in terms of the nuts and bolts of what it takes. So do we have enough people for the job? Do we have enough processes for the job? We do. Why is it that our block offices, they were the first one to point this out to me. When you walk into the middle of nowhere in a government office, it’s like a really hellish place to be. The computer is dead. The dust everywhere that CCTV cameras and TVs like this now everywhere. But even those only have always have the plastic around them because you don’t want the dust to get in because there’s no one to clean it properly. I mean, they’re basic capacity things that need to be fixed. And we’ve only been talking about state capacity. The film has got popularized at least in the Indian context, as a capacity problem. But capability is really about all these more complex issues. It’s not that people don’t want to do it. Have we actually created enabling conditions for people to be able to do it? And those enabling conditions for me revolving around issues of purpose, norms, values, professional identity and what actually gets systems to work collectively. If all systems work in the world on the basis of hierarchy, then you know the world would be this is not a factory shop, it’s it’s a state. And it deals with citizens not ineligible or eligible beneficiaries. So it needs to be able to move differently. On the role of public policy schools. I’d also add into that the role of think tanks, because that’s an existential question that we deal with on an hourly basis. And I think that, you know, precisely this kind of conversation is an extremely important role that we need to play today. There was, I think, in the in the phase of the 2002 thousand intense, a lot of emphasis on trying to figure out what are the technocratic solutions to the big challenges of state implementation or of public service delivery. So do we have the pedagogy right? Do we have the public health system right, etc.? I think increasingly across the globe and in India, very tangibly, the whole nature of the state and citizen expectation of the state is undergoing a very dramatic transition. And the nature of the challenges is is is getting far more complex as economies are going, becoming more complex as the development path is becoming more complex, as the globe is converging itself into fairly into a space of deep turmoil. I think we kind of need to go back to the drawing board and push ourselves much more in terms of the ideas that we have or how we are articulating or framing the problem. And from that process of framing, try to bring the technocratic solutions that we became really good at. So a lot of these ideas about outcomes that it’s to, you know, again, I’m going to be provocative, but and I don’t mean that we shouldn’t focus on outcomes. I started Accountability Initiative talking about the importance of outcomes. But we have got so focused on the outcomes that we’re not really talking about the process that enables the outcome. And it actually, you know, it’s you can’t the two are not separate from one another. But when we talk about process, we need much more in a much deeper. We understand the nature of that process and the context in which that process is embedded. So for me, the role of public policy schools like yours, that’s the role of a public policy professional is to bring the space of ideas back into the discourse, but also recognize that there’s a distinct difference between a public policy profession, which is a private sector professional working on public policy. And I think we need to be cognizant of that distinction. In CPR, we make that distinction by saying, I’m not going to walk in. I’m not going to partner with a state government to deliver just an outcome. I have to leave something behind. Otherwise, I’m not doing the role of a public policy professional and not leaving behind should be some form of capability or capacity. It also means that I have to be very self-critical as an institution and as a participant, because every action that I am introducing into the system will have a long term democratic consequence and I am not accountable for it. So how you have to constantly be very self-aware of that reality. And I think that’s the distinction between the services that are provided by extremely agile, extremely innovative, extremely capable messages. And BW sees words as public policy institutions or public policy professionals. And it comes back to the last point I want to make, because I get office a lot in India, but it’s worth thinking about as you become the next generation of makers and shapers of public policy professionals. It’s a it’s a profession that is only about beginning to emerge. Back when we were working in 2000, you know, I would say to people, I work in the World Bank and I work on state accountability. And they would be like, oh, you work in a bank. Do you think you can help me open a bank account? Now, suddenly, this idea of a public policy professional has emerged, and we’re still trying to make sense of what it is. And I think one important aspect of this is what does it mean to work with the state and to work for the state in? What has entered into our lexicon are also notions of a public policy think tank. If something is not good enough, what we are doing, i.e. we are doing the job of the state and I think we should be careful of all of this. I see our role as being the brokers of knowledge. I see our role as being the brokers of ideas. And our impact is not in the idea being adopted or in the knowledge being adopted or in becoming the the implement all of these. Our impact is in being able to constantly provide a mirror or constantly provide critique in the public discourse. If you don’t do that and you fall into the trap of doing what is asked of you, then you’re not being a public policy professional. You are a policy professional. Move the word public out of it. And I think we should be conscious of that distinction, because increasingly it’s becoming challenging to speak to ideas in environments where, you know, democratic exchange of ideas is no longer seen as a necessary component of democracy.

