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People often think of economists as people of ideas who have no connection with the real world.
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Indeed we live in times when intellectuals are looked down upon and we want our leaders to be
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men of action. A prime minister famously once said quote hard work is much more powerful than
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harvard stop quote he said this while defending demonetization by the way and we all know how
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that went down his statement also assumes that people from harvard don't work hard which is silly
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my guest today did his phd in economics from harvard and i can guarantee you that he has
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spent more time in the towns and villages of india than many of our politicians karthik
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mudlidharan once invoked a headline from the financial times to sum up a key value of his
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quote the best economist is one with dirty shoes stop quote karthik teaches and lives in the u.s
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but has spent thousands of hours in interior india trying to get to the heart of one of our
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biggest problems the state of our education welcome to the scene and the unseen our weekly
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podcast on economics politics and behavioral science please welcome your host amit varma
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welcome to the scene and the unseen i keep saying on the show ideas have consequences we only need
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to look at indian education to see how true this is our education system is broken because for
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decades our politicians and policymakers have held the wrong ideas about education all their
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conventional wisdom was wrong and the consequences of that are a humanitarian disaster hundreds of
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millions of indians through the years haven't reached anywhere close to their true potential
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and it's hard to dispute that this has led to all our other problems such as those of poverty and
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gender being much worse than they otherwise would be this is a moral crisis and it began as a crisis
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of knowledge my guest today is karthik murlidharan the brilliant economist who has had his boots in
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the ground for a couple of decades now karthik is the global co-chair of education at the jamil
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poverty action lab or jay pal and he has written more papers on indian education than anyone else
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i know he has spent thousands of hours all across india conducting experiments and gathering
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evidence for all kinds of theories and interventions and he advises various state governments in india
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it could be argued that these are exciting times for economists because we are now much
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better at testing our ideas against evidence a subject for which karthik's colleagues and mentors
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abhijit banerjee essar duflo and michael kremer won the nobel prize for economics last year
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i had a long conversation with karthik of which the first hour by the way is a to and fro on ppe
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philosophy politics and economics all of which are a part of our education system
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so we get into the weeds of indian education only after an hour or so but i loved every little bit
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of this conversation which felt too short to me before we get to this conversation though
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let's take a quick commercial break if you enjoy listening to the scene and the unseen you can play
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a part in keeping the show alive the scene and the unseen has been a labor of love i've enjoyed
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putting together many stimulating conversations expanding my brain and my universe and hopefully
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the insane engagement level of podcasts i do many many hours of deep research for each episode
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besides all the logistics of producing the show myself scheduling guests booking studios paying
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and that involves you my proposition for you is this for every episode of the scene and the
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unseen that you enjoy buy me a cup of coffee or even a lavish lunch whatever you feel is worth
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karthik welcome to the scene and the unseen my pleasure really look forward to this karthik
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you know before we get down to the subject at hand which is a naughty subject at of education
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let's get to the subject of your education by which i don't mean your formal education per se
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but what's your intellectual journey been like what makes karthik murli tharan who he is
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tell me a little bit about sort of your background and your formative influences
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uh yeah thanks amit i think you know like you said so you know mechanically i grew up in amdabad so
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i'm already kind of a pretty pan indian by temperament because i'm tamilian i grew up in
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amdabad so my i speak hindi gujarati tamil so in that sense my influences are pretty pan indian
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i'm also you know my schooling was very idyllic actually amdabad was a great city to grow up in
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and so i was on a standard engineering track my dad was an it graduate and so you know that was
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the default of what you did but i think i started getting interested in economics pretty early
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because my dad would just bring home the economist and just kind of leave it around casually and i
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probably started reading it or you know skimming articles from the age of 12 almost but i think
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by the time i was 16 is when economic liberalization happens i've been born in 75 and so that was kind
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of you know a moment of just getting hooked onto onto economics economic policy and there was an
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interesting tangent as to how i got in economics which is i was appearing for this national talent
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search exam you know which is done by the cbsc and the thing is you had there were four natural
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sciences physics chemistry math and biology and for social sciences history civics geography and
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economics i was studying in gujarat state board right and so basically my physics chemistry maths
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was up to national standards because of studying for i.t but my biology was nowhere like you know
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the things i looked at this and boss is my failure so and you know i think my dad was okay listen why
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don't you just pick up one of the social sciences and economics is something you read so much about
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anyway so you could do this so then i did a crash course and kind of preparing myself for the exam
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so there was a formal part of getting up to economics and there was kind of the informal
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part that was happening with liberalization but i think the really big inflection point in my life
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was when i won the scholarship at 16 to go to singapore and so i did my last two years of
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high school in singapore and the main academic reason i went was this was 91 the opportunity
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to mix and match across subjects which is possible now but which wasn't possible then right so i did
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British a levels of a math physics chemistry so kept all the engineering options open but did
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economics as a fourth subject and i think those two years in singapore were really the most
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life-changing in experience in terms of not just the academic study of economics where i had a
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fantastic teacher but also just studying the Singapore economy and recognizing that you know
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here was a place that was poorer than India 25 years ago i got there in 91 late 91 and you know
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65 is when singapore became independent and then you know you just kind of get obsessed with the
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importance of good economic policy and the centrality of effective policy in lifting
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millions of people out of poverty and giving them a good quality of life so in fact you know Bob
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Lucas who won the Nobel Prize in 95 he has this famous paper in 1988 called on the mechanics of
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economic development where he starts by saying that once you think about the disparities in living
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standards across countries and think about what policies and india and indonesia might adopt that
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might allow them to grow faster and when you think about the staggering consequences of that for
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human welfare it becomes impossible to think about anything else so in a way i was living
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Bob Lucas's quote in my head well before i ever read the paper and you know so that's how i got
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hooked onto economics and then i think you know the singapore years were pretty crucial because
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i left home i was in the hostel so it's one of those things where you know when you get homesick
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and miss your family and friends one way to go is you know you kind of just mope the other way
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was to just dive into your work all out so the marginal kind of intellectual leap i had in those
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two years was probably the highest and then i was just you know super lucky at various stages that
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you know the options that were open after that when options i wouldn't even have considered
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coming out of india so you know then my advisors and high school teachers were all kind of saying
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listen you should be applying to the top colleges in the world and i'm like really me and they're
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like yes you know we've seen students over the years and that's where you should be applying
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and then you know i've just been incredibly fortunate at various stages you know undergrad
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i you know had a choice between oxford and harvard and went to harvard mainly because
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of the financial aid and then you know the undergrad influences in economics were
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in a partly amartya sen but partly just a whole range like being a kid in a candy store right
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of the range of courses and everything you took so it was quite clear early on that i would care
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about academic economics but with a view to improving policy and then you know after harvard
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after four years i had this vestigial regret of having turned down oxford for my undergrad
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and so i did a one-year masters in cambridge on a fellowship and so that was that was a fun year
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and in fact i followed amartya center trinity and he won the nobel within six weeks of my getting
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there but that was a fun year in fact you know you will appreciate this given your quick info past
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right in fact that the because it was in 98 99 in england so that was the year i you know i bought
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my cricket world cup tickets in advance so i followed the indian cricket team around i that
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was the uptase and bupathy won wimbledon so it was a good year to be in england so but anyway like
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you know i think england year was fun but i think the other thing i got from singapore was a very
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very healthy respect for the private sector right uh which is something that your typical academic
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economist or typical kind of government bureaucrat doesn't always have and so before i went to my
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phd i really wanted to have a private sector experience and one of the things i did in college
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was i learned chinese and so i went back to singapore worked in management consulting for a
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couple of years and this is 99 to 2001 at a time when china has not yet entered the wto so most
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fortune 500 companies asian headquarters were in singapore or hong kong and with you know some
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shifting towards singapore because of hong kong getting you know the 97 kind of implications for
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independent china so it was a great time to basically just think about how private capital
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thinks right so the kind of work we were doing was really pan asian strategies looking at where do
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you source your production where do you where are the markets so it was an incredibly valuable two
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years but it was also very clear that i was not interested in climbing a corporate hierarchy per
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se as much as taking that understanding of how private capital thinks and applying that in the
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public interest right and then you know i came back to my phd and you know since you're personal
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this thing that's not in the i've had some interesting detours about like you know thinking
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about different pathways to policy thinking about active politics thinking about things and then i
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think multiple mentors and advisors at various points said listen your comparative advantage is
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always going to be intellectual right like you know i mean so go ahead and get the phd and you
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know be an academic but stay engaged with policy and that's kind of roughly what i've done and
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again i've been super lucky in the sense that i came to my phd at a time when development economics
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was becoming much more empirical so if this was in the 80s and 90s when you were really just writing
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a lot of applied theory models and trying to argue which type of poverty trap was kind of creating
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poverty i might have lost interest right but it was at a time when you know you really had to get
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your shoes dirty go to the field understand what was happening and i kind of you know the rct
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movement was happening around that time and i was kind of the first wave of the students of this
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year's nobel prize winners right so michael kramer was my direct advisor and abhijit nester you know
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they taught us the phd development sequence together in my second year in grad school so
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and then you know i think how i got into education so at heart i've really been a public i'm still a
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public finance economist right so the focus has always been on effectiveness of policy and for
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which public finance is like the core policy field there is both in the revenue side and the
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expenditure side and then the interest in education specifically i think came from you know partly
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there's the senyan influence about belief in human development and human capital but you know i've
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always kind of believed in senyan ends but disagreed with sen on means right you know we
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can come back to that when we talk about vouchers and how you know the senyan influence itself
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sometimes would suggest the case for more market-based provision of basic services but
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anyway i think you know the phd the rct movement you know is very technocratic is kind of very in
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some ways it's humble right so there's an aspect of methodological hubris where it gets pushback
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of saying this is a world standard but it's also at its essence it's about humility which is to say
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that we have way more theories than we have data and at some point you just need to subject your
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theories to real evidence and so how i got into education was really there was this conference in
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imran in 2001 at the end where i was a first year phd student and this is this you know really high
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level policy conference of top us economists indian economists the who's who of the indian
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kind of policy establishment were there and i was this eager beaver phd student sitting there taking
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notes and there were two entire sessions on education and you know the four speakers were
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literally like the who's who right there was abhijit banerjee there was michael kramer there
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was caroline hawksby and there's rukmini banerjee right providing a field-based perspective and you
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know it just got me hooked in the sense of both how important the topic was and how abysmal our
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performance was and the ability and the potential of good research to try and influence and inform
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the allocation of public resources to better the common good the education then just became the
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topic into which a lot of these principles you know that i ended up working on so anyway so i
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you know and then there's the specific research projects i started doing my first major study
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was this all india study on teacher and doctor absenteeism in the public sector and very simple
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descriptive work not fancy rct right all we did was make surprise visits to over 1500 schools across
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the country and in that was when i got my field work experience you know so it was a wonderful
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wonderful experience just seeing rural india seeing the school seeing the reality and then
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just crafting survey instruments to just learn what was going on and i think you know having
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then documented facts on teacher absence and just how much given the salaries are the biggest
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component of the budget just how much fiscal leakage you get just from that one line item
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and then you know part of i think where i have been the policy motivation for what i do always
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shows in the sense that i care about the academic paper but the motivation is always that how does
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this research help us understand improve understanding for policy and then over the years
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we've had some fantastic collaborations particularly in andhra pradesh this is the
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you know undivided andhra pradesh where we set up a series of long-term studies on both randomized
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trials as well as longitudinal follow-up of kids and we've learned an enormous amount from that
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research so you know which i'll talk more about on the call and then i think in terms of the
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policy engagement you know i've always been fortunate in the sense of having exposure to
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conferences and access to the technocratic leadership in the country right so you know
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whether it's the chief economic advisors whether it's the planning commission senior folks people
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like dr montec aluwalia have been like you know long-term mentors and influences and so in that
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sense there were windows to then provide inputs based on policy and then around 2012 when i was
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frankly very frustrated with the rte which i you know which i really think set us back in multiple
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ways right it's kind of a classic example of good intentions that are counterproductive and we can
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talk more about that i remember just being very very frustrated at how policy was not reflecting
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any of the evidence and i think dr aluwalia told me he said listen you know you write these
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great papers that get published in the top journals like you know and we might at best come to a
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seminar and clap our hands and say good job but in the end the policy is still written by people
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who are essentially bureaucrats and who don't understand the research so if you want to start
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having impact you need to roll up your sleeves and kind of you know get involved a bit more and
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so then he invited me to write a background paper to the 12th five-year plan and then a lot of the
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language in that paper ended up making it to the five-year plan and then after that you know i
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think he again said listen you know it's one thing to put things in a planning document but now you
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need to start engaging much more in terms of making this happen and so then you know both with mhrd
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where we've done some workshops and then over time you know where i spend most of my policy time
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frankly is with the states right because 90 of service delivery functions are with state
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governments and so i continue to work across a range of states testing a bunch of you know
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continuing to do research but continuing to also synthesize so i think one of the things again the
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doctor i think said to me which you're maybe not in the exact words but the spirit which i says
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you know he's like you need to learn to segment your brain into the researcher who says that i
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know nothing because you realize how little you know and so the academic this thing is always
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about fine tuning our understanding on relatively narrow areas of uncertainty but in the policy
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space is like whether you have research evidence or not we are still making decisions and so you
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need to then be comfortable with saying we don't have all the answers but here is the best i would
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recommend based on what we know and so you know that's kind of them being the spirit of my policy
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writing you know so i wrote that 12 plan paper and then for the new education policy which we'll talk
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about you know i provided extensive set of comments in writing and and the good news is many of those
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things have been incorporated like you know in the nep but the note of caution is that many of that
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language was also in the 12th five-year plan and so then we'll come back and talk about implementation
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and what it's going to take to take some of these ideas to action uh but yeah hopefully that gives
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you some sense of the personal aspect behind this right which is you know another kind of way i think
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about this is in the non-profit sector you have tons of very motivated non-profits trying to
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improve education trying to improve development outcomes right but the 800 pound gorilla in the
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room is the government and so the government spends over 300 000 crores a year in education
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and so if you can improve the effectiveness of that by one percent right that's basically bigger
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than the csr budget and education of almost any kind of you know entity that's running schools
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are providing scholarships and so it's a very very hard beast to move but the returns to improving
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effectiveness of government expenditure is massive and that's that's what i spend my time on that's
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extremely fascinating now before we get down to the nitty gritties of talking about your experience
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and of indian education and uh your insights from it a few threads to unpack number one i thought
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if someone from oxford listens to this they are going to get really pissed off because you basically
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said hey i missed out on oxford so i went to cambridge for a master leaving that aside i also
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found this particularly fascinating what dr alavaliya told you about policy that whereas you
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you may as an academic you approach something with extreme humility and you're trying to work on one
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small margin of something but as a policy person you have to have a clear direction which you're
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showing and that seems to me to be a lot like you know what harry truman once said when he was
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president about give me a one-handed economist because all his economists kept saying on the
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one hand this on the other hand and i was also sort of fascinated and this is something that
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this is a thread i come across in the personal journeys of many of my guests which is a role of
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serendipity and chance like you've spoken about how you'd have the economist lying around at home
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and in those days the economist was far better than it is today though it's still you know a
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model of clear writing on complex subjects so i can imagine you know the influence that would
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have had going to singapore i'm sure you've thought about where you might have been if not for
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sort of all of these the thread that i want to examine a little bit further before we
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actually start talking about education is what you said about your disagreement with sen on
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means and ends and i think this is where for example someone like mahatma gandhi diverged
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from a lot of the other leaders of our independence movement where gandhi was always all about no
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matter what the ends are the means matter and you know we sort of came into this republic with a
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mindset of that these are our noble goals these are our ends and the means are inevitably straight
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coercion and i can see this playing out at two levels where the first part of my question is
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that when you start examining this and some of your early training was to be an engineer but at
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the same time you've seen the power of free markets in singapore and you've read the economist but how
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do you sort of handle this dichotomy between means and ends and keep telling yourself that listen
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you know whatever beautiful policy i may recommend it is after all the heavy hand of the state which
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often has to carry it out and that mindset of course is changing and the second part which i'll
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explore immediately afterwards but the second part also is that then this tacit acceptance that
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listen there is going to be a certain amount of state coercion involved here so let's at least
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make sure that it is effective and justified by bringing experimental methods and rcts and all of
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that which i'll explore shortly but on this whole broader question how has your thinking on means and
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ends you know specific because you after all deal in a field where there is significant amount of
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state presence and state presence is equal to straight coercion you know all of this money
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that is being spent on education is after all coming from somewhere so how has your thinking
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sort of evolved on this and you know and can you elaborate a bit on your differences with the
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senian view as you put it yeah so and i think you know this is you know i'm just starting to see why
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the conversations are so much fun than lectures right because you can follow tangents follow nooks
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and crannies so remind me because of your cricket forepass to tell you one very important cricket
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joke not just a joke a cricket true story in my life but that has to do with my year in cambridge
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because you mentioned oxford in cambridge right but yeah so i think you're the oxford cambridge
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joke notwithstanding so i think you know coming back to sen i think the senian moral point of
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view that development at the end of the day is not just about gdp right but it is about enhancing
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human capabilities and that health and education are a core component of that you know i think
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that's a very simple and important and deep point right and i think if you'll allow me a tangent
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see a little bit of the senian worldview is i think being borne out right now as we speak okay so
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when i teach my undergraduate class in development economics one of the things i talk about is
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you know you can measure countries welfare and prosperity by gdp per capita which is a standard
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thing or you can measure it by the senian human development index which the undp you know followed
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and the basic difference is that the human development index has only a one-third weight
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on income it has a one-third weight on health one-third weight on education okay now what's
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interesting is if you rank countries around the world by gdp per capita or if you rank them by hdi
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the rankings are remarkably similar okay so there is very little difference and so the only
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exceptions you get there'll be some countries like saudi arabia that are much worse off in hdi than
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income because you know simply accidentally finding oil under you doesn't make you develop
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if you know half your population can't go to school now and conversely i think the senian
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examples of vietnam and kerala and others would be that here are places that outperform right like on
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human development compared to income and i think where i would say there's a slight vindication of
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the senian view in our current covid crisis is that if you look at which are the societies that
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have outperformed dramatically relative to gdp per capita it is the societies that are in fact
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higher hdi it's all relative because obviously better income helps with everything right so
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anyway so i think there is a deeper point there that you know education and health are you know
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somewhat kind of broader enablers of society right that and one of the philosophical tensions
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in education which again i'll come back in the end there's too many you know this thing because
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you see it but i'm bringing it now because you know i know you're kind of a classical liberal
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right like you know i mean and you know and i have many of those same those same instincts but here
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is the fundamental tension right the fundamental tension is i think many of us probably have an
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ethical world view that says that you know people should be allowed to keep the majority of what
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they work for and so the coercion of the state in that sense measured by say taxation right should
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be kept low okay but i think a lot of us would also share a world view that says that the role
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of the genetic lottery in life outcomes should be minimized to the extent possible so to you know
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to kind of come up with an analogy which again i use in my undergrad class is to say you know
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when you look at the field of life as a soccer field and you say this is an uneven playing field
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the problem with socialism communism as you say it's uneven and therefore the game should be a draw
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but if the game is a draw there's no incentive to play and there's no spectators there's no economy
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there's nothing and so then you know it's kind of you shrink all activity right so what we would
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like to do is we would like to level but if the game is so uneven right then there's no game right
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i mean so what you would like to do is level that playing field as much as possible and then saying
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now go play right you know now go play and let the natural kind of you know balance and effort and
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everything emerge so that you then get to keep the fruit of your labor right and the reason i'm
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making this tangent is because it deeply then has to go with what is the role of the state what is
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coercion what is this thing and so but i think the fundamental tension here is that at one level we
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say that we want people to be able to keep the fruit of their labor at another level you say that
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we would like to keep a level playing field and prevent the intergenerational or not prevent or
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at least mitigate the amount of intergenerational transmission inequality the problem is that the
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thing that people seem to want to do the most with their money is propagate their advantage to their
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children okay and so if you look at what people do in terms of schooling etc so i think the role of
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the state in the basic services of health and education i think is therefore much more you know
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you know warranted in terms of providing that kind of level playing field so then i think there's the
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tactical question of how do you achieve this and i think that's where there's this slight divergence
