In a new edition of I4I conversations, Yamini Aiyar is joined by Shrayana Bhattacharya to discuss her new book, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi Schools.

Also available as a video.

Yamini opened by sharing her biggest lesson from sitting in classrooms in public schools in Delhi, which is that the ways in which we have interrogated the problem of State capacity have adopted too much of a ‘top down’ lens rather than a ‘bottom up’ one. There are three broad approaches to how State Capacity or rather the lack of State capacity is conventionally understood: (i) Lack of political will to strengthen State capacity in public service delivery, with elections rarely fought around core services such as education; (ii) Frontline workers of the State operating within distortionary networks that incentivise broad-based corruption and incompetence; and (iii) The dynamics of the local political economy, which imply that the State engages with and responds to specific interest groups rather than citizens in normative rights based terms. 

Beyond the challenge of incentives and political economy, the most important lesson Delhi Schools taught the author is that State capacity is about how the frontlines see itself, the organisational culture it is located within, and how this aligns (or does not) with the purpose of public service delivery. It is therefore, in the interstices of the everyday relationships, processes, rules, and hierarchies of the administration, that State capacity is weakened and where there is potential for it to be strengthened. What works is often not big-bang reforms but the slow and consistent ‘boring of hardboards. 

Zooming in on the matter of incentives, Shrayana notes that it is a prominent way in which the economics literature thinks about the State – fundamentally different from the political science or sociology lens. This view frames relationships in the State as contracts as opposed to social relations. Addressing the issue of whether incentives work in the world of education and if they scale, Yamini draws on Lant Pritchett’s work to emphasise the need to distinguish between accounting-based accountability and the account. We tend to think about incentives as an accounting issue, with outputs and outcomes being the only way to track performance. However, there is also an ‘account’, which is the way in which you legitimise your role in the professional body to which you belong, and that motivates you to behave in a certain manner. This leads to the puzzle of high wages coexisting with low outcomes in the public sector, and the solution may lie in reaffirming professional identities and aligning them with the job profiles.  

Shifting the conversation to recruitment processes of the State, both for frontlines and elite services, Shrayana probes the popular view that State capacity can be enhanced by radically restructuring how the State hires and fires its workers. In the context of the elite services, Yamini opines that there are certain skills that the generalist bureaucrat may not necessarily have and expertise can be brought in through lateral entry. However, lateral entrants are walking into the same cultural context of the bureaucracy and hence, we may not see massive changes. In fact, bringing in experts without building State capacity risks hollowing out the State. Further, lateral entry takes away from accountability – the State is structured the way it is because it is meant to be accountable to its political masters who in turn are accountable to the citizenry, and this chain ought not to be broken in a democracy. In terms of the frontlines, we know from a wide range of empirical data that the Indian State is very thin as compared to other countries at simile levels of GDP (gross domestic product). There is a need to hire more staff and strengthen the State rather than hollowing it out with contractualisation at the lower levels. 

Drawing attention to the welfare State, Shrayana highlights that while it has expanded significantly since liberalisation, there remains a powerful policy coterie that questions whether these are freebies or tactile investments in human capital and view these programmes from the narrow perspective of corruption, populism, and wastage. In Yamini’s view, the State’s long-term failure to deliver has led to the framing of State capacity as seeking market-based solutions entirely or bypassing the State via the use of technology. We ought to shed some of our disenchantment with the State and imagine State capacity as a process of empowering the agents of the State to deliver on basic public goods. 

Shrayana observes how technology is often imagined as a means of sidestep the messy realities of the political embeddedness of the State. Technology promises efficiency by tightening delivery chains and visualising each actor and stage of implementation. But while there are examples of successful deployment of technology as an aid to State capacity, Yamini believes that these gains are largely limited to ‘thin’ tasks, which are verifiable and easy to identify (for example, transferring funds or monitoring teacher attendance). Technology is less effective in the context of ‘thick’ tasks that are transaction-intensive and require judgment at the level of delivery, such as determining who is eligible for welfare transfers or the teaching-learning processes in classrooms. These require State and society to come together to deliberate, negotiate, and bargain to reach a consensus.