Salimah Samji Wonderful. Thank you. I just want to add a little bit here before we have more questions on Zoom, before we take some more questions from Zoom. And if you have some in here, the name of our program is Building State Capability. And when we decided to name ourselves, we really thought through this capacity versus capability conversation and we on purpose chose to use the word capability. And yes, people don’t understand the difference, but we chose capability because that’s the word we wanted to use, because capacity alone is training and training alone without, you know, all of you in your questions say that they don’t have the power. Right. The the student from Indonesia who left said no one asked me. I can’t tell anyone. Trained yes. Capacity. The person clearly has but is not empowered enough, doesn’t have the capability. So you need the capacity and you need the empowerment to give you the capability to be able to do something. And, you know, these questions around incentives and carrots and sticks is something that we hear so often and we don’t believe in at all. We’ve been doing this for ten years, and what we have seen over and over again is intrinsic motivation. When you tap into the intrinsic motivation of public servants around the globe, that’s when magic seems to happen. That’s when and you empower them to be able to do something because they all they didn’t. This officer exams are not easy. You don’t do that because you know. Yeah, it’s a cool thing. No, it’s really hard. It’s really, really hard. It’s because you cared about public service and but what happens is like what anything you get on the ground, you do this work and you get that love of serving your public beaten out of you with those 8000 circulars. And even when we were working, I think we counted there was 99 centrally sponsored schemes. How do you actually administer like 90 centrally sponsored scheme in a district house yet that’s their job. You try to do that, you know, and it’s really easy to your point of like the blogs and whoever. It’s very easy for them to come in and like do something. We have like cookie cutter solutions to everything. They deal in the world of black and white and not in a world of gray, which is the real world we live in. It’s too easy to say they’re all corrupt. That’s naive. That’s because we don’t understand the difference. One of the talks we’ll do in January will be on Nigeria. There is an author at MIT who wrote this brilliant book on corruption in Nigeria, and we’re bringing him in January to unpack. Corruption is too easy. It’s become like this catch all praised for all sorts of things. But let’s understand why. Why does status quo prevail? And kind of digging deeper and building not just, you know, we’ve both worked at the World Bank together. And one of the things that we saw is they will build similar structures of a PMU. That will then be a scaffolding, but they never lay a brick. You come in five years, you’ve built the whole nice scaffolding. You don’t have it. You don’t. You leave. You pull all of the scaffolding down. Not one brick was laid. How is that building capability for anyone? Right. And so if the private sector was serious about training people instead of doing their job for them, then sure, they’re a welcome partner. But to be able to just build a parallel structure, to be able to do that, then that just takes away. Like the self-help groups in Andhra. You know, Naidu created that as a parallel structure to the government on purpose. Right. We can’t do that. We need to work with what we have and build that out. So we have two in the room, and then another will come to you after the two of the room.

Attendee 4 Yeah. Hi. Thank you again for coming and for your presentation. I got a chance to briefly introduce myself, but my name is Akshay. I’m with the mid-career MBA program here, which is the one year program. And before I got here, before I came to Harvard, I was with multiple think tanks in India who were 12 to 13 years before that in the corporate world. My question to you, Yamini, is what I what seems to be missing for me. I don’t know if that’s an emergent behavior, your emergent behavior that you’re referring to, but I. I do not see an empowerment here on your slide. And the reason it’s it’s striking to me is because one of the one of the big advantages in the private sector where I have work is that if it’s a CEO or a director of marketing or a regional manager at every level, there is a sense of you being able to make a decision. And while that decision can be challenged, but it’s rare. I mean, there’s a lot of thought process, whereas in this role, from my limited understanding, and particularly for a state agent like a bureaucrat is challenged all the time in all directions and makes it very difficult.