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with sen right like you know where the original senian view is that listen the countries that have
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delivered that have outperformed the human development relative to incomes have been like
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the keralas the vietnam's the cubas that have all had like heavy state involvement or even china or
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even the east asian miracle in some ways like you know did was built on very heavy state investment
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in education okay so you know and i know and we'll come back and talk about vouchers and markets
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and stuff like that but i think the one very compelling argument that the anti-voucher crowd
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has is to say that listen no country has ever managed to achieve universal education at scale
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without public provision and this is true even of east asian okay now that being said i think
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in many ways india needs to chart its own path based on our lived reality and this is a topic
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of you know in many ways like i said i'm working on my first book which will be out next year so
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there's many many things that we'll come back to later but to keep the focus on what you said about
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the means and ends on sen see where i say there's a little bit of a cognitive disconnect in sen's
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own results versus his views on say vouchers okay comes from the fact that if you look at one of
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his most powerful ideas and famines that people historically thought that famines were because
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of collapse of food production okay and what he showed was that it's not the collapse of food
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production per se it is the collapse of purchasing power right so typically when you have a famine
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there is food nearby and you know you can buy the food so sitting in bombay you don't starve just
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because bombay doesn't grow its food right you buy the food from places that grow the food right
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and so similarly like the problem with the famine is not that the food production collapses it's
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because the daily wage labor collapses because there's no harvest there's no work that incomes
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collapse and it's because incomes collapse that you have starvation and famine right so the entire
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idea of enrega or the idea of an employment guarantee scheme as a better means of social
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protection rather than publicly provided inputs comes in a way from sen's insight that it's the
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purchasing power that's the problem as opposed to the lack of supply that the market will take care
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of supply if you provide the purchasing power so if you take that logic to education then the case
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for you know voucher-based financing and saying let kind of the market provide and let the state
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come in by kind of providing the purchasing power i think is quite compelling but as i'll again we'll
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get to in more detail when we talk about private schooling it's much more complicated than that and
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where the market analogy kind of breaks down in schooling is what we forget is that schooling is
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a club good where schools define themselves as much by who they exclude as who they include right so
#
schools are not trying to maximize market share right so i mean if you look at harvard over the
#
years right and i'm a product of harvard harvard undergrad harvard phd 10 years there but i've now
#
spent 11 years as a faculty member the university of california and you know and at a moral level i
#
feel so much happier here right i mean and that's because the harvard objective function the
#
endowment has grown 10 times but the enrollment has not increased at all in 70 years right it's
#
because it's fundamentally a club it's like how do i identify a bunch of smart privileged kids
#
and give them even more resources whereas the university of california model because it's a
#
public university is saying that how do i maximize the number of people educated and how do i maximize
#
the integral of human capital times the people as opposed to just maximize prestige right so it gives
#
you one sense of why the simple market analogy breaks down but that being said there are creative
#
ways of leveraging the kind of the dynamism and incentive compatibility of the market in the
#
public interest which i'll you know which i'll talk more about but i think the main caveat i'm
#
making is that it needs to be much more nuanced i think you know and all of us in education go
#
through this phase including myself about 12 years ago of kind of you know you hear the idea
#
of school vouchers and it seems magical and i think there's a lot of potential in that but i
#
think it's a much more complex subject than other market analogies which we'll come to later i am
#
not by the way a votary of either school vouchers and i'm not against public schooling either let
#
me kind of clarify a couple of points that number one when i uh mentioned coercion one aspect of
#
coercion of course is that whatever the government does is funded by violence because it is taking
#
money from people but the other aspect the important aspect is that it interferes in people
#
solving their own problems what are markets markets are the mechanism through which society
#
solves its own problems you need something i give it to you it's a positive sum game both of us
#
benefit that's how we all grow you know and that's the kind of coercion that i actually object to far
#
more that when people can help solve each other's problems uh the state gets in the way and we've
#
seen that especially uh you know in the context of education where for example is good to have
#
a goal that these are our goals everyone should have this level of education ever you know we
#
should have a level playing field we should do something about the genetic lottery i agree with
#
every little bit of that i have no caveats with that goal my issue is what are the processes
#
through which we achieve that goal not just what is the ends but what are the means and what are
#
the means not in a moral sense of oh coercion is morally bad but also the means in an instrumental
#
sense of what will help take us towards that goal the best and you know one of the most fundamental
#
things that seems to have gone wrong here is that i think india has and i'll ask you to elaborate
#
on this at length after this but i think india has adopted with good intentions the sort of
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wrong means where we you know prevent society from solving its own problems for example i'll
#
quote from something that you have written where you wrote quote it is worth recollecting that
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shortages waiting lists and site payments were common in many sectors including telephones
#
computers and cars in the mid 1980s the most important lesson for india from the successful
#
economic liberalization in the early 1990s is that the key to expanding access increasing quality
#
and reducing costs in sectors ranging from electronics to transport was a reduction of
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barriers to the entry of private providers and the resulting increases in choices for
#
consumers and the competition among producers it is perhaps no accident that the greatest
#
challenges for the indian economy are in sectors like agriculture and education that have not seen
#
similar reforms stop quote and when i read these words which i read today when i read that paper
#
that you sent me i was like come to my arms because for years and i'm like a year older than you and
#
for years i've been telling people about how when i grew up in the 1980s you had to wait five years
#
to get a telephone unless you were a privileged kid like me but you had to otherwise wait five
#
years to get a telephone airline tickets were so expensive blah blah blah you opened those out you
#
allowed society to solve its own problems you allowed markets you took away that element of
#
coercion and boom magic you know today no one considers those areas a problem and the government
#
provision is not an issue but what has happened with education is that we didn't allow the private
#
sector a full rain part of it coming from that early mindset which you know we can get into about
#
how for-profit schools are still not allowed and you know because of that these areas which are so
#
important which you you could argue like education and agriculture as you pointed out are so crucial
#
to the well-being of our people forget our development as a nation which is a broad concept
#
but just through the material and physical well-being of our nation have been kind of
#
ignored because of this mindset so i i would actually say that you know choosing the wrong
#
means can take you further away from your ends even though it seems intuitive that hey we have
#
a problem let bring the state in and the state will kind of solve it no i couldn't agree more
#
and again you know i'm starting to these are different themes which i'm talking about in this
#
book which i mentioned right but i think one simple a source of confusion i think feel and by the way
#
i agree completely and since you quoted me back to myself i can't disagree right like you know i mean
#
but uh but no i think the the key to solving most of india's problems really is expanding supply
#
right you know that we are assured so where we are a shortage-based economy because of regulation
#
is where we have a bulk of problems right so i think so there we are completely in agreement
#
uh i think what makes this whole issue so complicated is the government plays three very
#
different roles in the ecosystem right the government is a policy maker the government
#
is a regulator the government is also a provider right now the problem most of the schizophrenia
#
with regard to how the government approaches the private sector comes from the fact that
#
the role of the private sector is actually dramatically different in these three functions
#
of the government right so for the government as a policy maker the private sector is an ally
#
right because as a policy maker you care about how do i get the best outcomes right for the
#
society right because as a policy maker your role is to maximize aggregate kind of welfare right
#
now as a regular so if the private sector can deliver it better then on the margin you want
#
the private sector to do it right so as a policy maker you're kind of the private sector is an
#
ally because it gives you more supply it gives you more diversity of options it gives you you know
#
just more options to play with right now as a regulator the private sector is an equal right
#
you need to treat the public and private equally and not privilege one versus the other so that
#
it's a level playing field and again here you know we don't quite do it but then as a provider
#
the private sector is your competitor okay because then you're competing for the same market share
#
right so i think part of the problem here is that if you look at the structure of a government
#
education department the majority of kind of the budget as well as the personnel are dedicated to
#
government as providers right and so therefore government as provider automatically is the lens
#
through which we look at the policy making the regulatory function as well and in that as a
#
result we end up doing untold damage right like you know by restricting private entry because
#
government as provider doesn't want the competition though government as policy maker right you know
#
should absolutely want that and it's the same issue in aviation right so i think you know again
#
speaking of singapore i just talk about as examples in my indian economy class about the
#
distortions that come from you know government as provider getting in the way of what's in the
#
public interest of government is regulated right and i think air india is an even more direct
#
example of that right where you know a country as small as singapore gets more tourists in a year
#
than all of india right i mean this is a man-made island like you know that has to create these
#
theme parks for tourism and here we are this kind of you know millennia-old civilization that doesn't
#
get the same number of tourists and like the big one big reason for that is singapore's open skies
#
policy so anybody can fly in anybody can fly out pick up passengers drop passengers and people
#
come there and where is here for decades our aviation policy is essentially being still
#
focused on bilaterals and kind of reciprocity for air india and so trying to therefore protect
#
air india like in has over the years dramatically cut short you know india's global integration in
#
terms of transport so anyway so i think the the part of the confusion here comes so i couldn't
#
agree more the government is this incredibly heavy-handed beast and you know we can come back
#
to what the policy framework should be and i think the challenge again you know is when the issue is
#
so complex that maybe what we should do is we should first kind of segment and discuss on the
#
evidence and what we know because understanding itself is difficult enough and then kind of say
#
now based on what we understand how would we craft a set of policy responses that are both
#
consistent with the evidence consistent with the principles but also that there is a political
#
way to make this happen right and then we'll come back to the various political constraints
#
right like you know between rent seeking and but sometimes it's not just rent seeking it's just good
#
it's just bad ideas right mean that take over and that are very very hard to get rid of so but
#
hopefully you know that clarifies a bit in terms of the private sector but uh yeah i haven't given
#
you answers yet i've just tried to you know uh clarify what the issues are no i i i think you're
#
showing academic humility there rather than the certainty of a policy uh uh scholar to use dr alu
#
alia's uh binary to be fair it's not even the policy scholar right like you know it's the
#
consultants with flashy powerpoints that are more scared about right so one thing i say is
#
you know consultants have confidence academics have confidence intervals right you know so
#
that's so beautifully put no i know what i will also want to therefore clarify to the listeners
#
i think the last part that i uh didn't get over is that for all my uh sense that the government
#
should not in any way uh stop society from solving its own problems for something like education i'm
#
not against public schools or public education at all i'm saying let a thousand flowers flourish
#
whatever works works we'll find out what works and which is a different matter so let's kind of
#
actually turn to the subject at hand after these delightful digressions and talk about education
#
itself give me a sort of a broad overview not just in terms of where things stand today or where
#
things stood before the nep but just over the decades what has been wrong with public schooling
#
per se number one which you've you know seen and examined and written about at a very granular
#
level and before that what do you think other mindset issues which were the problem like one
#
mindset issue which i think you would agree with but that's like a separate issue is of course a
#
for-profit issue that you know nehru once famously said to jr d tata quote do not talk to me of
#
profit it is a dirty word stop quote you know little realizing that like to me profit is a
#
driver of benevolence because the only way you can make a profit is by providing value to someone
#
else's life but leaving that mindset part aside just at that broader sort of conceptual level
#
where do you think we went wrong when after independence where we put our whole education
#
system and our public schooling in place sorry i mean you know i guess this is the the challenge
#
so even before i get there i want to follow up on what you said about profit being a dirty word
#
right see and i think so again so it's useful to kind of connect the morals in the markets for a
#
second right so and i think and i share your i share your deep kind of belief let's see the
#
libertarian reason for why you believe in markets so much the moral case for markets right is that
#
no transaction can take place unless both sides want it right so you know if there's no pressure
#
in you to buy right there's no pressure on me to sell so i will only sell if i make a profit you
#
will only buy if your consumer surplus is positive right so and that's an incredibly valuable
#
disciplining device for resource allocation across the economy right now the only problem with that
#
and why that problem becomes especially first order in india is that see i think the economic
#
approach to policy analysis as Pareto improvement right which is our both sides better off right
#
i think is a very powerful framing but it completely ignores the justice or lack thereof
#
of the original position right so it takes the initial position as given and doesn't question
#
right like i mean what is the moral basis of that initial thing so in a world where you have the
#
level of abject poverty that you have right the market solution for the most part essentially is
#
to leave those people out completely right so one way to say this is that democracy is one person
#
one vote right whereas the market is one rupee one vote one dollar one vote right so how much
#
purchasing power you have in the market so market is an amazing thing except that it doesn't care
#
for you if you don't have purchasing power right so to take example let's say pharmaceutical
#
research right like you know we spend more money kind of on anti-wrinkle cream research in the u.s.
#
like you know then you would on tropical diseases put together not because it doesn't affect more
#
people but because there's no money to be made right so in that sense the so the power of the
#
market is the incentive compatibility of the transaction the blind spot is the fact that
#
you know effectively it's one dollar one vote and so you know i think a lot of you know what i would
#
call left libertarian right it's broadly how i think of myself which is to say i believe in
#
individual liberty i believe in kind of you know minimizing the heavy-handedness of the state but
#
i also believe in to the extent possible reducing the effects of the genetic lottery so to speak
#
right by providing more purchasing power and dignity to the poor that then gives them a
#
chance to compete in this market which i think but the point i'm making is that so and this is
#
again it's a theme i discussed in my interview with i've been supermanian five years ago and
#
something that will form a big part of my book is that see what makes india an outlier in human
#
history right is that we are the only kind of country that had universal adult franchise and
#
democracy is such a low level of per capita income right and so what democracy before development has
#
meant for india is if you look at income distributions in general income distributions are right skewed
#
right which means the median income is typically below the mean so in kind of a simple democracy
#
the median voter is always going to want more redistribution right so most of today's rich
#
countries built their welfare states after becoming rich right but india so the core question in public
#
finance is how do you allocate taxpayer money between public goods that create productivity
#
versus redistribution and democracy before development in india has basically meant that
#
that scale has always skewed much more towards redistribution rather than public goods right now
#
so all of that i think still it's a preface to say that given our kind of unique history as a
#
country right it is impossible to get away from the massive by when i say political demand i mean
#
popular demand right i mean of kind of public involvement and which is what kind of shapes my
#
thinking as to say that the public involvement is kind of a given so then how do you optimally
#
allocate or optimally direct that urge for public now the other place where i massively agree with
#
you in terms of letting people solve their own problems is that one way to i think let democracy
#
deliver better services is to decentralize a lot lot more right because i think where democracy
#
is kind of failed india is not in the idea of democracy but in that the level of aggregation
#
is so high that you're expressing your preferences over so many dimensions of what you care about as
#
a citizen in one vote that decentralizing is a way to kind of unbundle the vote and then allow
#
your local vote to focus much more on issues of service delivery and build you know democratic
#
accountability so sorry you know but i think this is the time you know you raise things and then i
#
have to get to those gadgets answer that but that's fun and then you know these are very much the
#
kind of conversations i enjoy and when you spoke about decentralization that was another moment
#
of come to my arms karthik for me but uh you know sort of get back to the earlier sort of points
#
that you uh raise where i kind of agree with everything you said but let me tell you uh sort
#
of the margins at which i would add my little two pence i think when nehru said what he said about
#
profit being a dirty word i think he meant it in the sense of not in the nuanced sense that
#
uh you are speaking of it but more in because he had a zero-sum vision of the world that he
#
assumed that if someone is making a profit someone is getting exploited and that's of course
#
fundamentally not true that's on the way the world works and yet that is a mindset which a lot of
#
indians have even today which is why a lot of populism will focus on redistribution and in the
#
popular narrative you know which is rational and there's a reason why that is so but that isn't
#
necessarily correct the other thing that i'd like to sort of go into is and again that's another
#
point that i keep making that you know a lot of the countries which became welfare states did so
#
after you know they became prosperous and there is something to be noted there and if you attempt
#
to become a welfare state before you become prosperous what happens and i had you know
#
written a piece while back which i'll link from the show notes in fact i'll link a lot of your
#
stuff from the show notes so my listeners should kindly check that out for you know videos of
#
kartik's talk with arvind as he mentioned and various other links but anyway so this piece i
#
wrote a few months ago was about how indians should be obsessed about poverty getting rid
#
of poverty and not with inequality and to me the two are very different things and people don't
#
get it and they appear the same when you look at the world in a zero-sum way that if someone is
#
getting richer someone else must be getting poorer so if inequality increases that means poverty is
#
increasing but actually that's not the case at all and actually as we've seen since india's
#
liberalization or even since the 80s that as poverty has reduced and equality has gone up they
#
often in a developing country like india i think they often go in opposite directions because
#
everybody is getting better off at the same time but the rich are getting better off faster
#
because they're able to achieve scale and put their money to use and all of that but what i
#
would focus on instead is what the philosopher harry frankfurt calls a doctrine of sufficiency
#
which is frankfurt's view is that when we look at humanity what we should focus on is not the
#
differences between the rich and the poor but how poor the poor are in absolute terms and how he
#
defines a doctrine of sufficiency and obviously i'm saying this from memory so i won't get the
#
exact words but how he essentially defines it is that you figure out a measure of what a person
#
needs to live with basic human dignity and you define that a sufficiency and you fit and that
#
is what you aim for and for indians especially i think many of us english-speaking elites have
#
you know picked up this fashion from abroad that we can talk about inequality and all of that but
#
i don't think is relevant to us because you can solve inequality with redistribution you can make
#
everybody equally poor but if you want to solve poverty then you have to acknowledge the positive
#
someness of human interactions and the centrality of profit to that and work with that in mind so
#
where i you know agree with what you said about the original position that you know it is not
#
enough to say that if i interact say with someone who is much less privileged than me that doesn't
#
solve the problem of privilege right it doesn't solve the problem that he's relatively poor and
#
uh i am much better off but i am saying that i'm wondering if that's a problem to solve the problem
#
to solve is that he is not well off in absolute terms and by transacting with me he gets a little
#
better off with that transaction and what we then think about as a benevolence of the state in
#
practice never really works out that way as we have seen so i think you know so let me you know
#
let me agree with that but then add two additional important points of nuance right so i think you
#
know so where i agree with that completely is that you know and and this is in fact consistent even
#
with the view of rolls right where and rolls is generally considered you know much more of a
#
social democrat philosopher by focusing on the welfare of the poorest and even our roles would
#
say that inequality is good to the extent that it actually makes the worst off better off right so
#
if it's the inequality that gets the innovation and gets kind of the you know the new enterprises
#
that are delivering outcomes at scale that help the poorest absolutely right i think you know that's
#
wonderful and i couldn't agree more with you that for a country like india you should focus much
#
more on absolute poverty rather than inequality i think the two caveats are the following the first
#
is that where the inequality like intrinsically matters is the consequences of the corrosion of
#
the democratic process right i mean and that's because essentially you know what is the state
#
the state is also kind of allocating policies and lodges right so if inequality gets to the point
#
where essentially elites capture the government right then you kind of get and there's tons of
#
work just showing how you kind of decay institutions decay and raghuram rajan has this wonderful
#
his first famous book right was saving capitalism from the capitalists right so and this is true
#
even in economics right what we idealize about the market this is something i learned very early
#
right which is what as economists we idealize about the market is the ideal of free competition
#
that you know the competition is what forces people to be accountable but then when i went
#
became a consultant the first thing you're trying to do as a consultant is minimize your competition
#
right so is how do you define and how do you get either legislative barriers to entry patent barriers
#
to entry different kinds of barriers to entry so you know and we just see again and again and
#
again that that inequality can capture the political process right so that's i think one
#
important caveat the second caveat which is i think more subtle going back to what nehru said is that
#
see uh is it is absolutely true in a place like india that if you look at a feudal history right
#
that the feudal history is built of exploitation in the sense that and this is something that
#
modern economics hasn't dealt with enough but we're now starting to see a bunch of very careful
#
micro-founded work right you know that how much of the attention of the capitalist class was spent
#
in reducing the outside options right so going back to is reducing the outside options of workers
#
and so what appears like free market yes it is free market but i am essentially constricting your
#
outside options so much that you have no option but to accept this very low wage right and i think
#
the best example of this is really seen in my own changing thinking on enrega right so you know when
#
enrega was first announced i was a skeptic right i was a skeptic and i'm on the record as with many
#
new classical economists saying that listen this is going to boost wages without boosting productivity
#
and this is just a bad overall bad idea right and then and in fact the rhetoric around it was bad
#
and continues to be bad now in the context of the migrant crisis when people say oh we want to
#
prevent migration which is again getting it completely upside down because it's urbanization
#
that's kind of the engine of development but to leaving that aside right when we did this massive
#
large-scale randomized control trial in antarapadesh on the effect of improving enrega implementation
#
right the result just blew our mind right and what we found was that not only did it improve wages
#
it actually improved employment and incomes across the board and because what was happening was we
#
also find very robust evidence of monopsony right of essentially you know when you have a few large
#
landowners who can kind of ration employment and suppress the wage that improving the outside
#
option and improving the bargaining power of the workers which is what enrega does right is not
#
only kind of improving their welfare but improving it's not only equity but also efficiency right so
#
i think my goal right now is like to focus on the holy grail of policies that improve both equity
#
and efficiency and there are in fact a class of anti-poverty programs that you know that while
#
we might call it as just a child this is another welfare program if they're well designed can in
#
fact be efficiency enhancing as well okay so you know we are already like you know an hour where
#
and we can see that we can talk about so many things that but these threads are all connected
#
right the threads are all connected because how we approach anti-poverty affects how we approach
#
education affects how we approach health and this is this fundamental tension between the state in
#
the market right which is you know the democratic ideal is one person one vote the way the market
#
allocates resources is one dollar one vote okay now to the extent that that dollar that the person
#
commands in the market reflects essentially effort and returns to that effort that is expanding the
#
common good we don't grudge that right but to the extent that that reflects accidents of birth
#
i mean that is something that we do want to come in on so anyway i think you know philosophical
#
things aside in the end i think this is why you know there's a reason why the original public
#
policy degree in the world going back to oxford was ppe at oxford right was philosophy politics
#
and economics because you know it's a philosophy that taught you what kind of society you wanted
#
it's the politics like you know that said how do you kind of come up with a positive some game
#
right like you know given the competing interest in society and then it's the economics that says
#
boss you always have less resources than what you have demands for and so how do we optimize the
#
limited resource envelope we have and you know i think where i've spent more of my time on is
#
on the last one right because you can argue the first two kind of till the cows come home
#
but the point where i want to focus more attention on is given any set of ethical objectives given
#
any set of policy objectives there is so much inefficiency in how we do it okay that if we can
#
try to squeeze out some of that inefficiency out of the system right you know you will actually
#
deliver substantial improvements over the status quo right which is kind of where i focus more of
#
my time and so maybe that's a good segue to then start talking about you know education itself and
#
you know where we are in terms of our journey as a country and the evidence of the cost effectiveness
#
of how we are spending our scarce public money on education that's so insightful and i'm glad you
#
mentioned the ppe because it is one of my failures that i cannot talk about e without talking about pnp
#
and uh yeah before we go in for a commercial break and after that we promise our listeners
#
we'll talk about education but before we go in for that a couple of asides where you know i won't
#
disagree with anything uh kartik said but a couple of asides were having spoken about e in fact two
#
is education and economics i'll also uh you know drop some philosophical names which is give some
#
perspective on what did kartik mean when he spoke about role so john rolls in the early 70s wrote
#
this very influential book called the theory of justice and the principal idea behind the theory
#
of justice is what he calls the veil of ignorance so imagine that all of us are behind this veil of
#
ignorance where you know before we are born where we don't know what our you know opposition in the
#
world will be what would we want society to be like and people often use this thought experiment
#
to uh you know imagine a sort of a socialistic world but a lot of libertarians actually like
#
roles and see this as a justification for libertarian thinking because the way i would
#
come at it from my classical liberal position is that if i knew the ways the world worked if
#
i understood the rules of economics the power of incentives of scarcity what human nature is like
#
then from behind the veil of ignorance i would want a world with minimal coercion where individual
#
autonomy is respected not in the sense that there is no state and no coercion at all so i'm not one
#
of those but and what i often recommend that you know there are two books people should read
#
together one is roles a theory of justice which is a masterpiece and also anarchy state in utopia
#
by robert nozick which was in a sense a response to roles and talks about why we don't need the
#
state at all which is just at an intellectual level whether you agree or not i think just reading it
#
is a fascinating experience and you should definitely do it the other sort of point i wanted
#
to get at is that you know i also do this weekly economics podcast with my friend vivek called
#
econ central and we recorded an episode of that yesterday we are recording this episode on
#
wednesday august 5 that episode is actually going to release tomorrow and this is going to release
#
on sunday where i spoke about how about milton friedman's famous warning about how pro markets
#
and pro business are two opposite things almost you know the exact point you were making you know
#
citing rajan's book saving capitalists from the capitalist and i would argue then that i have a
#
mild objection to your phrase about inequality capturing the state i think the rich capture the
#
state and the problem there with the rich capturing the state is that why are they capturing the state
#
they're capturing the state because the state has much more power than it should and therefore
#
they can generate more money for themselves and this is a very perverse process and i agree with
#
you that it harms the poor the most and allows the rich to generate more wealth for themselves
#
through state coercion and the solution there is not to outlaw the rich but the solution there i
#
would say is to reduce the power of the state so the rich don't want to capture the state because
#
there's nothing in it for them the only way they can make more money is you know through the
#
pursuit of profit and adding value to the lives of other people on that note you know let's let's
#
take a quick commercial break and then we'll come back and talk about education on the scene and the
#
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indiancolors.com welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with kartik murli dharan
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about the ppe of indian education and of course the new education policy or the nep as it were
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before i get to him though one final little digression which comes on from you know before
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the break which is very simply that i had spoken about how you can get arguments for liberty or
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for classical liberalism from john rolls and if you're intrigued by that what is he talking about
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what does he mean i recommend this excellent book called arguments for liberty uh edited by
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aaron ross powell and grand babcock which is a collection of essays about how you can arrive at
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liberty from a different set of first principles we of course know that you can arrive at it from
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utilitarianism you can arrive at it from the natural rights of john loch and so on but this
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book also shows you how you can take aristotle's ideas and the ideas of john rolls and of course
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the ideas of kant and also get to an appreciation of human liberty and individual autonomy and
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i think our listeners have had enough of that let's get to education karthik tell me so you
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know i'll go back to the earlier question and i've really enjoyed you know reading through
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a few of your papers which you so kindly sent me which i'll link from the show notes of course
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give me a sort of overall general bird's eye view not just at this moment in time but through the
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last few decades that what has been wrong with our public schooling not just at a granular level and
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you of course examined various different aspects of it but even to begin with perhaps at a broader
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level of the mindset towards it yeah so this is this is great and look forward to you know just
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getting diving into the into the core topic of the day so if you look at education policy for 70
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years after independence right i think the first couple of decades can be characterized by you know
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essentially neglect of primary education okay so there was definitely investments in tertiary
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education with the view that this is important for building a technically trained labor force
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that would help india make the you know do the technological adoption needed for adopting
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technology and niru in that sense was kind of you know as a state-led modernist and therefore that
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certainly wanted the ability to absorb the technology but that original orientation of
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the indian education system still casts a very long shadow right on the modern indian economy
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today right so if you come back to why is it that our economy is not able to compete with say china
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or east asia in labor intensive manufacturing it's because the lack of primary education and
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the lack of foundational skills kind of hurts us in the mass market whereas the nature where
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india does really well is actually in much more technically sophisticated manufacturing right
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which is consistent with our tertiary investment tertiary education but i think you know where we
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certainly did start making a course correction in the early 90s right now so you had these
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waves of programs it was first out operation blackboard then there was service abhiyan then
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you know you had the right to education now you have the new education policy and over the past
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25 years i think certainly or 30 years there's certainly been a substantial pivot in terms of
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focusing on school education so i'm focusing first on the good news okay so at an enrollment level
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and if you just look at net enrollment rate and completion is that between 1991 and 2011 censuses
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you know there's a sharp increase in enrollment if you look at the fraction of children aged seven
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to fourteen who are in school or at least enrolled in school that number is now over 95 percent and
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one consequence of that increase in enrollment is also a sharp reduction in different dimensions of
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socioeconomic inequalities with regard to access to education right because you don't get to 95
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percent without basically getting almost everybody there so the glass half full story is the success
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in terms of enrollment right so you've seen massive increases in spending increases in school
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construction increases in recruiting teachers increases in you know building toilets building
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compound walls building school facilities and providing midday meals so there has been an
