51²è¹Ý

Title: The curious case of the powerful, powerless sarkari official: A discussion on Yamini Aiyar's book "Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi's Schools"

Abstract: What will it take to build high-performing, purpose-oriented public sector organizations in India? In answering this question, the voices of India’s frontline officers—charged with delivering a vast array of public services to citizens—are dismissed all too quickly. Public debates on the Indian state generally view them as corrupt, apathetic, incompetent, and in urgent need of disciplining. By training her focus on these voices, Aiyar reveals the complex ways in which bureaucratic hierarchies, processes, and belief systems shape state capacity. This book examines an ambitious effort to improve the quality of government schools, particularly their ability to equip students with foundational literacy and numeracy, in the city state of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Through the trials and tribulations of educational personnel, bureaucrats, and reform champions, Aiyar captures the sites of resistance, distortion, and adoption of reform ideas. Understanding these voices and empowering the frontline lies at the heart of the challenge of building high-performing public sector organizations and improving state capacity. 

Bio: Yamini Aiyar is currently Senior Visiting Fellow at the Saxena Center of Contemporary South Asia, Watson Institute, Brown University. She was the President of the Centre for Policy Research (2017-2024). Yamini's work sits at the intersection of research and policy practice. Her research interests spans the fields of governance and accountability, social policy and state capacity, federalism and democracy. The effort is to build an empirically grounded body of knowledge on the everyday functioning of the Indian State and its engagement (or lack thereof) with citizens and locate this within technocratic policy debates, the real world of policy administration, civil society and academia, in the pursuit of a more equitable and inclusive policy environment.