Salimah Samji Thank you, Najwa.

BSC Team You said the proposition for the state. What is the concrete roadmap you suggest to make the state responsive towards the citizens in India and improve the performance of bureaucrats? You said you work in MTI in Officer Training Academy. What ought to be when an officer hits the field and encounters what is? The second question is, is there a role for the judiciary in mediating the inaction caused by the blame game between the politicians and bureaucrats? And if so, what is your opinion on the current state in India? Third question What is the role of the policy bureaucrats changing with technology tools and open data? How will that role look like in 2050? And there are two questions based on a pause.

Salimah Samji There, and then we’ll officially and there’s one more here. Sure. We’ll take that one.

Attendee 5 Sorry, I’m a PhD student first year here. Building off of Rohan’s question. Like what? How do you see the role of, like, academic research in, in sort of addressing these questions? And also in the past, there were there were like ten years, 20 years. Do you see like any constructive sort of role of academic research on India in adding to this debate at all? Yeah, I think.

Yamini Aiyar Thank you.

Yamini Aiyar Thank you for these great questions. Okay. Following your question about our city’s technocratic solutions, I actually think it’s even if bigger than that, I think that there is and I don’t have a good way of articulating this. So forgive me, but it’s an argument I’m trying to frame in my mind. I’ve been trying to frame in my mind for some time and let me test it out. I think that the the thought of post 1990s entering into the 2000 India’s coming out party on the back of technology and combined with the complete the significant atrophy of the social sciences in our public institutions that have created the perfect storm or perfect moment for a consensus to be built around the technology imagination of how to solve the problem. So we all celebrated the uses of words like plumbing, etc. We said data is the new oil. We, you know, and both the producer of the research through mechanisms, through tools like the RCT and the Fed can do more of the research, which is largely the Indian bureaucrats, many of whom also now stem collectively putting together this imagination of the challenge of the Indian state can be fixed through a combination of data and technocratic carrots and sticks solution. So it sort of fed into each other and and and a lot of it also and the reason it fed it with itself, fed into each other and created a sort of intellectual consensus, had a lot to do also with the public understanding of the reality of the Indian state, of its failures, particularly at the grassroots, the experience, the immediate experience of the both of the globalization context, where getting the state out of the way sort of unleashes the animal spirit and the sort of India grows at night as the states sleep. The imagination, which gave a much larger space for the thinking than than critique of the thinking. And it’s not just India. I mean, look at households, look at what’s happened to social sciences, but look at what’s happened. I mean, I find it stunning to see so many political science job talks that are all about, you know, about the regression. They’re not about the question. I think this is political science. It’s not in some way the question you’re asking has to have some relevance to the context within which the question was framed, but it completely disappears. So I think that there is this there is this big challenge. And and, you know, into this game, the outcomes based framing of accountability, which the World Bank and many of us swap out in and of itself. None of this is wrong. You do need data, you do need outcomes tracking. You do need to have a ecosystem of evaluation with a multiplicity of of of techniques. You also, as a bureaucrat have only three years that the best case scenario. And if you really want to make a difference you’re looking for something tangible, practical immediately that you can do because you don’t know how three years from now or even two years from now that you will be there. So having someone come in and go away, you know, it’s a lot about norms and organizational sociology is like, Yeah, that’s fine in a classroom, but I have a job to do. So this helps, right? I have a set of short term things that are proven that I can do. I think the challenge is that a lot of it came without recognizing the embedded realities in which things happen. So who is framing the question? For me, one of the best uses of our city has been in the way in which back home has used them. Right? There is a grassroots implementing NGO that has spent an inordinate amount of time actually engaging with the client with the challenge that they confront. And they are experimenting. And along the way of experimenting, they both want to learn for themselves, but also want to be able to have tools and ways in which they can build the credibility and legitimacy of the experiments that they are doing. So in a sense they are city is not decide determining the question and then coming to use you as a field site. The city is co-creating the question and then coming up with answers and protect. Never wait for or at all the time that I’ve spent with them. They’ve not waited