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enormous increase in expenditure on education okay relative to what it was before and you know you
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do have positive results in terms of enrollment and it's not even to say that that doesn't give
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you any learning because the counterfactual of no schooling is clearly going to produce lower
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learning okay but the glass half empty part of the story is that despite these massive investments
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of not just money but also time right the opportunity cost of time is not zero including
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for children is that the translation of all of this spending into outcomes has been remarkably
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poor okay and so this here i'm talking mainly about the public education system right so and
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then there's the parallel piece that's going on and and so and we'll talk more about the research
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and evidence from specific reasons for why the quality of expenditure in education has been so
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poor but you know basically it comes down to weak governance okay and and suboptimal pedagogy and
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i'll talk about both of those points in a moment uh but one manifestation of the weakness of the
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public education system is kind of the widespread exit to fee charging private options right and
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basically alongside this increase in public education public investment you're also seeing
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a steady increase in the market share of private schools where you know even in rural india it's
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about 30 percent in urban india it's probably 70 percent i think recent estimates suggest that at
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an all india level you're talking close to 50 percent of children are enrolled in private
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schools okay and this is at one level it's an enormous indictment of our public expenditure
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education because the exit to private schooling is not happening as a response to shrinking
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government spending right it's happening despite increase in government spending so you know so
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one way to think about kind of the value destruction in terms of the low return on investment on
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not roi but low quality of expenditure those are two different terms because the roi can still be
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positive but you could do much much better okay the is the fact that uh because if people are
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voting with their feet and go to the private school one way to ask this question is what does
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it say about the quality of your product that you can't even give it away for free okay which is
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and you can't even give it away at a negative price right because the price of public education
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is negative because you're providing midday meals you're providing a bunch of other inputs so
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the business as usual is not working right so that's at a big picture fax level expenditure
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has gone up enrollment has gone up school completion has gone up and dropouts have gone down
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and on input-based measures we're doing really you know on every input-based measure it looks
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like the school system has improved till you get to this vexing question of learning outcomes and
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that's when you know the emperor really has no clothes and so i can now talk a little bit more
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about the detailed research on each of the factors in each of the reasons but you know if you want
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to comment a little bit on this big picture that's fine or i can go into the research itself so the
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big picture thing is very worrying because as you've pointed out even though enrollments have
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gone up in the last couple of decades outcomes have actually gone down and like you said is telling
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at least not improved you know at least not at least not improved and what is also sort of
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depressing is that despite the fact that there are that government schools are not just free they're
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actually giving you stuff in terms of midday meals and all of that so they're better than free
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but poor parents not just rich who can afford elite private schools but poor parents still tend
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to spend significant chunks of their income sending their kids to private schools instead
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and there is this misconception that private schools necessarily means a bishop cotton and a
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saint johns and elite private schools but most private schools are little budget private schools
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operating out of holes in the walls but i want to turn to private schools later after we sort of
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start talking about public schools one broad thing that i'd like you to elaborate on which i
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found incredibly insightful in your writings was when you pointed out that one fundamental way in
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which the indian education system falls behind others is that the education system can basically
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fulfill two functions which are human development where you actually increase the skills of the
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kids or sorting and we have focused on sorting we have focused on filtration rather than education
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can you elaborate a bit on this yeah so i think and maybe i maybe it kind of you know makes sense
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to come to this after i quickly discuss the results right the researcher sure let's go for
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that becomes an interpretive lens of making sense of why we are where we are right like you know so
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let me you know so the first part is so obviously let me just give you the details a little bit of
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insight right into why all of the spending is not translating into outcomes okay and then you know
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so if you look at where the budget goes the majority of the budget goes in four line items
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okay so by far the biggest is teacher salaries right and then there's also money that gets spent
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on school infrastructure and building toilets and compound walls and providing books and computers
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and resources and stuff like that then there's money spent on student inputs of say midday meals
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and and school grants and stuff like that and then you know you also spend a fair bit of money on
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teacher training and other kind of quality upgradation kind of investments right now
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the bad news is that none of these four things for the most part seem to have much impact on
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learning outcomes and it and let me just explain why okay so first of all i don't know if your
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listeners want a little bit of a detour into kind of research methodology but maybe i will not do
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that here and you know you can point people to other sources where i've written about rcps and
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research methodology you know but maybe it's worth taking just two or three minutes right which is
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and it's also something about the nature of research more generally is that the problem with
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research is that actually bad research is worse than no research okay and that because it kind
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of crowds out people's attention by creating more confusion okay so you can get very very
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misleading results right if you don't account for the fact that correlation is not causation
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and often you have to you know you need well identified research strategies that give you
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credible control groups against which you can be sure that you're in fact evaluating the effect of
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the policy that you say you are okay so to take a two minute detour on on research methodology
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let's just take the midday meal program right so this is something we spend thousands of
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crores on on a year and if a finance minister would ask the education minister saying we spend
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all of this money on this program can you tell me what the impact has been the education department
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actually has no way of answering that question right because they haven't necessarily thought
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about the outcomes or measure the outcomes now even if you measure the outcomes and saying in
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2003 i have some baseline indicators of say you know of attendance of nutrition and of learning
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outcomes and you say okay let me measure this five years later or 10 years later after the midday
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meal and see how much it has improved okay now the problem with that comparison is that there
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are hundreds of other things changing at the same time okay so you've got general economic growth
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parental incomes are increasing attitudes are changing so maybe you got those improvements
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without your program at all okay which is kind of why you need a credible control group and part
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of the reason you know the main reason for this year's Nobel prize in economics was kind of the
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bringing of experimental methods from clinical trials into the evaluation of social policies
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and a lot of the work i do you know as you said in introduction i am the global chair of education
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for j-pal and so oversee the entire or not oversee but at least provide your help channel the
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insights from all of the research happening around the world into kind of updating our
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synthesis about knowledge and education research right so the research summaries i'm going to give
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you are based on high quality work and so coming to school infrastructure you know so having a
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school relative to not having a school definitely matters okay it matters for enrollment it matters
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for learning outcomes if the counterfactual is no schooling there's no question that schooling
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matters but if you then look at the budgets that we're spending on upgrading classrooms and building
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toilets and compound walls and all of that kind of stuff for the most part or libraries computer
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labs you know none of these things seem to matter okay and i think we can get into the reasons for
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this and but the broad and simple answer is that i think there's three possible things okay so one
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is that all of these infrastructure can help make education a better consumption experience but it
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may not actually be what matters for teaching and learning which is for learning which is what
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happens inside the classroom right so one slight tangent but which is very related to this this is
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wonderful paper looking at german higher education after world war two okay and tries to study
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the relative importance of physical capital versus human capital in education okay so it's a paper
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that looks at allied bombings during world war two created quasi random variation in physical capital
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destruction because some universities lost their buildings completely okay whereas the universities
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that had a higher fraction of jewish faculty had a much bigger loss of their intellectual capital
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right because these people you know they were either shunted to camps or they migrated to the
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us and so what the study shows is that 10 years after world war two that the universities that
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had lost their physical capital had completely recovered that is 50 years after the universities
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that lost their scientists and faculty had still not recovered okay and so what that tells you is
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like and this is relevant to india's you know expansion of higher education today that we
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keep talking about buildings right but we don't have the faculty till you have kind of top class
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faculty this is not going to translate into higher quality education so you can say the same thing
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about schools where the buildings may be nice to have necessary but by no means sufficient for
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getting learning outcomes and then there's other things that could be going on but at a big picture
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i'm not going to say don't build schools i'm just going to say that the evidence suggests that it
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may be an enabling condition but it's certainly not sufficient to get you learning outcomes now
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the harder part then is teachers if you look at where we spend most of our money so you say okay
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maybe it's not buildings maybe it's teacher quality right and here again the news is very
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depressing it's depressing because if you look at say teacher training which everybody says you
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need to train teachers and teacher training will improve outcomes is there's not a single study in
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india that finds any meaningful correlation between possessing a teacher training credential
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and your effectiveness in the classroom as measured by you know improvement in student
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learning so again as an aside some of the best insights we have gotten onto public sector labor
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markets in terms of research has come from the education sector and that's because measuring
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public sector worker productivity is very very difficult because it's multi-dimensional and
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you're working in teams whereas teachers are a class of public sector employee where if i measure
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the learning levels of students before the school year and measure it at the end of the year and i
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know which teachers assigned to which student you can actually measure productivity as effectiveness
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at improving learning outcomes okay so there's a lot we learn about public sector labor markets in
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general but specifically you know using methods like that this value added analysis we find
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there is really no evidence not in my studies not in any other studies and so again what's going on
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okay so why and this is very depressing to me as an educator right because i believe in training i
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believe in education that's what i do and to then see the results that none of this seems to matter
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okay so and again there's three broad explanations the first is remember that what we are pushing is
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the teaching credential as opposed to any effectiveness at teaching okay so a bunch of
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these credentials are probably just fake given that we have you know an entire industry a
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cottage industry of kind of you know diploma mills and then it's not surprising it has no effect
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but i think a deeper problem is even if you look at the legitimate teacher training programs if
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you were to go look at the content analysis of their curriculum right most of the curriculum
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of teacher education programs focuses on history theory sociology psychology philosophy of education
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and very little actual pedagogical practice of how do you teach okay and one of the reasons for
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this is that education schools themselves tend to be occupied by phd's who have phd's in their
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disciplines and so they want to propagate their disciplines in the context of education as opposed
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to get their hands dirty with the actual job of learning how to teach which is a practical skill
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okay so the practical orientation is kind of non-existent and if you look at the better
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teacher training programs around the world they are things that are you know more practicum based
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and i'll come back to that in one of my policy recommendations and then the third problem is
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that even if the teacher training credential were to give you some meaningful knowledge
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in a de facto setting in a government classroom where there's zero motivation and accountability
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for outcomes you don't use that knowledge right like so that knowledge may not translate into
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practice and the way we know this what you see is that the same teacher training program that is
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found to be highly effective in private schools when you do that training program in a government
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school ends up having no effect and i can give you links to the research on this and conversely
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when you do performance based bonuses for teachers in the public schools what you'll find is that in
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the business as usual setting teacher training has no effect but in the incentive schools the
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better trained teachers do much better okay and so what that tells you is that the training gives
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you the capacity to do be better if you were to choose to exercise that capacity right so
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so quality is kind of knowledge times effort right and if effort is low then the knowledge doesn't
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matter and this is something that shows up even in my research on health right when we can have
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maybe a separate show on on the even greater crisis that's our health care system okay but
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the fundamental point is the same and this will show up when we get to the private schools also
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the private school teachers are less qualified but they make up for their lower knowledge with
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much higher levels of effort okay and so in the public system the teachers are much more qualified
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but the effort levels are low which therefore limit the transmission of that knowledge into
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better outcome right so that's the training for you so now think about it right because the entire
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building block of our right to education of kind of these legislations and going back to the heavy
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hand of the state and regulating in terms of credentials and all the research shows that
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those credentials have zero impact on learning outcomes okay so we are the whole system is
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pushing in some ways for a meaningless credential so we can come back to that later okay and then
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the third part of business as usual is kind of reducing pupil teacher ratio reducing class size
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and this is by far the most expensive thing that we spend our money on right so if you look at the
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right education act we to move ptr from 40 to 1 to 30 to 1 which roughly costs an extra 25 000
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crores a year in terms of additional teacher hiring okay now the effects here are not zero the
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effects you do have some positive effect on learning outcomes but the magnitudes are very
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very small and they're so small that the investment per se does not appear to be very cost effective
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okay and now what are the reasons for why the reduced ptr may not be having an impact it's
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again if you look at the data more carefully what you'll see is that where class size matters the
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most is when children are very very young okay so when you're really young and you need small group
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attention because children can't even sit in one place so one way to think about this is think
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about university education as a professor i can lecture 200 students a lecture to 200 okay now
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how much better is the quality of education when it's 100 maybe it's slightly better maybe there's
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a little bit more discussion relative to 200 but the question is is it twice as much better because
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that's what it's going to cost you right like to cut the class size in half okay or at least some
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some variant right so the class size reductions matter the most when children are very very young
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there is our norms and ptr as done at the elementary school level and if you go look at
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the schools often what will happen the senior teacher will teach class five in a small class
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and assign the junior teacher to the large younger class okay so uh so the ptr reduction at the school
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level is not optimized in terms of how it's used then there are other issues of ptr which kind of
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we have to do and i'll come back to this in the policy recommendations which is one of the problems
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in india is because we have expanded school construction across the board you now have so
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many subscale schools that you have literally like you know over tens of thousands of schools
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that have enrollment of under 20 or 30 students with one or two teachers so in that setting then
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you have multi-grade teaching across five grades even the ptr reduction doesn't translate as much
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into turning out so again the point i'm making and why all of this is important is that if i
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were to put 20 experts in education and i'll come back to the new education policy later and i think
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overall the new education policy is a great document it's a wonderful document and i'm happy
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about many things about it but the big kind of blind spot is that there is no discussion of kind
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of a word that is considered dirty among educationists which is cost effectiveness okay like which is you
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know when you have a bunch of things to do and you have limited resources you need a way to prioritize
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this and typically what ends up happening is you spend your money on what looks like all the
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components of an education system but many of them are actually not the most important things
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and you're spending tons of money on things that don't matter and what gets even worse see ptr
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reductions are still okay but perhaps like the most inefficient part of our education system
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is the fact that teachers salaries are so high okay and relative to either the market or private
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schools or kind of other you know multiple metrics of what the outside wage for the human capital
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that's as public school teachers is is we've now got large-scale study showing you that even
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unconditional doubling of teacher salaries gives you zero impact on learning outcomes okay and so
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given that the bulk of our budget once you kind of take your pay commission recommendations that
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absorb 60 70 80 percent of the education budget so when you look at our education budget is going up
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most of that is just being absorbed by salaries right i mean and those salaries are not translating
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into outcomes because we have a binding constraint of both governance and pedagogy right so the story
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in terms of the business as usual is very depressing because and most of what the government
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does and then the last thing is kind of midday meals and other kind of inputs where again the
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effects are positive but they are very very modest okay so and one reason is what we see in multiple
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studies is when the government provides a bunch of inputs books and meals and stuff like that
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you actually see a little bit of substitution in the household right because the household then
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offsets its own expenditure so this is not to say that the household did not benefit from the
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expenditure because they save money but it doesn't stick where you send it right because money and
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resources are fungible okay so the bottom line is that you can get this even from looking at
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the big picture that expenditure has gone up and learning outcomes are flat and then if you start
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looking at this component by component you'll kind of see that each of these big expenditure
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categories are not really having much of an impact okay now this can be very depressing this can be
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very depressing because you say boss like you know this is what i spend all my time on is there any
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hope here and on an optimistic note i think there are two very robust classes of interventions in
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public schooling that have time and again been found to be effective and found to be massively
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cost-effective right so and the first and basic thing is just governance right that our public school
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system is incredibly weakly governed and you know my best known study is still the study i did 15
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years ago 17 years ago just measuring teacher absence right that on any given day about 25%
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of teachers are absent and you know some people have gone and quibbled and said no it's lower
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than that but actually you have to include the times when you make a surprise visit and the
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school is closed because there's nobody there right like you know and i think some some studies
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have not included that as absence so you know but the true numbers are about 25 then we went back in
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about 2010 and measured in the same villages and what you found was that on every input based
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measure the number of toilets has gone up number of electricity connections compound walls every
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input based measure of quality has improved but the absence had reduced by only about two percent
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and in fact in more recent ongoing work in specific states like madhya pradesh you know if anything
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the absence looks like it's continuing to go up okay so that's a problem that's just not changed
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so to give you a sense the fiscal cost of teacher absence alone at 2010 salaries we estimated was
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about 10 000 crores a year okay that's just one line item of kind of just money down the drain
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and given the increase in salaries right now that's probably even higher now this is not to
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say therefore that you should not hire teachers or not the key point we make is that what's missing
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is the governance layer right so the most robust finding in our earlier work is that the biggest
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predictor of lower absence is just has there been any monitoring visit made to your school okay that
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has any superior officer visited your school once in the last three months and what you see is that
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there's kind of staggering vacancies at the level of the block education officer and even the tenure
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of a district education officer in our data as average of about one year okay so these guys come
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they go and and we can discuss the all the pathologies of public sector personal management
#
later right but the bottom line is that the public sector personal management is just incredibly weak
#
and if you manage we have multiple studies from different kinds of governance interventions
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ranging from better monitoring to even slight amounts of time paid to measures of performance
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and learning outcomes and we can come back to whether we have the state capacity to implement
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that so one of the reasons i have not even recommended that even though i did the study
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and performance pay i've not recommended we scale it up because i don't have the confidence that we
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have the capacity to implement that right but the reason that study is important is more as a proof
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of concept of how much slack there is in the effort of a typical teacher that even three percent of
#
pay that is linked to performance with nothing else can give you dramatic improvements in
#
performance right so the default level of slack is very very high okay so the first class of
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interventions is governance and there's another variant of this where you see where study after
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study after study finds that locally hired contract teachers right who are hired typically at the
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village level who have tenth or twelfth pass kind of credentials no formal teacher training
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and who are paid one fifth to one tenth of what a government school teacher is paid is at least as
#
effective if not more effective at improving primary school learning outcomes okay so and so
#
what that tells you is that the training and the salary is neither necessary nor sufficient right
#
so where most of your resources are going right now is saying i want trained teachers and i want
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highly paid teachers but neither of those things seem to matter relative to kind of are you there
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and are you in fact teaching at them and where the students are which i'll come back in a moment
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okay now so one part of the problem is governance but now for a moment and you know people teacher
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unions and others will often kind of you know really get upset at me they'll say like you know
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your studies on teacher absence have been you know a real setback for teacher morale set back for this
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thing and i'm like boss you know the problem is not the fact that i'm calling out the 25 percent
#
who are absent it's that those who are absent are shedding a bad light to those of you who are sincere
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okay because there are a bunch of sincere teachers okay so this is not to paint all public school
#
teachers with a bad brush there are many many many incredibly sincere teachers right who
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overcome a lot of hardship go travel to remote areas are very committed to their students and
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try to do a lot okay so this is not meant to paint teachers like broadly with a bad brush right so
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now let's look at the second part which is let's look at a highly motivated teacher okay and this
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is in a way an even bigger problem because if you look at what does a highly motivated teacher do
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a good teacher defines his or her goodness by have i completed the entire portion okay so you take
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the textbook you convert the textbook into lesson plans and you see each week you know you're very
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diligent you say this is my class lesson plan i will teach i will do the homework i'll discuss
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the exercises i'll do all of this okay now the problem and this is the elephant in the room that
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pretty much like you know people just haven't recognized is that what has happened is that
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because your curricular standards are set at a time when the fraction of people who are going
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to schooling was relatively small okay that these curricular standards are in fact very very high
#
and you have tens of millions of first generation learners who are entering the schooling system
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without the lkg ukg that most elite kids have and so they fall behind the curriculum they fall behind
#
the curriculum so fast that if you get to class three and if you don't have foundational literacy
#
and numeracy at that point you could be sitting in the class and even though the teacher is very
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sincerely teaching right like you know it's just not making sense right it's like you know what
#
the engineering college or the single say bouncer guy right like i mean to use the cricket analogy
#
right and this is i guess the one place where a podcast is limited relative to you know videos
#
but maybe you can even just put a link to this one picture you know which i've put in a bunch
#
of my articles which i think is that the single most important picture for understanding education
#
in india is this picture that and assuming you kind of put a link to this that shows that on
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the x-axis if you have students by grade enrolled in and in the y-axis you have the grade appropriate
#
standard if the children are on the grade appropriate standard they would be on a 45 degree
#
blue line okay but in practice the true learning level is about half of that okay so the progress
#
that's being made is about half of the curriculum but what is even more problematic is the enormous
#
variation in learning level within a given classroom okay so if you look at that picture
#
you'll see that and this is partly a result of the no detention policy and another case of good
#
intentions kind of backfiring and but because you have promoted children through regardless of
#
learning levels you end up in a situation in a class six or seven or eight where you have children
#
at second standard level third standard level fourth standard level fifth sixth and seventh right
#
so it is like humanly impossible for a teacher to cater to that kind of variation in a classroom
#
so the teacher defaults to completing the syllabus and the curriculum and so what happens is that
#
children are going through the motions of sitting in school learning nothing and that's because the
#
system has already left them behind okay and the one you know very powerful way of just seeing this
#
point is you know if you speak in Tamil, your podcast viewers will understand maybe 20% of you.
#
No matter how motivated I am, I am highly qualified, highly motivated, I am not absent
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at all, I teach with a good feeling, I give a lot of homework, I do a lot of correction,
#
I speak fast in one lecture, I give the content of two lectures in one lecture, but no matter how
#
sincerely I teach you, you won't understand a word, you are sitting there and laughing because
#
you know what I am saying, but even now if I say that you are a fool, you won't understand a word
#
because you are sitting there in class, I will suddenly come and ask you what I said, you won't
#
understand a word, then what will you do, there will be a child next to you, that child will understand,
#
I will look at that child and say, look, I will stop this child and say, okay, you solve the problem I said,
#
you have to do that, then I will look at you and say, you are a fool, why don't you study, right, so
#
what have I just done to you, right, I have given you 45 seconds in the shoes of an Indian child in
#
a typical Indian classroom, right, which is that and this is that sense of helplessness that you
#
feel sitting in that classroom, where you feel that this is beyond me, is basically the lived
#
reality of the majority of our children day to day in our school system and that's because
#
essentially that and this then brings me back to the filtration and sorting, okay, which is how do
#
you make sense of this education system that you know and so any so once you understand that this
#
is the binding constraint, there is also now tons of evidence and in fact this is a big part of the
#
work that was cited in the Nobel Prize awarded last year, which Esther and Abhijit in partnership
#
with Pratham and Rukmini Banerjee and others have done series of studies that just show that you
#
know if you you don't need highly qualified teachers you can have volunteers with a 10th
#
standard education but all that they're doing is teaching at the right level if a child is not
#
able to read letters you teach them letters if you can't read words you teach words you can't read
#
sentences you teach sentences and you kind of build the scaffolding and meet the child where they are
#
and teach as opposed to kind of going lockstep with the curriculum because this is what I need
#
to do and now you know we have tons of evidence that if you manage to kind of teach at the right
#
level that that becomes highly highly effective and cost effective okay so if you take this kind
#
of overall picture on the public education system and say how do you make sense of this
#
is it's useful to then take a step back and realize that education systems have historically served
#
three very different functions in society right there is a part of this which is about creating
#
teaching skills and teaching your actual content and you can call that the human development or
#
human capital function of education right but the other function that education has served
#
historically is it's also served a sorting and screening function of identifying who is smart
#
so that you can then allocate the people who are smart into positions of higher education positions
#
of leadership and because you know you want your kind of highest ability citizens in positions of
#
responsibility that affect kind of the logical now don't get me wrong right there is nothing wrong
#
in sorting per se right every society needs sorting whether it's kind of you know whether
#
it's europe whether it's china every society finds a way to identify its most talented
#
and direct them to positions of responsibility and that would actually be consistent with the
#
Rawlsian view because you want your scientists and your you know people who are doing things
#
that have broader social impact to be of the highest quality right the problem is not the
#
sorting per se the problem is that because you obsess on sorting that if you're not going to
#
meet that cut off then the system basically abandons you right and so when you're below that
#
effectively you know the only thing that the system cares about is are you passing this exam
#
okay so which is why the best way to make sense of the indian education system is that we are not
#
an education system we are fundamentally a filtration system right so if you look at the
#
iit's you know people will say hey look at our iit's you know and then when i talk in the u.s
#
people often are very stupefied right because they'll say okay i thought india had the best
#
education system in the world you guys produced the ceo of microsoft the ceo of google the ceo
#
of ibm you know the chancellor of my university ucst like you know they all went to iit the former
#
provost they all you know and then i tell them that you know that's right but the magic of the
#
iit in some ways is that you maintain the stringency of the selection process and so if i manage to
#
select the top 0.001 percent of a billion person distribution i could put those kids in a circus
#
and they will still do fantastic things right so what we have is and this is true of the is it's
#
true of everything right i mean it's true that we have this selection focused education then exam
#
system and that's what drives everything right it drives everything to the point that then if you're
#
a student that's behind the exams what do you do you don't try to learn concepts you try to say how
#
do i cram every past exam paper to give myself some shot at passing this exam and which is why
#
you then get this phenomenon of completely unemployable graduates because they have crammed
#
their way into something without any understanding of what's going on and famously captured in three
#
idiots right so i think the but the point the reason this is important is that people rail
#
against the exam based system but sometimes that can also give you very counterproductive like you
#
know well-intentioned but backfiring kind of approaches like you know with uh i think couple
#
sibil and rt try to do of saying let's get rid of board exams okay but that is actually a mistake
#
because getting rid of board exams doesn't get rid of the fact that society still wants the sorting
#
and so the rich will find other ways to signal right like i mean they'll take ibs they'll take
#
other fancy boards they'll take you know other they'll take horse riding and find other ways
#
to show that they're smart and for the poor in fact your board exam is the only option okay so
#
by taking that out you've actually made it even harder so that's again an example of why you need
#
to not just kind of you know identify the symptom and go after it but identify what are the deeper
#
structural factors of the education system that give rise to these two very conflicting pressures
#
where the human development paradigm is something that says regardless of where you are i want you
#
to be better than where you were yesterday right which is what we want our education system to be
#
doing there is the ranking and sorting paradigm is all about like can i get past this hurdle so
#
i think my larger point and this is something i mentioned in my in you know my both the paper
#
that i wrote for the volume that abhijit banerjee and raghuram rajan and gita gopinath and and mir
#
sharma edited as well as those who are very much in my comments to the committee on the new education
#
policy is that the fundamental challenge for us is how do we move our education system from a
#
filtration system to a human development system that's able to add human capital to children at
#
every part of the distribution and allow you to be better than where you were yesterday as opposed
#
to kind of chasing this ranking day system because that's a zero-sum game rank by definition is
#
zero-sum right you know and you then create the pressure without creating the creating education
#
so you know i've said a lot there so let me just take a pause and you know let you come in on what
#
you would like me to elaborate on yeah you know i've been listening with uh wrapped fascination
#
are i'm running temptation j i won't burden my readers with a minute of bangla after your
#
minute of Tamil which was most charming by the way if i was a student in your class that would
#
have been the high point of my class so what are you talking about but let me unpack uh some of
#
what you just said and you can tell me if i understood it correctly and if i'm summarizing it okay
#
number one i want to go back to the slight detour you took which i don't think is a detour i think
#
in many ways is central if we want to get ahead which is the role of research where i mean something
#
that you have spoken about in the past of course is the difficulty of research in social science
#
where there are so many variables my guest Shruti Rajgopalan once put this very well when she said
#
that you know uh in the hard sciences let's say if you want to you know test the proposition about
#
whether putting a coin in a body of water will displace water or not you know you can take a
#
jug of water put it there you can measure where it is put the coin in and you can measure it again
#
but in the social sciences you're basically there's a swimming pool with a hundred people
#
swimming inside and splashing inside and you're throwing a coin in there and then you're trying
#
to come up with you know was this an effective intervention and and you know uh like you said
#
that you know bad studies which can you know put mistake correlation for causation can often uh
#
sort of go wrong there and what has sort of begun to happen in the last 20 years and
#
uh by your three esteemed uh friends and teachers got the Nobel Prize was talking about randomized
#
control trials and how even within the social sciences there is a role for doing well-designed
#
studies which can throw light on certain things now i was struck by a couple of those studies
#
which you cited in your papers like number one and and the interesting thing about many of these
#
studies is that they um threaten conventional wisdom now what happens if you if social science
#
research is all muddy and you can't get any conclusions conventional wisdom tends to propagate
#
itself and uh you know become hardwired into the way we think about education and you pointed to
#
a couple of studies which actually challenged conventional wisdom one was there was conventional
#
wisdom that one laptop per child would actually improve learning outcomes for children and all of
#
that and it just seemed so intuitive and obvious that no one really bothered to test it until
#
someone did test it in peru as you pointed out and they found that it had absolutely no impact
#
which is counterintuitive but there you are and similarly you refer to the study in indonesia
#
where teacher salaries were doubled and no impact at all on outcomes now why is this
#
important what is important here which i kind of want to stress and i think is an enormous
#
point that you made is that it is not to say that giving a laptop to every child is not desirable
#
or that paying teachers well is not desirable it is to say that our resources are limited
#
there are limited things that we can do with them there is a scarcity of resources and especially
#
because this task is so mission critical because we need to educate our children it has a moral
#
dimension therefore we need to focus on how best we can use the limited money available to us
#
and the central the sort of core thinking of the indian state over the decades of this has been a
#
focus on inputs like even the rte which we can discuss in detail when we get to private schools
#
but even there the the focus is on inputs how much are we paying teachers you know how are
#
the buildings how many toilets are there is there a playground and as you have pointed out in a
#
phrase which i found very telling these are neither necessary nor sufficient and the research shows
#
that so it is no longer a question of coming from a particular ideology say you know a socialist
#
ideology versus an anarchist ideology or whatever and saying that no this is bad that is wrong
#
but what you are doing is you're saying that one these things matter and two now we can measure
#
these things so let's measure them and let's sort of design interventions accordingly because we
#
have limited amount of money to play with so we need to know what works and what doesn't work
#
and i i think that's a profoundly important point because when we think of state action
#
we often take a lot of things for granted we assume that the money is unlimited and
#
uh you know we also assume that just increasing imports or everybody will talk about how we should
#
spend a greater percentage of gdp on uh education but the point is spending more is not enough what
#
are you spending it on what are the outcomes you're getting those are extremely important
#
as you've pointed out and the other point that you made and in fact that graph if listeners go
#
to scene on scene.in on on the show notes of the episode page i'll actually reproduce a graph
#
because it is a very powerful graph and what the graph basically shows is two things that um
#
number one you know we are not meeting the outcomes that we should be meeting you know one
#
recent example of this that you've given from pratham's annual status of education report what
#
is called asa report is i'll quote from your something that you've written where you said
#
quote data from pratham's annual status of education report shows that a half the children
#
in rural india cannot read at a second grade level after five years of schooling and b the
#
large increases in education spending in this period have not led to meaningful improvements
#
in these outcomes top quote and people can look at in inputs and say that hey we spend so much
#
more we are doing something about education but not if you don't focus on outcomes and your graph
#
is powerful because not only does it not show that we are nowhere near those outcomes like a
#
fifth standard kid doesn't have anywhere near the fifth standard proficiency that you should have
#
but i was very interested in just that visual depiction of the range of outcomes in that
#
fifth standard where if on a scale of one to ten ten is that you are where a fifth standard it
#
should be and one is you know nothing at all and that there are just a massive number of people
#
all the way between ten and one even at one two three four and that also explains to me that other
#
big puzzle for which i entirely blame the state which is that there is this really bewildering
#
gap between supply and demand when it comes to the workforce in the sense that yes of course
#
there is a jobs crisis in india but it is also true that most of the people who get an education
#
there do not have any skills they are useless why is that gap there is this not a problem we
#
need to solve that we are and you forget the people who don't get educated the people who
#
are finishing their tenth who are getting graduate degrees postgraduate degrees have no skills they
#
are unemployable and you know what you said about the way the whole system works the emphasis on
#
rote learning and the fact that you know in that fifth standard class the guys who are on 10 or 9
#
they are okay they'll understand what the teacher is saying the guys who are at one or two they are
#
like a you know kid listening to something in a foreign language or tamil or bengali if they
#
don't know those languages so it is a great sort of tragedy that we have to address which you so
#
eloquently explained just now and in all of these papers so two questions one is there recognition
#
of this within the policy making world and number two what are the kind of ways that you have
#
recommended that we can actually improve the system given number one the core issue that
#
you know we are optimized for filtration rather than education we are sorting instead of teaching
#
all the kids left behind i mean this is almost most child's left behind right you would call this
#
and you know we are optimizing wrong we are optimizing for sorting versus human development
#
how can we correct that and number two how do we change the mindset where inputs are considered
#
so extremely important but like you pointed out they're not that private schools who pay
#
their teachers one fifth or one tenth you know do so much better and and the other big point
#
i'd make there of course is that the difference is not private public here the difference is in
#
incentives you know and and that's also something policymakers perhaps don't consider enough so
#
i think i've asked you too many questions have i mean i think like you know this is
#
you know i could we could easily go for six hours and break a record of like you know the
#
longest show you've done so yeah let me just i think i agree with and reinforce a couple of
#
the important points you made right when you talk about the role of the research and i said this in
#
my op-ed you know commemorating the nobel prize and going back to the private sector see as an
#
economist i don't worry so much about how toyota produces its cars or how maruti produces cars and
#
the reason is that you face market prices for your inputs and you face market prices on your on them
#
on the product side right which means that if you are inefficient right on either how you're sourcing
#
or kind of how you're pricing or how you're able to compete in the market you'll be completed out
#
of business okay so you know so there's a natural selection process by which you have to be efficient
#
and the efficiency is rewarded in terms of profitability right so and there is something
#
just relentlessly beautiful about the private sector and scale where you know if a mcdonald's
#
manage it's easy it's pillory for being cookie cutter but if you manage to improve like you know
#
the time efficiency of a process by two seconds and multiply that by the number of burgers or
#
number of fries you serve right i mean the implication of that for the bottom line is
#
enormous okay so a toyota has a kaizen like approach to management which is to say continuous
#
improvement and let's keep on finding out epsilon ways in which you can improve things and that
#
multiplied by the sheer scale of what you do is going to give you big returns right now the
#
fundamental problem in the public sector is that you can spend other people's money badly for a
#
very long time right because there is no market test and so essentially what do you spend on you
#
know the bureaucrats goal is typically how do i minimize my kind of so even the best intention
#
bureaucrat right has you know has limitations in terms of time horizon has limitations in terms of
#
the technical knowledge and capacity that's available on these things and is also responding
#
mainly to the pressure groups around and so it's a it's a basic function of the politics of what is
#
visible right that you end up focusing on imports because the inputs are visible you can have a
#
school building you can have a politician go cut a ribbon and saying like they hope we have built a
#
school for you and you know and coming to laptops right so it's actually when i give i have this
#
whole paper on technology education fact which is in the a year and which kind of highlights and i'll
#
just build on that example a little bit and then come back to the the politics point right which
#
is what we find is that so here are these studies with one laptop per child that have zero impact
#
right on the other hand we've gotten incredibly optimistic results from a study we did in delhi
#
using an indian developed software called mind spark right and the key is this is a company based
#
in amtabad now in bangalore you know and they've spent 15 years developing a bunch of assessment
#
products and over the years have kind of you know built this online tech platform but the key is
#
that because they have millions of data points and kids they are able to calibrate your learning
#
level and customize your instruction to exactly where you are right and what we see is that that
#
program gave you stunning improvements that within five months of exposure we saw bigger gains than
#
in other programs over five years okay and the main reason is that it's because it's able to
#
customize instruction and actually achieve this human development paradigm right as opposed to
#
the sorting paradigm right so the good news is that that's incredibly effective the bad news is
#
if you go look at the national ed tech policy the national ed tech policy is still fundamentally an
#
input and procurement policy right it's okay everything is based on estimating budgets for how
#
many computers how many schools how many they say and again you can't blame them because if you go
#
to you know whether it's and you know not to pick favorites across states this was true in tamil nadu
#
this was true in up that when the chief ministers announced their laptop programs the most important
#
thing they wanted was to put their photo on it right like so the tamil nadu laptop program had
#
gilalta's photo on it the up laptop program is even better it had like i think 30 seconds of
#
samajwadi party propaganda like in the login you know like when you come in you see you know uh you
#
know you see a glacier they're smiling and giving it to you and of course then there was an after
#
market in getting rid of that software right like you know but the point is but the but the point is
#
that politics is about what is visible right and that's kind of what makes service delivery such a
#
vexing problem right that our usual machinery of democratic accountability rewards what is visible
#
and you know the seen and the unseen right so the scene is there is the input the unseen is the
#
outcome right because you don't measure this and so which is why in many ways the most important
#
contribution of research and kind of you know public interest work is just good measurement
#
right so there's this wonderful example from rukmini banerjee right so 15 years pratham has
#
been doing this work on learning outcomes and in fact one of my colleagues abhijit singh has this
#
beautiful new paper on administrative data integrity right like you know where he shows that
#
if you go look at the official measurement of learning outcomes and then do an independent
#
audit of that you'll find that the true learning level is less than half of what is reported in
#
the official data right like you know because everybody has an incentive to inflate these
#
outcomes so rukmini has this great story where i think she i can't remember if she said it
#
in a conference if she wrote it in an op-ed but you know in i think she went to a village
#
somewhere and again she goes to schools test kids and they can't do anything and she goes
#
to the gram pradhan and saying do you know that your children can't read and the pradhan refuses
#
to believe it and then she takes the pradhan and shows them like you know that this is what
#
the learning levels are and then there's an education department functionary or maybe it's
#
a teacher who gets very upset at her and apparently this is wonderful line he says madame
#
why do you want to come and puncture this balloon with this pesky thing called reality
#
right like let me translate that for the readers means why are you so attached to reality
#
but it kind of then goes back to how some of the most important contributions of research
#
and this thing is just measurement right that if you kind of you know in in a world where marketing
#
has kind of taken over substance in so many areas right like you know that you know to insist and
#
you know again when i come to research come to this thing you still want to be able to market
#
and present the insights but you need the substance of that first which is why i spent
#
five years before i come and do any presentation after learning what's going on right but you know
#
but it just highlights going back to the politics of all of this that has the lesson been learned
#
and i think you know when i go to the is academy in missouri right i'll find many many thoughtful is
#
officers who will come after my seminars and saying you know this was wonderful we agree
#
with everything you said like you know can you please come and help us do something in our
#
states right so there are multiple chief ministers multiple you know education ministers secretaries
#
who will be motivated and try to do something the problem is and this is why you know i have this
#
whole book which i'm working on on which i i won't even give away with the title it'll be out next
#
year but it's this kind of it's my 20-year arc of kind of trying to improve the indian state right
#
on different aspects but one of the challenges that even the best intention people like you know
#
will have tenure of two years or three years right so which means that the time horizon you have
#
means that even the highest quality bureaucrat can at best create a new scheme get it funded
#
and get it rolled out so the metric of success that's available is fundamentally an input-based
#
metric right that you get to show in your time frame whereas getting these outcomes improved
#
are kind of wicked problems right that take a generational investment five ten fifteen years
#
and these are just incredibly difficult in fact you know every time i go to mhrd and go to the
#
secretary elementary education's office i kind of have a smile on my face because the first time
#
i went there was 2001 when the education secretary was sc3 party and then i look at the names on that
#
board right you know there's been at least 10 if not more names in that period between then and now
#
and whereas like you know those of us who are in the weeds are there thinking about this long-term
#
basis so you know and and so this is a tangent that maybe we should just do a complete second
#
show on this which is you know why so much of my policy engagement these days is done with the
#
states right and you know i've kind of you know i talk to uh i've always provided inputs to the
#
planning commission i am you know an informal honorary advisor niti ayog but again in practice
#
where i find the highest return on investment of time spent is in the states because you know
#
education is a state subject and there are states that are trying a bunch of things so let's maybe
#
that's a good pivot to then talk about you know so i think all i've done here is clarify why these
#
issues are so difficult right that um you it's easy to spend taxpayer money badly other people's
#
money like everybody wants to spend other people's money right like you know so then that then goes
#
back to the coercion which is why i sometimes get nervous when the government talks about raising
#
tax revenue because i don't want to raise tax revenue till i can be assured in the quality
#
of expenditure but and this is a dominant theme in a lot of my work where in fact i think we need
#
more public spending we need more public kind of provision but the efficiency is so low like i mean
#
that i kind of you know that i wonder right you know that often there are more efficient ways and
#
i'll come back and talk about this with a very concrete example of early childhood education
#
so yeah so i think my bottom line is i agree with you i've tried to clarify for your listeners two
#
or three additional concepts about why you know value for money in the public sector is so difficult
#
because you're spending somebody else's money why the politics of kind of visible the seen and the
#
unseen i'd not even planned that but it's beautiful right like you know because what is seen is the
#
inputs and what is unseen are the outcomes and so you know you will naturally focus on what is seen
#
and then the last part is that the issues in terms of the time horizon and the nature of some of the
#
reforms that are needed are so complex that they cannot be done just by an education secretary
#
right so if you want to change aspects of recruitment though you know you need coordination
#
with finance you need coordination you know with other parts and let me also since anecdotes are so
#
powerful just like the let me give you one more true anecdote right and i won't give you the year
#
because that will give away the person right but you know the other problem in government is that
#
individual line departments typically have zero incentive for cost effectiveness right because
#
what they're trying to do is maximize the budgetary allocation that they get and a very
#
senior education department official once looked at some of my work and actually with a straight
#
face said your research is going to hurt education because the finance ministry is going to use your
#
research to cut my budget okay and because you're showing that we can do this at lower money and i'm
#
like you know sir or ma'am i won't even reveal that right like you know that i want to keep your
#
budget the same if anything i would like to increase your budget but i cannot in good
#
conscience like make that case when there is so much inefficiency in your expenditure right so
#
and and i want to connect back to a very important point you made which is i think one of the source
#
of tension between activists and economists is you know the activists kind of there is a large
#
sanctimonious left in this country right like you know i mean that believes that we need the state
#
to do more of everything and think about the economists as being counting scrooges who say
#
like you know is killing person he was killing person right but i think the point is that in a