for the JD paper to come out before talking about it. They’ve taken bits and pieces of the data that they find useful and then use those as levers to leverage conversations with bureaucrats. But it actually becomes an enabler to build capability for discourse rather than as an end in itself. So I think that’s the big push that we need to make. All kinds of research are welcome. It should never be one that gets full ahead of money and they should always be space for different types of research. So that’s one of the things. I mean, what’s interesting about CPR is that we actually are completely multidisciplinary. So you have an anthropologist who heads the state capacity initiative and somebody wants us. Me rather puzzled when we just set this up. Really? You an anthropologist who’s setting up who’s going to walk on set capacity anthropologists like why don’t you have an economist and anthropologist? They actually talk real people. And really, that’s where, you know, if you actually start looking, you’ll get deep inside. So, yes, anthropologists use terms and vocabulary that is completely obscure to anybody who is real. But, you know, frankly, it’s always a regression. It’s completely applicable to anyone who is doing so. How can we get these walls to communicate and engage with each other? That’s where I think many of the answers come from. I think the point about empowerment you made, it’s a really important one. And, you know, it never struck me until you said it, because for me, empowerment is so self-evident, but I never even articulated it. I wanted to unpack empowerment into ideas of purpose, values and norms. But you are absolutely right. They all come together in the form of empowerment. And of course, the big challenge there is around this tradeoff between discretion, discretion and efficiency and accountability. And I’ve always been a great believer in more decentralized empowerment and deeper and greater discretion all the way to the grassroots. But the tradeoff always has been around efficiency gains. And I think again, right now, in the context of a deeply inefficient state, efficiency is what is just grabbing the attention. Right. So why do we offend? The Indian welfare state right now is a big, huge cash transfer and suddenly not enough to resolve any of the problems. But it is a big, huge cash transfer. Why is it that if there’s a complete bureaucratic and political consensus around this and it has emerged from the fact that there’s a complete sense of disenchantment with the ability of the state to do any of these other things. So, you know, we don’t invest properly in the National Employment Guarantee Program or in rural infrastructure, in public health systems, or in the public school system, because we are completely disenchanted with it. We have brought in technology, but technology is a hugely empowering for an individual at one level, but hugely disempowering for a system and another. How do you balance these straight? I think these are the questions. So somebody asked about the practical convergence of these ideas into implementation. If civil service training does not have this discussion in the comfort of the training room, you’re basically not going to be able to find these solutions. They have to come from within the system. And what we are trying to push by training, because it does sound like after all this, you’re just going back to do what everybody else does, which is training seriously. But the question is, how are you using that side of training? Is it just about a set of skills or is about creating a public ethos of consensus and or a site of deliberation that can build a consensus around how do you balance these trade offs? Some of this stuff simply doesn’t exist. We don’t have good case studies, for example. So when bureaucrats finish their field work and then I’m going to go into more policy positions, they only have anecdotes which they share with each other. But those who come in, especially senior bureaucrats, to do the training, they’ve forgotten that I’m in the field or that things change so rapidly that their time in the field is not the world in which you could create an app for a solution. So, you know, there’s no space for this kind of live discussion. I think this is what is really important, and this goes back to the role of research and academic research. I think its relevance is in building actually breaking all of these silos using multiplicity of methods and allowing for more space for this kind of discourse to take place. So think of your research as a provocation for policy as opposed to an answer to a policy problem. And maybe we’ll have a much more interesting enabling ecosystem for this discussion to happen.

Salimah Samji Wonderful. With that, I think we’re going to end the session over one. Yes, please say.

Yamini Aiyar I definitely don’t think the judiciary is the answer to the problem. I think in their overreliance on the judiciary and the judiciary is not accountable and right now is also not exactly the moral compass that I know that that a judiciary ought to be. So. So. No PILs please!

Salimah Samji Super, thank you very much for asking incredible questions.

Yamini Aiyar Thank you. This is incredibly fun.

Salimah Samji And for engaging with us. We’ll be here for a little bit, but this ends our session. Thank you very much for joining us virtually as well.