#
world of limited resources cost effectiveness is not just an economic convenience it's a moral
#
imperative right it's a moral imperative precisely like you said because these problems on terms of
#
human development whether it's malnutrition whether it's learning outcomes are so pressing
#
that in a world of limited resources it is kind of you know morally unacceptable
#
to not put cost effectiveness at the center or at least give it a very high weight in how you
#
allocate scarce public resources and you know that's kind of a unifying principle that informs a lot
#
of my work and the other thing i sometimes say and again you know i have an entire three-hour
#
kind of lecture just on education that i give to the top officials is you know if you look at
#
education outcomes and look at per capita income now of course there's a strong positive correlation
#
right but if you look at the countries that are big positive outliers again what you learn is that
#
for any given level of per capita income if i can pivot my public expenditure from things that are
#
less cost effective to more cost effective you can deliver much better outcomes at any given
#
level of fiscal and administrative capacity and so you know and so let me just say very quickly
#
what i think about the new education policy and then come back to you know my own views and kind
#
of policy way forward see i think the new education policy on public schools is for the most part an
#
excellent document right i think if the process was good i think they solicited they had a very
#
very extensive set of consultations you know i have gone and met with the chairman met with the
#
members i have provided extensive written comments and in fact a lot of in fact sometimes i worry
#
that people like you know there's a plagiarism risk here like i don't there's a side story
#
about that which is i have provided the same set of inputs into the committee and also put that
#
in my you know this paper in the Banerjee Rajan book so and i think some of the language including
#
in foundational literacy numeracy has been taken verbatim like you know from from what i've said
#
i feel very happy about that okay so at that level i think it's a good document it recognizes the
#
centrality of foundational literacy numeracy and i said this i said if you do nothing else as a
#
country in the next five years then make sure that every child who is today coming to class one is
#
able to be functionally literate and numerate you would have done more for this country as an
#
education system than we've done in 70 years okay and that's because what my data also shows is
#
that if by class three if you haven't reached foundational literacy numeracy that's when
#
there's an inflection point where the additional time in school is almost kind of irrelevant right
#
and going back to some of the skilling points i think it's Mani Sabarwal who once said that the
#
best skilling program for india is a better school education system because by the time you get to
#
skilling and vocation it's already too late because the building blocks are not there okay so i think
#
the NEP in that sense is an excellent document in the sense that it is moving away from the
#
input-based dogma of the rte it correctly identifies the priorities and i think a lot of the ideas in
#
there i think are incredibly sensible i think the big blind spot again is i'm not seeing enough
#
discussion of cost effectiveness right so and there is this kind of general sense okay we need
#
six percent of gdp to get this and that's maybe like you know as with all of these things that
#
are produced by committee it's because when you are an educationist you feel that you're kind of
#
you know it's amazing how much of the international aid community for education of any sector measures
#
their success by resources raised and will not ask about what are the opportunity costs of those
#
funds right like in other sectors right so it becomes the holy grail therefore to come and ask
#
for six percent and my own view is given where we are as a country in terms of tax to gdp ratio
#
we don't have that kind of money and given what we know about how much inefficiency there is in
#
the status quo that i would have liked to see much more emphasis also on just cost effectiveness and
#
how do you deliver these goals in a cost effective way but that's i think my main quibble now there's
#
another issue with regard to how you deal with private schools and i'll come to that later
#
but you know as an aspirational document i think the net is excellent i think it saves all the
#
right things and there's very little to disagree with it substantively i think but what it is what
#
there's a says a lot less on is the how and that how then requires engaging with the nitty-gritty
#
of the state that we have with its limited fiscal and administrative resources and then how do you
#
make this happen right so that's kind of my big picture take on the nep and maybe that's a good
#
point to then segue into maybe four or five or six depending on time very specific policy ideas
#
right you know that i feel can be implemented before we do that let me quickly uh once again
#
unpack some of this and i'll of course come back to the nep and i have a couple of further questions
#
on that but you mentioned the the sanctimonious left so to say the activist versus the economist
#
and one of the big mistakes i find the sanctimonious left so to say often making is giving
#
importance to intention over outcome so if there is a policy which has a good intention then they
#
just judge it on that and they don't actually see the outcome and the point is there are many good
#
intention policies which lead to terrible outcomes it's the seen and the unseen that's what we've
#
you know routinely seen over the decades like the labor laws for example or like much of what is
#
happening in education like the right to education act for example uh which we can also discuss when
#
we come to uh private schools and what we were talking about you know the bureaucrats saying that
#
oh this will harm education because actually it would have harmed his or her budget was very
#
sort of telling for me because it reminded me of parkinson's law so parkinson's law the c
#
northcote parkinson wrote this book called parkinson's law and parkinson's law basically
#
is that uh you know a work expands to fill the time available uh which often explains why i get
#
so little done but uh the corollary for this for bureaucracies is that bureaucrats just want to
#
maximize their own budgets they don't care about anything you want to grow your department and the
#
number of people who report to you and you want to grow your budgets and that's the incentive and
#
that's the game and you know you brought up incentives one with relevance to the bureaucrats
#
right if a bureaucrat is to plan ahead if he's got tenure in a particular department for three
#
years how does he show he has done something he cannot show outcomes because outcomes will
#
have of good policy will happen 10 years 15 years down the line and cannot be easily attributed to
#
any one policy so what does he show he shows inputs and these sort of bad incentives then
#
become a problem within the system and i would say you know politicians have the same kind of
#
incentives where they are always catering for the next elections so not only are they catering to
#
populist sentiments which might be devoid of economic logic but they are also catering to
#
short-termism so this kind of long-termism may not really have an impact a couple of quick questions
#
about the nep since you brought it up and then i really i mean before you do that you know because
#
i do want to kind of have one important nuance there because i think so any discussion or comment
#
that we make about the political time horizon can easily be interpreted as kind of an indictment of
#
democracy and you know i want to make sure that that's not the implication but i think what we
#
need to do a lot more hard work on and again i have a whole chapter in my book on the political
#
economy of these reforms because all the well-intentioned ideas will not happen without
#
thinking through how do you make this incentive compatible politically right so i think you know
#
the answer is not to say and it's very naive to kind of say okay look at you know successful
#
states like china south korea they all kind of develop you know under stronger leaders with
#
longer time horizons and that would be a big mistake because i think the biggest kind of
#
you know the biggest disasters have also happened like under strongmen right you know and as we've
#
seen around the world so i think that the implication of this is not to say okay the
#
limitations of democracy mean that the politicians are going to focus on inputs the implication is
#
how do you make democracy work better right and a key part of that again goes back to decentralization
#
because because education so if you look around the world education is incredibly local subject
#
and if you're voting for your local empowered mayor or local thing essentially on your service
#
delivery then you're making your vote work better by kind of by unbundling what the vote does so
#
that your vote at the national election can be for functions that ideally sit at the level of
#
a federal government you know issues of national security issues of you know overall economic
#
growth and national performance and then there are issues that matter the state level and service
#
delivery should be sitting at the local level so i just wanted to come in because you know it's
#
very easy to interpret some of these frustrations of political incentives this kind of thing
#
frustration of democracy but the answer is not get rid of democracy answers make democracy work
#
much better yeah i could agree with you more i mean uh to give into an authoritarian system is
#
basically to give the state endless power and we know what the incentives are there and that's not
#
going to end well so it's like someone said democracy sucks but it's the best of all the
#
bad systems we have available to us so we got to make it work in one way of making it work is to
#
think about incentives quick question on the nep before i'll ask you to elaborate on what your
#
solutions for public schooling would be and if you have time i have time and i think my listeners
#
have time so we'd like to hear all of them in detail but before that a quick question on the
#
nep that couple of quick questions one is of course my pet bugbear that you know this whole
#
mindset we have against allowing for profit private schools does the nep address that in any way
#
and secondly the bugbear that the both of us share but you have worked much more on
#
and elaborated so well that does that sort of mental focus on inputs rather than outcomes
#
is there a change to that at that broader bird's eye level yeah so i think you know so let me do
#
the second one first and come back to for profit when we talk about private schools i think on the
#
second point the nep does i think you know by talking about a national testing agency by talking
#
about measuring learning outcomes at third fifth and eighth it's already i would say a step function
#
improvement from the rte right like you know which tried to kind of move away from testing and
#
measurement altogether you know they had this very utopian idea of continuous and comprehensive
#
assessment which i mean again to be fair to the rte like you know some of the ideas were absolutely
#
spot on and not inconsistent with what i'm saying right because what i'm saying about a human
#
development paradigm there is the sense that exams are fundamentally about sorting and that
#
this continuous and comprehensive assessment would help better in terms of learning the problem is
#
you still need the exam as a way of providing objective feedback to the system right so it's
#
not the key is you don't want the test to be a test of the student as much as a test of the system
#
right and that's a very important distinction right so you're not using the test in third
#
of a standard to say i'm failing you the student right it's more like saying if my goal is to make
#
sure every one of you pass an absolute standard what do i need to do as a system right to give you
#
the additional support needed to meet those learning objectives so i think in that sense
#
the nep is definitely a step in the right direction in terms of improving the outcome focus okay so
#
and to its credit i think it's not just talking about a blind expansion of input so there's many
#
things about the nep i actually like a lot and it is i think a very thoughtful document in that
#
regard i think the bigger challenge is that bureaucracies are so good at converting
#
goals into inputs okay and i'll give you an example of this in the context of again education
#
right where see one of the things i have argued in fact the one piece of work i did analytical
#
work at dti oh was kind of devised this thing called a school education quality index where
#
you know we would essentially the broader idea here is that high performing organizations are
#
characterized by autonomy on process to frontline workers with more accountability for outcomes
#
okay so you say i'm not going to micromanage how you deliver you know the situation in the ground
#
you deliver okay but i will hold you accountable for outcomes right whereas in government we do
#
exactly the opposite right which is we micromanage and process with zero accountability for outcome
#
and this is seen even in the centrally sponsored schemes of how the government of india interacts
#
with the states right so because the government of india gives you budgets under these centrally
#
sponsored schemes that often have like i think a former nitya advisor was telling me that in health
#
there's about 1500 line items under the national rural health mission and so every state every year
#
has to send up what's called a project implementation plan which is how they are spending against each
#
one of those line items so you have an army of consultants preparing these reports on one side
#
and army verifying them on the other and in the end this is just meaningless paperwork on both
#
sides right so if you could shift some of the focus to saying okay we are going to provide some more
#
untied funding to states to figure out how you're going to do this but hold you accountable for
#
outcomes and start tying a little bit of funding to improvement in outcomes right that would be
#
i think those are that's the next level of the how that is missing in the nip but the good news
#
is it doesn't tie your hand i think the reason the rte was such a kind of i would say negative
#
impact this because it tried to micro specify so much right there is policy documents i think are
#
more effective particularly national policy documents i think are better as statements of
#
principles like of what we want to achieve without getting too much into the so that's
#
both a strength and a weakness i think the weakness is of course you say now how you're
#
going to do this can you apply your thinking to that the strength is by not prescribing one model
#
it allows kind of a thousand flowers in state level thing and so which is why i think the most
#
important next step is how does mhrd translate the nep into a set of kind of programmatic
#
interventions that then translate to the states right so mhrd for your readers of course ministry
#
of human resource development so but to give you an example see my view on outcomes is if you look
#
at the three goals of education of access equity and quality right are three very very sensible
#
goals but my view is that if you measure learning outcomes in a systematic way in a census and you
#
know that where you're able to do this that the best thing you can do for access is again improve
#
foundational literacy numeracy because the drop-offs are happening at some level the drop-out
#
happens at some point because the child realizes that going to school is pointless okay today
#
there's no child or no parent who doesn't want their child to study right the drop-outs happen
#
because even the most illiterate parent recognizes that after four years in the system my child has
#
learned nothing and i remember a field visit of mine now about 10-15 years ago that we we went in
#
a field visit to identify drop-out children and we found this one child who was working in a
#
motorcycle mechanic shop must have been about 11 years old and you know i think there was this big
#
push to the parent like you know school and you know this dad was illiterate but he very very
#
clearly said he said listen i've sent my child to the school for four years and i know he has
#
learned nothing he's actually learning something and i'll come back to that when it comes to
#
vocational education so therefore if you want access promoting foundational literacy numeracy
#
education is going to be your best way to keep kids in school because then they'll actually be
#
learning something equity again what you want to do is you just want to be monitoring outcomes and
#
seeing are you bridging outcome gaps right because if you are doing that then you're actually
#
achieving equity and quality by construction would be learning outcomes now the beauty is if you then
#
look at how an education bureaucracy takes these three goals and then spits out programs out of
#
them right so access becomes school construction right equity becomes do i have schemes for girls
#
and minorities in every underprivileged group so every department of the government is running
#
its own scholarship schemes like you know for its narrow slice of the population that it's meant to
#
serve and then quality becomes how much have i upgraded facilities and how much have i trained
#
teachers which again we have shown has zero correlation with outcome so in that sense the
#
rte was a much poorer kind of document because of how much it micro-specified these things
#
and the nep i feel is in that sense a much better document but it can become as bad as the rte if
#
mhrd decides to take it and micro-specify a bunch of things so the key step now is going to be how
#
do you design an architecture of center-state relations where the center you know provides
#
the funding and provides the technical support as needed but provides more autonomy to states
#
and figuring out how they're going to deliver the goals and maybe this should be an entire separate
#
topic on indian federalism like you know that we can do it because yeah there is many many threads
#
on india you know so one question that comes to mind quickly and what i'll do is before we get to
#
the rest of the episode we'll take we'll for the first time ever take a second another commercial
#
break in the show so you get a break as well but before we get to that one question that sort of
#
comes up from this and this is a thought that i've often had whenever there's a sea change from one
#
system to another now let's say that in education there was a state of affairs and now with the
#
nep it's the you know the idea is to move to another state of affairs and my question here
#
is that when one then designs a shift like this a new state of affairs does one take into account
#
number one the transaction cost of shifting from one to the other so to say and number two
#
you know whether there is the state capacity and the intellectual capacity within the
#
state to do that kind of shift do these considerations and have to be part of the
#
design because as you pointed out you know if goals can just become these inputs and you know
#
because any metric that exists can easily be gamed and the whole system can just go to hell very
#
fast so does the nep sort of address some of this is this stuff that people like you who are trying
#
to bring about broad changes in policy as well as of course incremental improvements but also
#
broad changes is this something that you guys have to keep in mind and think about yeah and i think
#
you know again so the challenge of policy documents for countries as large and diverse as india again
#
you know we have 1.4 billion people that's more than the entire western hemisphere put together
#
right more than north america central america south america put together and you don't have like
#
a government of the western hemisphere we have more people than all of africa put together you
#
don't have a government of africa right so to that extent the the sheer heterogeneity of the
#
lived reality of indians is so large that i think trying to micro-specify any more would be a mistake
#
so in that sense i think the nep has the right balance of kind of being essentially a statement
#
of national goals so what is it that we want to achieve and you know providing some frameworks
#
for national public goods including you know standards accreditation and stuff like that
#
and hopefully providing a lot more policy space for states to do this and i think and the reason
#
that's important is because the state capacity itself varies so much across indian states right
#
you know and that's why i think we should we should definitely do a complete separate issue
#
an episode on federalism right because i think given my work in the states what i see is one of
#
the other problems of these overbearing centrally sponsored schemes is that over the years it has
#
essentially atrophied the policy making muscles at the state level right because you go to the
#
you know even state departments education departments health departments and better
#
functioning states like tamil nadu like or marashtra and you know often the default is
#
like a child like in central guideline okay because if it's in the central guideline it
#
means the money will flow whereas if you have to come up with your own policies you need to argue
#
for that case with your finance ministry and that's why where the lack of intellectual kind
#
of machinery to do this comes in so you know it's a very fraught problem right and so there's a very
#
big literature on decentralization that says that one of the problems with kind of decentralizing
#
too much is then the technical capacity and state capacity doesn't exist and that kind of because
#
there's economies of scale in terms of designing some of these architectures of policy right so
#
you don't kind of have that necessarily at the level of every district so which is why i do
#
think we should do a separate issue in federalism and go through the first principles of what kind
#
of you know functions in a different part and how would we structure a national policy framework
#
that also maximizes our chances of getting it done given our limitations of state and
#
administrative capacity but i think it's very hard for a policy document to explicitly talk
#
about that because you can maybe acknowledge that constraint and you know i and i haven't read it
#
word to word maybe that's even there somewhere but the constraint is very very real that's
#
fascinating in fact i had an episode with pranay kota sani on centrally sponsored schemes and why
#
uh pranay pranay's point was they should be restricted to just 10 and obviously a call for
#
greater federalism as well for the first time ever in the history of the scene in the unseen
#
we'll take a third commercial break in uh one show and i hope you'll still be here on the other side
#
of that i think i think the second break but we're breaking it no no i i i take one break right after
#
the intro outro which i haven't recorded so even i even i was about to say second but then i realized
#
wait a minute it's actually the third and let me point out that no one actually buys advertising
#
for the show i just put my own random things in the commercial break but it gives a moment of pause
#
you know you can end your dishwashing session here if you're listening and then resume at the
#
you know the next time you have to wash dishes so let's take a break
#
hi i'm vivek kaul and i'm amit varma here to tell you about a new weekly podcast that vivek and i
#
have launched called econ central in econ central we will help you make sense of the economic news
#
of the last week and we'll also try to explain complex subjects in a simple language we will
#
also take events outside the world of economics like from politics sports literature and explain
#
them through the lens of economic thinking why is the stock market going up when the economy is
#
going down what's the deal with high petrol prices should we boycott chinese goods what does free
#
speech have to do with incentives why are the roving bandits of uttar pradesh in competition
#
with the biggest protection racket out there the indian state all this and more in our new weekly
#
podcast econ central econ central launched a few weeks ago and is free on all podcast apps you can
#
browse our archives at econ central dot in econ central you have an incentive to listen
#
don't forget the url econ central dot in
#
welcome back once again to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with kartik mudlidharan about the
#
state of indian education and it's about time we actually get down to concrete brass tracks and
#
talk about how we could actually improve the state of our public schools and and reading
#
kartik's many papers and watching his interviews and all of that i've always come away with so much
#
insight into what the problem is so so kartik go ahead what are the sort of things that if you had
#
unlimited power if there was no democracy and you were the man in charge what would you do
#
let me first of all say i want democracy and in fact i you know i i'll tell you what i would do
#
if i was in charge like you know but certainly there's an aspect of this that and you know and
#
let me take a step back and talk about you know the power of good data and the power of good ideas
#
right i mean and in my interactions with kaushik vasu i've been subramanian and again they would
#
say this again and again is that you know the your typical policy maker is just it's so easy
#
to criticize the bureaucrat right but if you spend a day observing their lives i mean it is
#
not a life anybody would want in terms of the sheer pressures that they're under in terms of
#
you know the almost inhuman number of things that have to be delivered in a time-bound way okay so
#
and they just even the best of them you know and as you know the other version of parkinson's law
#
is the only reward for good work is more work right like you know so even when you get very good
#
people they get saddled with more and more responsibilities still the best each person
#
has enough responsibilities to be close to their breaking point right like you know so which means
#
that it's kind of you know it's really more about not criticizing the bureaucracy but recognizing
#
the incredible constraints under which they function and then for those of us like who had
#
the luxury of time to kind of think deeper harder thoughts about what is wrong and how do you then
#
want to improve you know it's our kind of response because so much it's just so easy to throw stones
#
from the outside that part of our kind of moral responsibility as how do we contribute our piece
#
of this ecosystem is to just clarify the basic facts right and once you clarify the basic facts
#
and then going back to democracy it's like we think about there's this good democracy and bad
#
democracy right so there's the bad or there's good politics and bad politics a bad part of politics
#
is the pursuit of power and keeping power which is unfortunately what most of the time the media
#
is focused on there is a good part of politics which is how do you adjudicate conflicting claims
#
in society and come up with a win-win solution right so and i'm very glad you brought up politics
#
because many of the ideas i'm going to talk about i'm also going to talk about what might be
#
political constraints and what would be you know essentially a sensitive democratically validated
#
way of implementing some of these reforms and so you know the reason i keep coming back multiple
#
times to push back at any suggestion somehow that like you know if you're a czar you'll get things
#
done it is you know it's all about making democracy work better and one part of making democracy work
#
better is just more facts and transparency on you know where the money goes is it being spent in an
#
effective way because what you do is you kind of like you said it for good intentions it's like if
#
i have said something good the problem with the right to education is like it is like you know it's
#
like the national flag and apple pie i mean how do you object to a right to education you don't
#
right the problem is that the innards of that act are disastrous right so you need to then flesh
#
it out and saying the problem is not a right to education the problem is this provision and how
#
misguided it is and so that's a long hard slog right so anyway so i think with that caveat aside
#
let's come back and talk about so let's say i was a state education minister or you know an advisor
#
to the union education minister and trying to set up certain priorities for what we need to do as a
#
country and how do we actually make it happen okay so the first part which i think is very clear and
#
it's in the nap is a foundational literacy numeracy mission to make sure right that every child in the
#
next five years that every child in this country has functional foundational literacy numeracy
#
defined as the point where you can read to learn okay so the first two or three years in school is
#
you learn to read but are you able to then read to be able to absorb new content right so that to me
#
is my functional definition of foundational literacy right are you at the point where you
#
can read to learn content okay so and that's what primary school is supposed to get you to the point
#
of doing and we need to deliver that okay now the question then is how are you going to deliver that
#
and i think part of the problem is because is the lack of coherence with regard to goals down the
#
system so if you go spend time with a teacher or spend time with a block education officer
#
if you look at the and this is why you need to get into the sinews of the state and so much of
#
my work is kind of the last mile service delivery architecture of this country right is if you go
#
look at what a teacher or anganwadi worker is being held accountable for they are mainly held
#
accountable for paperwork okay so when you get a supervisory visit the first thing this person does
#
is come and check your registers right is the paperwork in order is your enrollment correct
#
and you know there is the any sense of learning outcomes is non-existent okay so at best you might
#
have somebody you might call a child and ask a question or two but that doesn't happen with any
#
clarity down the chain as to what is it that we're trying to achieve right so the first part of this
#
is just coherence and clarity as to what foundational literacy numeracy means with regard to
#
achieving certain absolute standards right so it's not about marks it's not about ranks it's about
#
if i give you a sheet of paper in second grade or give you a passage are you able to read it
#
and answer four questions right and again this should not become like have i memorized that
#
paragraph in fact it's kind of shocking coming back to curricular reforms i remember madhya pradesh
#
once looking at an eighth standard hindi exam and i looked at this and said boss i would fail this
#
exam even though like you know obviously you know my hindi is is decent enough to certainly pass an
#
eighth standard exam but it's because that exam was essentially about reciting verbatim text like
#
you know that if you have learned a kavita by heart then it'll be kavita me kabhi ne is panti me kya
#
kaha right you know which is what did the poet say in this line which is essentially an act of
#
memorization as opposed to in any way a test of language or comprehension right so the first part
#
is just coherence on the assessments and measurement so that everybody down the chain from the
#
education minister to the education secretary to the district education officer block education
#
officer teacher and parent understands that as an education system our goal is going to be to
#
deliver every child leaching these levels okay and once you have that then there's the question of
#
so it's not just enough to measure right because you have this foundational problem of data
#
integrity okay and so it's not like even in fact some of the better initiatives in the country
#
gujarat again than the pm was a cm and you know i think there are many effective things he had
#
tried as chief minister including go nuts up which was his attempt to do a universal kind of
#
census of learning where senior officials would go and you know do this measurement exercise
#
and then madhya pradesh in fact expanded this to what's called pratibapar which is a
#
and on paper it's a fantastic exercise it actually happens right they do a census assessment of every
#
child every year to kind of say our children learning and in fact the exercise is so comprehensive
#
that niti ayog had actually put this as one of their examples of best practices in the country
#
okay for education measurement so the elephant in the room and that's this kind of beautiful
#
paper by my colleague abhijit singh you know that's just come out as a working paper
#
and it's called the myth of official measurement right and so what it does going back to a slits
#
say lagav right it just takes a random sample of schools and a random sample of kids and retest
#
the same children on a subset of the same questions okay two months later and finds that the true
#
learning level is actually remarkably lower now and it's a very interesting kind of data fudging
#
okay which is if you look at the ranking of the students the ranking of the students is exactly
#
the same okay so on our independent tests as well as the official data the ranking is not fudged
#
okay but what is fudged is the level so that and that fudging is disproportionate at the bottom
#
because there might be children who can't do anything and they will still be shown like as
#
being able to do the question and again this reflects the fact that the system understands
#
that at its core it is a sorting system and not a human development system so the reason you don't
#
compromise with the ranks is because the ranks will matter for a child at some point in the future
#
and it is unfair if i flip the rack okay but you don't mind compromising in the absolute levels
#
of learning right like you know because who cares and teachers will then say okay if i show this
#
child is not performing then i will have to do remedial education and who will do that okay so
#
the entire fln mission will fail if you don't have you know not only administrative data the
#
level of every child but a system of administrative data integrity of making sure so and in some ways
#
again be i this is whole chapter and outcome measurement in my book where i talk about
#
you know a structure of nested supervision where you can the kind of inspection we did it's not
#
that difficult to actually build into a system and the key is that you hold the teacher accountable
#
not just for outcomes but accountable for the truth okay so coming back to system
#
right like i mean which is how you will actually deliver outcome right so this is then the nitty
#
gritty plumbing that is not in a policy document but that comes from our research and shows how
#
important this is going to be right so you need the goal clarity you need a system of administrative
#
data on learning outcomes with data integrity so that at the level of the child you're able to
#
follow progress and make sure that you're getting the interventions needed to be able to succeed
#
okay so then the third key part of this is the pedagogy itself right so going back to what i
#
said the tyranny of the syllabus and the tyranny of that exam is not going to go away anytime soon
#
okay so and the teacher is still going to face this fundamental tension between should i complete
#
the portion or should i be doing customized instruction for children who are below the
#
levels and so concretely speaking you know there are NGOs like Pratham and Madhi in Tamil Nadu
#
like you know who've done a lot of you know micro optimizing of the time within the classroom and
#
you know the best practice right now is that you have about 90 minutes a day in the timetable
#
which is meant to be for revision or supervised work okay so it's very difficult to tell a teacher
#
to take away some of your regular periods because the syllabus completion pressure is very real
#
but then you can use that other 90 minutes of unstructured time to say okay now let me do the
#
additional work on foundational literacy numeracy to make this happen okay so that is the pedagogy
#
piece of this so you need the goal clarity you need to be able to measure that with integrity
#
you need to direct your pedagogy towards delivering that and then there's of course you know so there's
#
the governance piece overall and frankly i think you know even more than attendance which even
#
though my own work has been on attendance i think you know it can get a little really intrusive to
#
then say i'm going to do cameras and biometric scanners because frankly in the end i don't want
#
to kind of invade the teacher's sense of agency as long as the outcomes are done right so i would
#
much rather have a culture of autonomy on process and accountability of outcomes and if the governance
#
machinery is able to ensure administrative data integrity and learning outcomes for every child
#
i am reasonably confident that the system is capable of delivering improved outcomes once
#
you know that this cannot be forged okay and then there is a piece of actually providing
#
supplemental instructional resources and so you know ideally there would be a way to hire kind of
#
teaching assistants or you know contract teachers or you know on short term two or three hours
#
as a day to provide that additional instruction to the children who are falling behind and that
#
can be incredibly cost effective as we've seen in study after study so and i'll come back to
#
my third big idea where i will integrate this okay so i think the first part of this is the
#
flm mission that's there and i think the mhrd is going to come up with these frameworks so but
#
the key thing is going to be getting to this next level of detail of measurement as well as data
#
integrity which is not in the nape but which will need to happen okay so that's i think point number
#
one does that make sense any response reaction it makes sense i mean my response that is like
#
first of all when you started speaking of goals i immediately thought that wait a minute like you
#
know like when i speak to i teach a class on writing so when i i always tell my writing
#
students that you know everybody has goals that bad writers will have the same goals as the good
#
writers what is important is a process but then i get what you're saying that we should at least
#
begin by having clarity of what are we trying to achieve and if these are the outcomes we're
#
trying to achieve and we have that clarity then those goals are very useful if they are then
#
communicated to everyone where i feel a little skeptical of what happens after that is when you
#
talk about the integrity of measuring it because my experience in india which is a you know the
#
the center of jugar in the whole world is that if there is a metric it will be game correct no and
#
i agree right so and i think see in the end these are all about probabilities right so you'll have
#
about 20 percent of teachers and administrators who will be high integrity there'll be 20 percent
#
who you will never be able to fix but that middle 60 percent does respond right like you know to
#
what the overall thrust from the system is and i think you know we have additional micro evidence
#
on how using technology for measurement can you know really be a game changer for data integrity
#
because then it's kind of real time measurement that gets uploaded it's hard to fudge it's hard
#
to you know so we've done a bunch of pilots on this and i think a bunch of these inputs we will
#
probably put in a memo and send to mhrd and you know center states and hopefully some of that gets
#
reflected because the nep has been announced but there is still a set of details that you know still
#
has to show up yeah that makes sense i mean so let's move on from there yeah so then coming back
#
to cost effectiveness so i think so one thing which nep does talk about it talks a little bit
#
about school consolidation or sorry school complexes not school consolidation but let me
#
again provide some facts for your listeners right so one of the problems of our approach to access
#
of creating schools within a kilometer every habitation is that 20 years ago that may have
#
been necessary to get marginalized groups into school because they would not be able to travel
#
right but one of the consequences of this is that your public schooling system the countryside is
#
pockmarked with these subscale schools with enrollment of about 20 30 children that you
#
have five grades two teachers and you know it's bad for governance it's bad for pedagogy and it's
#
bad for cost effectiveness right so it's bad for governance because going back to my point about
#
monitoring visits it's really hard to go and visit like you know every school that is so far out and
#
remote and you have limited administrative capacity it's bad for pedagogy because you
#
by construction you have multi-grade teaching the two teachers are now teaching simultaneously
#
across five grades so it gets really really hard even for a motivated teacher to deal with that
#
and it is also really bad for value for money and that's because you have a norm of minimum two
#
teachers you end up with ptrs of about 10 to 15 in these places and which pupil teacher ratio
#
so the cost per child in these small schools ends up being made over you know from the few states
#
where i've calculated the data ends up being over 75 sometimes 80 000 rupees a year per child
#
compared to an average cost per child of maybe 30 35 000 if you are at a scale of about 30
#
okay so one simple idea is that there is a trade-off obviously between access and scale
#
right so if i try to provide access in this way of building schools you're losing scale right
#
now an alternative way of providing access which is what we see in our bihar girls bicycle paper
#
where we see that that was an incredibly effective program right is that you can have schools at
#
larger scale in the middle of a gram panchayat and be able to provide transport right like
#
you need to have a larger catchment area and you don't even have to provide transport vouchers you
#
can literally run a bus service right you can run a bus or you can contract a bus service to say
#
here is my catchment area that's actually two or three kilometers and i'm just going to go pick up
#
children and then have this focal school in the middle of the gram panchayat or anywhere else in
#
kind of you know in what your catchment area is and then once you have enrollment of about 150
#
to 200 right you know then you're at a place where you have you know much better pedagogy because
#
you have a single teacher per subject you have much better governance because you can have a
#
principal you actually get better teacher morale because teachers actually enjoy having a community
#
of peers as opposed to being out there in the village as the only kind of educated person and
#
you also get much better value for money and that gives you the scale that allows you to then invest
#
in whether it's the computers or the you know or the other facilities so you know i think 20 years
#
ago 25 years ago it might seem that this was unrealistic because we didn't have the road
#
transport infrastructure but given the investments we've made in the rural roads and all of that in
#
fact there's a very nice study by the shilpa agarwal at isb looking at i think you know child
#
mortality maternal mortality i'm not sure on what the exact outcome is but what it shows is that
#
in fact that you get much better health outcomes from investing in roads than from investing in
#
clinics and that's because the clinics when you build them remotely these are subscale and they're
#
not used as often whereas when you build the roads you're able to bring people to where the scale
#
facility is right so that same logic i think can apply with the logistics of how we organize our
#
schooling system so this is again a very plumping kind of discussion but it is enormous in terms of
#
cost effectiveness because the bulk of our money goes to teacher salaries and the cost per child
#
in these schools is about 70 80 90 000 okay now but coming back to political economy what are two
#
the important potential political economy concerns okay so the one is that local communities tend
#
to take a lot of pride in their school which is often something that has been created after
#
lobbying a lot and then you know whatever it is like i mean is a source of pride for a local
#
community so a top-down decision of saying okay we are going to shut down these schools and
#
consolidate will backfire on day one right so what you need is to kind of have a democratic
#
validation of this process by having a policy or a you know project that says here is a proposal
#
that in this panchayat what this would mean is that we would build a school we would provide
#
this transport this is what would happen and then let the panchayat themselves vote on that right
#
and say that is this something they would like to do and so again as a way of accommodating
#
heterogeneity as opposed to going top down if you have an approach like that maybe there'll be 100
#
villages 200 villages that say please try this and then you try it out and then if it works
#
right then it spreads by demonstrated success as opposed to trying to do this by top down
#
sometimes policymakers have a view that says no in india the only way to do things at scale is to
#
force it down the throat but you know going back to the coercive state and how do you make democracy
#
work better i think you know where you balance the economies of scale that come from the higher
#
level with kind of the agency that you want to provide to citizens and communities is to
#
use the analytical horsepower at a higher level to say here are some policy reforms that may make
#
sense that within a given budget envelope can deliver much better outcomes and now you the
#
community come back and tell us if you would like to do this and if you would then you know let's
#
roll it out right so i think that would be my approach to this larger issue of school size
#
optimization i think is the right way to frame it and then from a teacher's perspective there's
#
likely to be some union opposition because in the long term the cost effectiveness of this comes from
#
the fact that you're reducing potentially the number of teacher posts right because you know
#
but there are two i think broad answers to that so one is that in fact it actually improves working
#
conditions for teachers significantly right because most teachers live in urban areas and
#
commute to the rural areas so by kind of making the school in a more central area you're actually
#
making the school more accessible but you're also improving the working environment by having a
#
profession a community of peers right you go in it's much more fun to in fact what we document is
#
the absenteeism even in health care is much lower in district hospitals and it is kind of in the
#
outposts right because there is a set of peers there's both peer monitoring and there's kind
#
of a community of practice right so i think from a teacher working condition perspective this would
#
almost certainly be a positive and you're also not firing anybody so you're basically ring fencing
#
this and protecting incumbents and so the fiscal savings will come over time but this is then
#
something that will substantially improve not just cost effectiveness but governance and pedagogy
#
right so it's a very concrete idea so and what i try to do in my writing is kind of cover both
#
the principles as well as very concrete ideas right because abstractly but it's like now give
#
me five implementable ideas that as a state education minister or secretary i can do right
#
you know so this the foundation literacy mission that i told you about is something a state can do
#
this is something a state can do okay so does that make sense before i move on to my third big idea
#
oh it makes a lot of sense i mean a couple of reactions one of course the point of education
#
is to educate children not to employ teachers so something we should keep in mind so i don't
#
you know what the outcomes for teachers are is kind of irrelevant for me though i can see why
#
in the political economy the unions would matter in the same way that the point of markets for
#
example is not to protect local businesses but to fulfill the needs of customers and we often get
#
the wrong way around and for me the big aha moment that you just provided is when you you know you
#
refer to that study about how you know you'll get better outcomes for health care if sometimes if
#
you build roads rather than clinics and similarly you can get better outcomes for primary education
#
if you hire buses instead of building schools which is you know such a phenomenal and a very
#
counter-intuitive way of thinking about it and i think you know if local communities are given
#
all of these choices you will have a thousand flowers blooming different experiments i mean
#
you know there's a limited set of conventional ideas on this that exists within government
#
economists like you bring in some more like you just did but just open it out to local communities
#
and i'm sure there'll be stuff that even you couldn't have thought about so you have to kind
#
of enable that to happen i'll ask you to move on now i mean the challenge and again which is why
#
i think we definitely need an episode in federalism is because the entire culture in government is one
#
of kind of lack of trust right so one of the reasons you don't move the money down is you'll
#
say okay it'll get siphoned away by the local political elites right so which is why you need
#
to combine that autonomy and process with accountability and outcomes and so there is
#
this very delicate federal architecture right you know that is should be discussed you know
#
at length in a separate in a separate episode so i think the third idea and frankly if tomorrow
#
if i was an education minister this is the single most important thing i would do okay and this is
#
something that straddles a whole range of service delivery sectors and it basically has to do with
#
the following simple idea okay that one of the foundational aspects of weak state capacity in
#
india is we don't have enough frontline employees okay we are understaffed in education we're
#
understaffed in police we're understaffed in health we're understaffed in anganwadis
#
but the reason you're understaffed is because salaries are too high okay and one way you know
#
salaries are too high is you get like 200 300 applicants for every government job right so
#
econ 101 will tell you like you lower the wage and increase the quantity right and we don't do
#
that now it's not enough to just say that the salaries are too high because maybe the high
#
salaries are attracting high quality workers which is why you then need the ton of research to show
#
that the salary level seems to be completely uncorrelated with effectiveness so i'll send
#
you another paper which i didn't want to inundate you but i have this entire paper on restructuring
#
public you know on public sector labor markets right where i document all the pathologies of
#
public sector labor markets right so which is a whole range everything from you know you don't
#
hire right you don't pay right you don't the spatial distortions there's but so coming back
#
to education right so what we have is we have very very robust so let me give you the idea first
#
okay and then give you how it kind of is consistent with the research but also navigate some of the
#
problems the political problems which i think again in a democracy one of i think the basic
#
mistakes that many armchair economists will say is actually here is the reform like you know i mean
#
but it's just these silly politicians who don't do it but i think like the prime minister of
#
luxembourg once famously said he said we all know what to do we just don't know how to get re-elected
#
after doing it okay so so so it's actually irresponsible of economists to kind of not you
#
know you don't need to be political to say what are the political constraints and how do you make
#
good economics be good politics right so that's incumbent on any economist who wants to do sensible
#
policy work okay so therefore coming back to what is this idea the idea here is that i would like to
#
restructure teacher training so that we make teacher training a much more practicum apprenticeship
#
you know based system where today what happens is you can basically pass some exams somewhere
#
and kind of get hired as a teacher with maybe token four weeks or six weeks of kind of practical
#
training and what i have in mind is actually much more ambitious than that which is to say
#
let's have a three to four year teacher training program that's basically 75 percent practicum
#
okay so you take the current content which is all the theory and everything and you put that in
#
modular quarters okay and each year you do one quarter whereby you kind of satisfy one module
#
of theory and then you do nine months of practice where in that practice you basically paid a
#
stipend and you are working in an actual school providing the instructional support specifically
#
for foundational literacy numeracy right and then what happens is you get paid a modest stipend in
#
this period and at the end of four years you get a credential as a bachelor's in elementary education
#
that has a teaching credential but then the key additional pieces when it comes to time for
#
regular teacher recruitment what you say is that you will provide extra points for every year served
#
as an apprentice okay served like in a practical so what you're doing here is you're killing many
#
many birds in one stone right so what you're first doing is you're improving the long-term quality
#
of teacher training right by kind of making a practicum based and making teachers actually
#
understand what it means to be effective and then the theory starts making much more sense
#
because today i can have a credential and show up on day one and have 25 screaming kids and have
#
no idea what to do right like you know so you are improving the long-term quality of teacher training
#
you are providing a fiscally feasible way of augmenting teaching staff right because
#
you're now saying i'm taking these apprenticeships seriously in providing a stipend of five seven
#
thousand rupees a month right which again in the rural areas is a is something that people will
#
you know happily line up for those jobs and so you're providing a stipend that makes this a
#
serious kind of engagement and what you're doing is it's consistent with all the research and
#
evidence on the contract teachers where what we see is that if you have even a 10th pass or a 12th
#
pass kind of typically young woman from a village that they are incredibly effective at early
#
childhood education and you know and providing the foundational skills now you can't do middle
#
school math because at that point your learning becomes a binding constraint right but when it
#
comes to foundational literacy numeracy you're more than able to do this okay now the question
#
is and then the other big thing it does is it helps with some of our issues of female labor
#
force participation because one of the big barriers is that women are not able to leave
#
the village okay so now you're creating employment opportunities within a village that both creates
#
empowerment as well as role model effects that cascade down okay now if you look at the evidence
#
right the contract teacher there are studies after studies that basically show that these teachers
#
were highly effective if not more effective certainly way more cost effective right equally
#
effective at one-fifth the cost so the correct comparison is not contract teacher versus regular
#
teacher but for the budget of one regular teacher i could hire five of these guys right and so and
#
that comes back to the basic private school economics which is to say i hire many more teachers
#
at lower wages and so i can provide a better education okay now the reason the contract teacher
#
model is widely believed to have failed and why kind of you know the rte explicitly kind of
#
prescribed it is because the education establishment hated the idea okay they hated the idea that you
#
could have untrained professional teachers right untrained teachers so there's kind of the
#
occupational licensing source of objection now you and i might believe that that's just the source
#
of rent seeking but like it or not like you know that is certainly a part of kind of the ecosystem
#
that says we need qualification and training okay now the second problem was judicial because once
#
you got enough you know you would have a bunch of these guys going to the courts and saying you know
#
we are doing the same work and being paid one-tenth and so you have this equal pay for equal work kind
#
of things where courts will arbitrarily come in and say no you need to regularize these guys like
#
you know pay large amount and then there was a political problem which is because this was done
#
as a regular teaching was frozen this became kind of this purgatory where you had kind of you know
#
cohorts and cohorts of teacher you know people who were wanting to become teachers who were in this
#
limbo and every time before an election there would then be massive pressure to promise
#
regularization and once you do that mass regularization then you have the worst of both
#
worlds because you've regularized them but they are not even credentialed right like so which is
#
why you know it stays like madhya pradesh like i mean now they say that even though the improvements
#
they got in the 2000s with the shiksha karmes education guarantee scheme uh not uh yeah were
#
actually very lauded that it kind of backfired because eventually they had to yield the pressure
#
of regularization and that has kind of saddled them with a bunch of civil service teachers who
#
are not even qualified okay so then that's kind of so the economics of contract teachers works
#
but it fails for both you know ideological reasons kind of legal reasons and political
#
right so what i'm doing with this teacher apprenticeship idea is saying how do you take
#
the kernel of that idea of what we've seen in the evidence and make it pass through all of these
#
filters right so now what you're saying to the professional crowd that says we need credentialing
#
you're saying i absolutely believe in credentialing but if anything you're going to improve the quality
#
of the credential over time because this is now a practicum based training okay so this is going
#
to improve the long-term intake into into teaching you're solving the judicial problem because this
#
is you're no longer in this problem of equal pay for equal work because it is an apprenticeship
#
it is defined as an apprenticeship that is part of your training that has you know it is not like
#
an endless stopgap kind of arrangement and you are alleviating the political pressure by saying
#
that listen you know having a teacher training certificate is no guarantee of a government job
#
right so today people take dozens of exams and try to get in so just like taking exams is no
#
guarantee of the job but sitting for the test multiple times actually increases your chance of
#
cracking the exam without making you a better teacher what you're now saying is like i mean that
#
i'm going to provide some weight for this practical experience in the regular teacher
#
hiring right so and this reflects i think what is realistic in our political economy setting where
#
you're not going to say get rid of government teachers you're not going to say reduce their
#
salaries so what you can at least do is saying let's improve the pipeline so that the people who
#
make it are people who actually want to be teachers because today essentially most educated youth are
#
playing the government job lottery right of essentially applying for every possible government
#
job because if you crack it you're set for life right so you have tons of people who are in
#
teaching who have no interest in teaching right so once you've done this for three or four years
#
you're actually improving at least the two-sided match on unobservables with kind of what the job
#
characteristics are and you are improving the longer term kind of pipeline of teachers while
#
also solving your short-term problem of providing augmenting your teaching resources in a cost
#
effective way by taking the apprenticeship very seriously and the other thing you could do is to
#
kind of say that listen each district can have one of these you know the diets the district
#
history of education training can run these practical programs where you say for the
#
apprenticeship itself i will select the top 12 standard candidate from every panchayat and then
#
your practicum is based back in your panchayat so you come you know for three months into the
#
district headquarters do this training and then we use technology to kind of monitor you every
#
week to kind of give you additional refresher so there's a bunch of details that can be worked out
#
but the core idea going back to my paper and spaceship on the labor market distortions in
#
the public sector is it also deals with the spatial distortion which most people don't appreciate
#
right which is the problem with public sector recruitment today is because you recruit on the
#
basis of exams and who cracks the exams the candidates who crack the exams are typically
#
from urban areas or at least once you have a government job your kind of aspirational
#
classes to be in the urban area but the jobs are all rural okay so part of the absence comes from
#
the fact that you're sitting far away from the community that you're serving and part of the
#
effectiveness of the contract teachers comes from the fact that you belong to the local community
#
right so and there is kind of this occupational licensing mafia that sits in both health and
#
education in every sector but this is one way to kind of be cognizant of that and not try to wish
#
it away but then try to create a pipeline that allows you to kind of augment yeah so and the
#
reason i so passionately believe in this is given the jobs crisis right like you know you also then
#
have a way of increasing just the you know utilization and opportunities for educated
#
unemployed youth like you know you have 12 and it's a way to provide structure and and frankly
#
what will also happen is there's a lot of women who for good or for bad will drop out of the
#
labor market once they get married and have kids so but you are providing from the age of 18 to
#
22 like you know for rural educated women who today might get married at 18 they can mean after
#
finishing 12 you're providing you know also that additional window of delaying marriage and fertility
#
of improving empowerment and i think it's one of these win-win-win things that any politician
#
should also latch on to because it gives you visible outputs right like and will allow you
#
to do this in a cost-effective way so tomorrow if i were an education minister in a state i would
#
apply an enormous amount of you know energy to making something like this happen who is
#
fascinating and it's very impressive also how number one you get to the grassroots and you figure
#
out exactly what's happening the nuts and bolts of everything then you get to root causes and these
#
are the root causes and then when it comes to fixing it you're not coming up with uh you know
#
a policy brief that is one mile high up in the sky but you're actually taking the political economy
#
into account and saying okay i have to cater to the incentives of you know the politicians who
#
will bring this into force and the policy and the actual people on the ground who will implement it
#
and all of that that's kind of very impressive so but what stands in the way of something like
#
this happening so it's a great question right and i think okay so and i don't know if i should give
#
this away like you know because this is like a topic for a new this thing but one of the big
#
kind of things which i'm doing right now which you know we are not yet public with it we don't
#
even you know have a website but we're starting to do some deep work is uh so the two big things
#
i'm doing right now is one is writing this book on state capacity which has a provisional title of
#
fixing the indian state uh but there's the other part of what i'm doing which is i'm setting up
#
this whole new institute in india right i mean called the center for effective governance of
#
indian states right and the whole idea is to then have like a few crack people who are embedded in
#
state governments who are able to take these ideas and then translate that into actual policy right
#
so in the past five years i've had access to policymakers at the highest level right so i've
#
served on rajasthan's chief ministers advisory council i've met you know with multiple chief
#
ministers i met you know routinely with education secretaries and basically like you know all the
#
access can at best plant an idea but it doesn't translate the idea into action without kind of
#
having a slightly embedded presence within the government right so it's a long haul it's a long
#
kind of it's a 20-year journey of trying to augment state capacity but i genuinely believe
#
that there are enough and and that's another reason why i believe so much in working at the
#
level of states because if i'm pitching ideas at the center one joint secretary can kill an idea
#
right but if i'm pitching it at the states i just need one guy to bite and then you kind of see can
#
this work and the way you will actually make change happen is by making things happen properly in one
#
or two states and then i shouldn't be the one evangelizing that that education secretary or
#
education minister can have a workshop of other states and saying this is what we've done
#
so our role then becomes saying here are the principles here is the evidence here is an idea
#
that i have designed in a way that accounts for your constraints now let's make it happen
#
but i think the challenge to making it happen is still and this is partly why i built sieges
#
right so over the past four or five years there is almost not a single senior government official
#
who has not said that the idea makes a ton of sense in fact the current expenditure secretary
#
to government of india tv somanathan who was the joint secretary in the prime minister's office
#
when he was the discussant on my paper on public sector recruitment so you know and he's a tough
#
nut okay he has a phd and he has very little patience for ivory tower academics right because
#
he's brilliant he's been in the government and so his highest praise for me on that paper was that
#
says it shows an admirable understanding of ground realities okay but and then he said he said like
#
you know the way you will make progress is by doing this at the level of one or two states
#
and even at the level of states the challenge is that making this thing happen it requires kind of
#
a stability of policy vision that is beyond the lifetime of even an individual secretary right
#
like you know because it requires thinking about a training architecture that will still show you
#
results over three or four years it requires them thinking about what are your public sector
#
recruitment rules can you tweak that to them provide weightage so and it turns out that
#
individual officers who understand will be very sympathetic but it is beyond the limit of any one
#
person even a principal secretary to make it happen and that's kind of why you need an embedded
#
institutional presence in the government that says this is a strategic initiative that we're
#
going to coordinate across ministries and make it happen so it's a very long journey and i don't
#
want to talk about too much about this because again the chances are we will fail okay but at
#
least we have to try and this right now reflects my best bet at how do you take all of these ideas
#
and try to make something like this happen but maybe we can do an episode on this next year
#
right like you know once we have the book and once we have some results to show once you are
#
a grand success and perhaps even who knows in the future a Nobel prize winner like so many of your
#
advisors you know we have a few minutes left and it would not behoove me to leave a subject like
#
private schooling out of this because it strikes me that everything that we're talking about and
#
i think you've barely even scratched the surface of all your great suggestions on public schools
#
and i'll link to all your papers and let listeners discover that for themselves but you know coming
#
to private schools number one i've sort of had a bunch of episodes on education before on the
#
profit motive in education which i'll link to on the disastrous impact of rte which and i'll link
#
to those episodes as well and the key you know to just give like a cliff notes version of what that
#
is it's basically that there was all this focus on inputs and a lot of low-cost budget private
#
schools had to shut down because it was like if you don't have a playground you can't teach
#
and these people are like you know we are not selling playgrounds we are selling you know
#
education teaching and like you pointed out 70 percent of schools in urban areas are private
#
schools people instead of budget private schools so instead of you know going to free government
#
schools which are also giving freebies like mid-day meals and all that people are actually
#
choosing to pay out of their own pocket they hard-earned money rickshaw drivers slum dwellers
#
because they want their kids to have a good future and one scheme that you've discussed in
#
you know over the years many times is of course school vouchers again to give a cliff notes
#
version of what that is for my listeners school vouchers basically means that what you do is
#
the government doesn't fund the school it it funds a student so the student gets an education
#
voucher he takes it to a school of his or her choice and you know the education happens there
#
so what you have is that you have parents making the decision and they're in a much better position
#
to decide than the state is parents making the decision where should i take my school and giving
#
them that autonomy and that power is you know also a moral imperative plus you bring in the value of
#
competition so schools complete with each other for the money of the state it is still the state
#
that is providing the money for it but the education the service is provided by private schools
#
which are far more efficient you know their outcomes are more or less the same or sometimes
#
better as various papers have shown but they are much more cost effective because the dictates of
#
the market come in play now as i said at the start it's not that i'm entirely a supporter of
#
school vouchers myself my sense is that listen if you just let the free market operate which you
#
don't if you just let the market operate society can solve its own problems if you allow it to
#
we've allowed that space in telecom and airlines and so many other things you get 80 brands of
#
biscuit in the market but you only get one kind of education and we need a little more of markets
#
coming into play now i know that you know you've written extensively about private schools where
#
you've written about school choice you've also written about charter schools which is a relatively
#
a new concept in an indian context what are your sort of thoughts on this at two margins one is
#
that does this fundamental distrust of private enterprise which it seems to exist in the mind
#
of the state whether it does or not in the mind of individual bureaucrats i don't know
#
but in the way the state approaches it it seems to is that going to change is there a recognition
#
that that is a problem and secondly at a more granular level when you come down to actual
#
policy and you've spoken about the need of redefining the relationship between the state
#
and markets when it comes to education what are the on the ground you know policy proposals or
#
suggestions that you have yeah and you know i think the it just speaks to the richness and
#
complexity of these issues right i think on private schools let me you know take about just two
#
minutes to just summarize some of the key facts right which is uh again it's it's i've done years
#
of work on this but i think yeah the key facts for your listeners are your typical budget private
#
school so here is the problem to take a step back there is a naive sense that there's a naive sense
#
in which private schools are better okay which is if you look at the test scores the private schools
#
will do better but that is completely naive because it's essentially reflecting different
#
household selection into private schools right so the kids are going to private schools that
#
obviously parents are more educated that even though they are kind of going to budget private
#
schools and poor they're still better off than those who are going to the public schools okay so
#
that simple comparison of public and private can be quite misleading and also because your
#
typical private school has actually two extra years of schooling so if i compare public and
#
private schools and third standard and say private school is doing better it's really not apples to
#
apples because your typical private school kid has had lkg ukg and so has four years of schooling
#
compared to two years of schooling right like you know over here so the and so therefore it is
#
essential to have a credible control group and so what we did was kind of run the one of the
#
largest randomized control trials and school vouchers anywhere in the world which were done
#
in india and andhra pradesh from 2008 to 2012 and you know those results it yielded some very very
#
interesting insights right and and as with good research there was enough in this to annoy both
#
the left and the right and so i got criticized on both sides okay so and basically see what you find
#
is that when you took a bunch of poor kids who are attending government schools and gave them a
#
voucher to go to private schools okay so and they attended a private school of their choice in the
#
village and attended for up to four years that at the end of four years surprisingly so first let
#
me talk about the processes right so the private schools are poorer on observable measures of
#
inputs but do better on every measure of effort okay so they have the teachers are less educated
#
they are less qualified they're less trained they're paid much lower salaries right so in an rte
#
framework these private schools look miserable because on inputs they are actually way inferior
#
to the government school but once you kind of go measure effort you'll see that the private schools
#
do better on every measure of effort right so lower teacher absence higher time on task longer
#
school year longer school day and we also have like a module that measures management practices
#
and in fact that's a new working paper which will release in the next couple of weeks and you see
#
that on even concrete measures of management practices the private schools do much much better
#
okay so but but but this kind of the stupefying result is even though the observable characteristics
#
of the private schools are so much better at the end of four years of this we find that the kids
#
who went to the private school did not do any better okay on either maths or telco which was
#
because this was in in unified andra and so you know what this tells you is that you know at one
#
level the critics of the private schools that say that most of what the private schools are doing is
#
functioning on the selection margin as opposed to the education margin is actually correct right
#
which is there is a selection aspect of both the better relatively better off as well as private
#
schools trying to screen out children who might you know be slow learners or disabled or whatever
#
okay so in that sense there was enough in the results to kind of you know put a note of caution
#
to the kind of blind voucher wallahs right like I'm saying private because there's nothing
#
but on the other hand what we see is that the private schools are actually delivering the same
#
output at one third the cost right so the cost per child is actually much much lower so if you
#
look at the cost per child in the public schools it's much higher and because the private school
#
has to compete in the market they are much more cost effective the other subtle thing that's going
#
on with the private schools and this is what makes education research so vexing right which is that
#
it you know so what we did is we went and looked at the timetable so what you saw is that the
#
private schools actually spend much less time teaching Telugu and math and they use that extra
#
time to teach other subjects that are not in the government school so they were teaching more
#
English teaching more Hindi okay and so this makes it very difficult because now it's not an apple
#
to apple comparison so even though the level of learning is the same it was being achieved with
#
much less instructional time right so the productivity in the private school was higher
#
and we see that the Tesco results are higher in English and Hindi okay and now but even there you
#
can have difference of opinion as to should you aggregate these results in saying that the private
#
schools do better or is the problem that you know and Abhijit Banerjee himself told me this he said
#
like you know what is the point in not being able to read in three languages right like you know
#
you're not able to read even in your mother tongue so that you're diversifying your curriculum and
#
part of what's happening and if you look at the private school curriculum choice there is one
#
view that says these guys are being incredibly forward thinking because the labor market returns
#
to English and Hindi are going to be higher that if you're in Andhra Pradesh Hindi gives you access
#
to a national labor market right so just given the amount of internal migration say workers from
#
Bihar and UP coming to EP if you are if you are a Hindi speaker maybe that increases the chances
#
of being a factory foreman and so and supervising these workers and so the returns in the labor
#
market may be higher and you know even if you can't speak English okay so one view is these guys are
#
being very very far-sighted the other view is that no there is isomorphic mimicry even in the private
#
schools that they're just like mechanically copying the curricula of elite private schools
#
and because elite private schools do multiple languages they do that and even though that may
#
not in fact be optimal for these vouchers okay so and so I think basically the school choice argument
#
relies on two pieces it relies on kind of there's a productivity argument and there is a choice
#
argument and I think the challenge here is that the market metaphors break down for multiple reasons
#
because choice and assessing school quality is an incredibly challenging problem I have a PhD in
#
economics from harvard and I have no idea what's going on in my child's preschool right like you
#
know so you only have some proximate measures of quality and so it's very very hard okay so the
#
punch line from all the results is to say that listen the private schools are more productive
#
but it is not obvious that expanding a voucher system in the current status quo will by itself
#
give you better learning outcomes it might give you better value for money but that is not the
#
same and which is why when I look at the global research on education there there is a different
#
model right like you know so what are the problems even with vouchers and I think is that when kids
#
have the freedom parents have freedom it's very attractive but there is no guarantee that the
#
school has to accept you right so that goes back to the harvard point I made in the beginning right
#
like you know you can afford it but you're not getting in because harvard's partly a club right
#
I mean that's kind of excluding based on multiple characteristics and most private schools in India
#
at least the elite private schools which kind of play in the consciousness of the policy making
#
class are also fundamentally clubs right by kind of the way they interview the parents and everything
#
that they do okay so one place where the market metaphor breaks down is when a school is not
#
actually trying to maximize market share in the first place but trying to maximize exclusively
#
right so you want to design systems whereby schools are competing on effectiveness as opposed
#
to selection and there is interesting theoretical work that shows that how a unbridled voucher
#
system can actually make outcomes worse by moving the margin of competition to selection rather than
#
value addition okay so that's something we need to be cognizant of now there's another part of the
#
choice argument where voucher studies have shown you know need for caution which is that parents
#
often pick aspirational schools right you pick schools that you think are aspirational and look
#
good but going back to this curricular mismatch issue that I highlighted that if you're picking
#
a school where the curriculum is so far ahead of where your child is there is a real sense in which
#
this could backfire okay and and so there's an alternative model of saying how do you bring the
#
efficiency of private management while kind of minimizing some of these pathologies private
#
schools okay and that's basically what the idea of charter schools is right so the idea of a
#
charter school is that you maintain the public characteristic of a school but you basically
#
provide a management contract right like you need to a private entity that says I will yeah
#
okay sorry before I get there maybe just get your quick reactance to the research yeah yeah before
#
we get to private schools my quick reaction is first of all you know I'm familiar with your study
#
and I've also read the responses by Geeta Gandhi kingdom and James Tooley where they pointed out
#
the Telugu angle that you're pointing out now my my my sense of it is that you know and they've
#
also done studies and you know there are other studies which show that you know private schools
#
give better outcomes and so on but leaving that aside just kind of focusing on this issue my sense
#
of this was that leaving the choice angle aside just on the productivity angle that one yes they
#
got you know outcomes at much cheaper so better value for money that's aside but also they didn't
#
get worse outcomes on any margin exactly even if they were the same if they're getting it cheaper
#
and they're learning a couple of extra things that's okay the second thing that sort of struck
#
me was that I think that choice argument is actually enough on its own because I think who
#
are we you know if a choice has to be made for the child it's very condescending to say that the
#
parent does not have the ability to make that choice it is only the parent who should make that
#
choice in you know my view and what I would say is that like you pointed out in your paper as well
#
like your 2018 paper which you sent me was quite nuanced on this issue where you pointed out all
#
these different sides and there you pointed out that you know even if parents may make a mistake
#
sending their kid to a place where the main medium of instruction is English rather than Telugu
#
because studies have shown that learning happens at that early age much better in the mother tongue
#
despite that that could be offset by a later premium that they get for having gone to an
#
English medium school later on in the labor market now as you said it's too complex for
#
anybody to judge and therefore morally the choice of where the kid go should just stay with the
#
parents given that there is such muddiness of information either way and I'm very very
#
sympathetic to that like you know and I think I mean the only slight push back to this is you know
#
and it goes back to the third goal of education systems the public education systems which we
#
haven't spent enough time on right because you know and but this is very very important and it's
#
important to understand that the spread of mass education actually had very little to do with
#
either of the first two goals right because the sorting goal like you know could happen
#
by kind of elite exams which you know Chinese bureaucrats have been passing for a very long
#
time right so where the modern state was willing to invest in mass education in fact my colleague
#
at UCSD Agustina Paglayan is a political scientist and she's done some very nice work on this is
#
that the third objective education system there's human development there is sorting but the third
#
is actually creating a common shared sense of citizenship right so and what makes education
#
inherently political right is that as economists we are used to saying how does a free market or
#
free agency make choices conditional on your preferences right but we don't ask where do
#
the preferences come from right and so the what makes education inherently more political than
#
any other market analogy is it's because it's the place where you're actually forming preferences
#
right that can mean of a generation and so and that creates externalities and then that's a good
#
question about should the government have a say right and so but the language question and again
#
we should do it we could an entire episode just on the vexing question of language right but it's an
#
incredibly vexing question right so and it's because no language is morally superior or inferior
#
right that can mean and then but the market attraction of a language is a function of a bunch
#
of other things so but the larger point here is that one of the reasons public education systems
#
try to kind of put their thumb with regard to language is precisely because there is a certain
#
public good with regard to culture right that goes beyond the individual choice and that's a much
#
more nuanced discussion that's all so i don't agree with the spirit of what you said that in
#
the end however complex it is it's the parents and the ultimate users who should make their decisions
#
but even without coercion you can still put your thumb on the scale as a society that says there
#
is a collective good and this is classic public externalities right like you know there's a
#
certain collective good in maintaining a language or a culture and we find ways to put our thumb on
#
the scale on that one way or the other what is that like one whenever i hear the word collective
#
i'm like no we should think in terms of individuals not collectives but whatever that's just
#
because i think there is a limit to kind of the extreme individualism which we kind of see in
#
the u.s with kind of the disaster and masking right now right like you know so when you build
#
this kind of myth of kind of the frontier man like you know who's out there on his own doing things
#
then when you need the public good of wearing a mask not for yourself but for the public good
#
you find it very hard to do that so again there's a balance yeah on that issue i agree with you
#
entirely but the point is that if you look at the negative externalities of how this
#
indian state has messed up education they are disastrous you know and and my point there would
#
be that earlier we were talking about how both of us of course support democracy because you want
#
every individual every citizen in a democracy to in a in a nation to feel empowered and democracy
#
gives you that and similarly i'd say that the our current education system is actually the opposite
#
of that it is an authoritarian system where you are building a model and yes some experts like you
#
are having some input into the model model and hopefully the model will be improved in the
#
margins but it is one model being imposed on everyone and what would be nice is to see many
#
many models flourish one way of doing that of course which we will discuss in our next episode
#
which will hopefully be even longer than this is the federalism model where you have so much local
#
governance that you have different models coming out locally but another model would be that just
#
let entrepreneurship flourish in this field unleash the market you know society will solve
#
its own problems that doesn't happen but we only have a few minutes and it would be a travesty
#
if i do not let you speak about charter schools because you've been very insightful and eloquent
#
on that as well so on private school policy let me say two things right so there is one set of
#
policies that matter where you say unleash the private sector regardless of your ability even
#
if you don't cater to the poor okay and because that's kind of the status quo anyway right 50
#
60 percent are doing that okay so on that i think my biggest policy thrust which i think you will
#
also agree with is to say you regulate based on disclosure as opposed to mandates okay so you
#
still need some regulation because you know there are problems of asymmetric information there are
#
problems of you know safety public goods etc but what you say is listen you know if a qualified
#
teacher truly matters let the market decide like you know whether parents are willing to pay for
#
that and if a school decides that i can provide better education by hiring four teaching assistants
#
with a 10 standard pass who are able to provide small group instruction let them have the freedom
#
to do that and the only requirement is that they so basically it goes back to my point about admin
#
data integrity right like so my basic approach to say regulate based on disclosure is if you lie i
#
will shut you down okay like i mean but as long as you're telling the truth you can do whatever you
#
want right let me quote you on this yeah since you brought up regulation let me quote you on this
#
because i like this quote and which is why i sort of copy pasted it into my notes quote while these
#
reasons for regulation make sense in theory earlier you've basically given reasons for regulating
#
private schools one they are public spaces two there is information asymmetry in the sense you
#
know parents have no way of knowing schools are so complex like you said you don't know what's
#
happening in your kids play school and then there is a symmetry of power that private schools can
#
arbitrarily do whatever and parents have no power so on these you say quote while these reasons
#
for regulation make sense in theory the indian approach to regulation of private schools has
#
in practice been heavy-handed and arbitrarily enforced in particular the approach has placed
#
a lot of power in the hands of school inspectors who can shut down schools for a wide variety of
#
reasons and extort bribes from school management to overlook regulatory violations further this
#
problem has worsened since blah blah blah and then you talk about the right to education act
#
very eloquent i don't want to i don't want to take up your time but i agree with you entirely and
#
your solution as you were saying is that rather than make them comply with a whole bunch of these
#
things and then inspectors will come to attest it and they'll have to be bribed and everything goes
#
haywire you let them disclose everything and then if you find they happen to lie about something
#
then you take them to task but otherwise you reduce the regulatory burden exactly i think you
#
know and the status quo is particularly kind of corrosive right because what happens is the
#
burdens are so onerous that kind of very few legitimate operators can in fact meet them right
#
so you kind of get negative selection that the good guys don't participate and the only people
#
who will participate are the ones who are willing to pay the bribes to kind of get so you get this
#
corrosive equilibrium where you cannot meet this and so the good guys go out and the ones who are
#
there are the ones who are willing to kind of you know bribe their way through the inspection
#
certificates and of course i mean and that's a status quo that benefits like obviously the
#
inspectors and it it also goes back to this kind of cognitive dissonance that i think the government
#
finds it incredibly hard to separate its roles as policymaker regulator and provider right and so
#
those are three very different functions that require different approaches to the private
#
sector so on the policy side you know that's basically all i would do right now there's a
#
second part of the policy side on private schools which is i think there is a case for saying how do
#
you harness the creative energies of the private sector and going back to something i said at the
#
very beginning right that if the problem with the market the democratic ideal is one person
#
one vote okay the market ends up doing one rupee one vote okay so what would kind of a left
#
libertarian do is you say you equalize the playing field or reduce the inequality by putting purchasing
#
power in the hands of the poor and then let the market cater to them right which is kind of exactly
#
the voucher idea and i think we're all in sync with that and in fact to connect back to you know
#
so that your listeners understand that first one of us was not a long ramble of different things
#
but everything is connected right through those principles so going back to why this is consistent
#
with the martya sen right because the senian point is that providing purchasing power and then
#
letting the market provide the food was in fact a better approach than trying to actually send
#
food into the famine hit areas right so similarly you know the voucher of providing the purchasing
#
power would do that now i think the the limitation with vouchers is not the conceptual point of
#
empowering parents and letting them choose it is the challenge that we have seen evidence in
#
multiple settings that because parents perceive school quality based on the level of achievement
#
and not on the value addition it creates incentives on the school side to basically focus on selection
#
as opposed to value addition right and so the question is how do you harness the energies of
#
the private sector and kind of architect a system that harnesses that for the public good so the
#
idea of a charter school is very simple right which is you basically say this is still a public school
#
but you award management contracts to kind of qualified private school operators and they get
#
reimbursed on a per child basis and the only two restrictions are that you cannot do selective
#
admissions so any child who applies to the school with public funding should be admitted and if you
#
have excess demand then you run a lottery and the second is that you're not allowed to charge top-up
#
fees because then that again creates a gradient based on ability to pay right but subject to that
#
you run the charter and what the evidence in the US shows is that the charter schools have been much
#
more effective than the vouchers and the main reason and this goes back to pedagogy right
#
is that because the charter schools are often set up in low-income communities the entire pedagogy
#
in the school is optimized for a context where children don't have the kind of home support that
#
is envisaged by a typical private school so a typical private school will assume that the parents
#
can do this and parents can do this and parents can do that and a lot of your in fact what we see
#
even in our own AP data is if you look at the value adds the typical child who goes to the
#
private school actually does much better gains than the typical child going to the government
#
school right it's the voucher child who doesn't disproportionately benefit and that's partly
#
because they are much lower ses and starting at one close to 0.8 standard deviations below which
#
means that teaching at the right level problem is probably applied right so what the charters have
#
been doing is optimizing pedagogy for low-income settings making sure that you have extra time to
#
complete homework because your parents are not able to support you right so there's a bunch of
#
additional pedagogical innovations that are optimized around how do you improve learning
#
outcomes so the way i would think about our policy framework for india for leveraging charter schools
#
is almost to say let's set a grand challenge right that we say as a grand challenge the truth is
#
we actually have not yet cracked the problem of how do you deliver learning outcomes at scale to
#
first generation i mean this is an incredibly hard wicked problem we've thrown a lot of money
#
we've tried all kinds of approaches i have talked about a foundational literacy numeracy mission
#
the certain principles but there's no guarantee that will succeed right so maybe a better approach
#
would be to say that here is the budget per child right like i mean i'm going to open up a bunch of
#
schools to these charter kind of private management and what you're seeing already in india is that
#
there are a bunch of these education providers who have come to exactly the same realization that
#
they would like to serve low-income communities but that they would like to have management
#
autonomy on schools and so there are non-profits i think people akanksha madhi you know the bunch
#
of people who are actually doing this the problem today is that the government is allowing them in
#
but they are raising their money from csr right and so the government is not kind of reimbursing
#
that and so that gets us to you know money sabharwal's wonderful quote of the impossible
#
trilemma and service delivery here right which is that the government has an execution deficit the
#
private sector has a trust deficit and civil society has a scale deficit right because civil
#
society has both intentions and ability to deliver but is limited by kind of its fundraising government
#
has scale and legitimacy but can't execute to save its life the private sector can execute at
#
scale so you know in all my years of field work in rural india the time when i started getting
#
drinking water was when then like coke and pepsi started having kinley and aquafina so their kind
#
of logistics and delivery networks would reach the hinterland way before like any any government
#
yojana would reach right so in that sense the private sector can deliver at scale the problem
#
is that and this is where it gets so difficult when we think about private sector and health
#
and education which is there is a point up to which you can improve outcomes by squeezing
#
inefficiency out of the system but beyond that even the private player also becomes a rent seeker
#
right like you know i mean partly by excluding difficult children or you know so there's a bunch
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of aspects of schools of public spaces which kind of limits the unbridled use of the private analogy
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right so what's nice about charters is you're saying you're maintaining a couple of essential
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characteristics of public education which is non-discriminatory admission and no top-up fees
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but you then have the autonomy and kind of come in and bring all your ideas here to solve this
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grand challenge or how are we going to improve learning outcomes at scale now there's a bunch
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of other complications with regard to procurement with regard to the fact that there's this wonderful
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study in liberia published in the american economic review recently that was done by my
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own former student that looked at a charter school experiment like this and what it found was that
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there were eight different providers but there is enormous variation even among the providers so
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there are some who are very good and some who are worse than the public schools right so a naive
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sense of private versus public is also misguided because you need the heterogeneity but which i
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think is again consistent with your view that over time if you had a well-functioning market
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the poor guys would be weeded out but i think the last point i want to leave with on this is
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this requires incredibly nuanced view to architecture of service delivery right i mean
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that recognizes that public and private both have their weaknesses and you want to design systems
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because and make the two as complements and not substitutes because we should do a separate
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episode on health but to give you a headline of one of these recent papers that we just published
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is that what we see is that improving public systems is actually highly correlated with the
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quality of private quality because the private has to compete with the public and so that forces out
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the left tail of the private distribution as well right so it's like when we think about education
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in india there's this old joke about two guys in a jungle being chased by a bear and the first guy
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says like you know i need oh we need to outrun the bear and the second guy says no i just have
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to outrun you and that's basically the story of service delivery in india right the private sector
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in absolute terms the quality is nothing to shout out about but it is epsilon better than the
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government and that's enough like i mean but it's not going to prevent this kind of the bear of
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illiteracy that has been kind of laying waste to generation after generation is not going to be
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solved by private schools in their current form it's going to take a mission mode and system
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architecture of how do you harness the creativity of the private sector to come and crack this
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problem and you know that's what i hope like well-designed charter pilots might allow us to
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start to yeah agree with all of that and we shall have further episodes coming up on let me see
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number one federalism number two hell number three we were actually i'll let my listeners know we
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were actually going to do an episode on uh covid before we decided that hey the education policy
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is out and very kindly offered to educate me and all of you on the state of indian education which
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has been very enlightening we have two minutes to go before your hearts heart stops so a quick
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final question which is that you know one sense that i get from looking at your work over the past
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a few decades is clearly that this is not the most profitable thing you could have done in terms of
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you know your material ends i mean had you just stayed in the private sector when you worked in
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singapore you could have been a hot shot ceo somewhere and even within academics i'm sure
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there are many interesting options which all constitute an opportunity cost for your passion
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for indian education and solving these specific problems and working with the state and working
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with state governments and getting your ass out there in village after village and figuring you
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know actually looking at all of these problems so closely so when you look back on this journey
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how does it kind of feel like do you feel a sense of satisfaction at the fact that you've been
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able to make a difference on the margins is it frustrating that the differences are
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so small and that by and large most of the fault lines still remain you know what motivates you
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what keeps you going is very fascinating to me because on one hand you are a professional
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right you're a professional academic you're a researcher you're all of these things but on
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the other hand it often seems to me that and not just you i've had other people on the show
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like you who are doing things they don't need to do and yet they're doing it out of this sense
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of mission so you know what keeps you going what's what's your private juice so the quick answer is
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i think i have the best job in the world right you know because the and one way of knowing that i
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have the best job in the world is you know if tomorrow i had many millions more in my bank
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account i would do exactly what i do i wouldn't change a single thing of what i do right so in
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that sense i think the you know it was very clear to me in the private sector my two years that
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there's no shortage of incentives for talent to be in the private sector but you know what i wanted
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was to kind of take that level of understanding and apply those insights and whatever kind of
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opportunities i've had in the largest good right so anything but i'm not unique in that i don't
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think i deserve any special moral kudos for that i think that's a whole range of people are very
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public spirited and i think we all just need to find the ways in which you can contribute and so
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i think you know if you look at the studies on happiness what the studies on happiness will say
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is that if you kind of obsess about a long-term goal without enjoying the journey then that doesn't
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make for a satisfied life i want to be ceo i want to be this you get there and saying like what's
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the big deal because i've slaved away 25 years and where's it all gone right on the other hand
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like you know if you kind of keep living for the moment then you can go drift from pleasure to
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pleasure like you know without any concrete achievement at the end of this right so where i
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feel incredibly fortunate is that i kind of love the day-to-day craft of the research and kind of
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there's an artistic element of what you know high quality research is right so in fact when i was
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in italy a few years ago i think the you know what people don't see is the amount of blood sweat and
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toil that goes into every one of these papers right that's published in a top journal it's like six
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eight ten years right so you know there's the the i felt the highest affinity with sculptors right
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because each paper kind of feels the same way right that you start with a block of an idea you
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have some idea of how this is going to look like and then you carve and you carve and you chisel
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and you chisel to the point of then you know your writing and maybe my need for your writing course
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is the opposite right which is how do i you know not spend so much time and it's diminishing returns
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of kind of microtuning every word of what i'm writing right but there is almost an artistic
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process in that that just gives me intrinsic joy for its own worth right but at the same time you
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know the motivation for everything i do has always been from the beginning about affecting the larger
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good so i feel incredibly privileged right that i have a day-to-day vocation that allows me to
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interact with some of the smartest people in the world and the interaction with the students keeps
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me forever young i think pata dasgupta once famously said that god made phd students to
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keep tenured faculty honest right because you know you can't wing it right and so the moment
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you leave that academic research life and become a talking head on tv you know your shelf life is
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maybe three years and then after that like you know i mean you've lost that edge so it being
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in academia being with the students is kind of what keeps that technical side of me active and
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alive and so i enjoy the day-to-day basis but it's also true that if the only thing i cared about
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was publishing papers i could have published a bit more but i don't think like i'm particularly
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regretting you know that aspect of it and it's also true sometimes that the academic economics
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profession doesn't fully value the amount of time i spend with policymakers you know the amount of
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chai i drink with secretaries to then kind of make things happen right but you know again i go back
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to my advisor michael kramer and one of the most important things he said to me he's like never
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apologize for the fact that your fundamental motivation is to make sure that 200 million kids
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in india have a better education and that economics is a tool to get you there right it's a very
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powerful tool but it's not an end in itself right so in that sense i feel super privileged at having
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you know a kind of a perch that keeps me constantly uh mentally agile with the freedom to do high
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quality work and so my trifectas rigor relevance and impact right so where the rigor is measured
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by publishing the work in the very best journals and passing the technical scrutiny of the top you
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know scholars in the world the relevance is that i'm not publishing on obscure topics right like
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you know so i work on my rule of thumb is i work on topics of at least 10 000 crores a year of
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annual expenditure so if you're improving it by one percent then that's kind of enough roi on my
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time invested and then the last part is impact which then requires me to spend the time i do
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right like you know doing the work i do with governments so yes i feel very very contented i
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think there is a lot of schizophrenia in my life about you know the balance between us and india
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this is something i struggle with a lot there's many many times i feel like picking up my bags
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and just coming back because you know the karma boomi for everything i do is india right like
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and i've got one project in indonesia one in tanzania but other than that everything is india
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so the motivation of all my work is unapologetically indian and in a way that may
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have actually limited some of my academic success because there is a fetishizing of insights to be
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more general in pure academia as opposed to contextual right and so there are papers of mine
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that could get rejected from the very top journals saying that oh this is only about india right like
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you know whereas if i was working on something kind of more general then you get more narrow
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success in the academic sense right so but on the other hand it's i would be not true to my
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journey and my motivation because it's kind of improving things in india that have been everything
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so and right now the balance is i spend nine months a year in the us three months in india
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but you know post covid starting next day i may even switch that i may kind of start spending
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much more time in india taking sabbaticals and coming here and teaching and particularly as
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i'm building sieges and trying to do much more detailed work with states right my pivot you know
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i might just in the second half of my life pivot that to have a lot more time in india so i do
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hope you spend more time in india because we can actually meet in person and you know fight in some
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cafe somewhere while arguing about state coercion you know kartik you're so inspiring thank you so
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much for sharing your insights on the show i've had an incredible time talking to you so thanks
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amit thank you if you enjoyed listening to this episode you can follow kartik on twitter at kartik
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underscore econ k a r t h i k underscore e c o n you can follow me at amit varma a m i t b a r m a
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do check out the show notes for links to kartik's work interviews and many of the things we spoke
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about you can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you
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did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen if so would you like to support the
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production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any
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