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Here are two ways to think about the state.
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One, it can get normalized for you.
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We have a predatory state that does not do what it is supposed to, that gets in our way
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when we try to solve our own problems, that is more of a parasite than a protector, but
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you could think that all of this is normal and have a my-bab mentality.
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This approach is wrong.
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Or, you could just accept that our state is all of these things and you could rant and
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or maybe just give up and get on with your life and not actually do anything to find
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I guess this is my approach and I am beginning to feel that this may also be wrong.
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The correct approach is the one my guest today has.
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She recognizes the faults of the Indian state, but instead of condemning it from a distance,
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she is happy to get into the weeds, to engage with the beast and to try and do the hard
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I would rather sit in my armchair and talk to people.
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But hey, thank God for Yamini Iyer.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is Yamini Iyer, one of India's finest thinkers and policy scholars, who studied
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at LSE, worked at Ford Foundation and World Bank and then chose to devote her life to
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serving India instead of chasing a career.
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She started the Accountability Initiative and went on to become the president of the
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Center for Policy Research, CPR, which has recently been under different kinds of fire
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I have always been awed by Yamini's profound understanding of the Indian state, how it
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works, state capacity and so on, but she also has deep knowledge of many other areas, as
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you will see from this conversation.
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But before you start listening to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Yamini, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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Such a pleasure to be here.
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I'm so glad to finally have you on and I'm going to start by asking you if you remember
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when your next-door neighbor was executed.
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I was told that you lived in Karachi at one point in time and your dad was posted there
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between 78 to 82, I think, and that and your next-door neighbor was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
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and he was, of course, executed by the powers that be in 79.
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I think somewhere your father has also written about how he would drop you guys to school
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and then he would walk past Mr. Bhutto's house and he'd see all the security there and all
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of that and so on and so forth.
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Do you have any memories of that time?
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You know, I was so, so young, I would like to emphasize, so not so much about the politics
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that surrounded it, but it was a very happy time for our family.
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My younger sister was born there and I don't know if it's a memory just because it's a
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memory or because the story has been told so many times that it becomes a memory, but
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my older sister and I am one of three sisters.
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We were sitting on the staircase waiting excitedly for this new baby to arrive and we talked
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about what name we should give and my older sister had a friend called Sana and so we
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said, well, we'll name this baby Sana and we did.
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So you know, I remember the house, I remember where we sat, but my sister entering our lives,
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she's the calmest and most sober of the lot of us.
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So she has played a very important role in all our lives, so Karachi is special for that,
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but it's also special because I think that the kind of relationships that my family made
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in that time, I think my parents must have been in their late 30s, early 40s when my
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father was posted there, those friendships really in, you know, at a personal level marked
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for us as a family as we grew up, what friendships really mean.
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They have been long lasting, they've traveled through borders, they've traveled through
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politics, they've traveled through difficult times, but a constant reminder that at the
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core of everything, when human beings bond with each other as human beings, those relationships
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just stay forever and that warmth and love just has never gone away.
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So we never really stayed in touch with the famous Sana, after whom my younger sister
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is named, but you know, well into our adulthood, someone wrote an email or, you know, saying,
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I'm the Sana and my older sister reestablished a friendship there when all of us, my sisters
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and I went through our weddings, we had contingents of my parents, friends and their families
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come, so it was the politics of what was going on around us at that time was in some ways
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peripheral to this love affair that my family had, which was based just on pure friendship
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and heartwarming relationships that have stayed forever.
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Tell me a bit more about your childhood, tell me about your parents, because one only sees,
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for example, the public lives of public figures, as it were, you never actually, you know,
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get to know a little more than that.
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What was it like growing up?
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I mean, you were also in Iraq for a while, I believe.
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I have the unique distinction of being born in Iraq, in Baghdad, and I've always waited
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for that moment when, you know, whenever I before visas became biometric and automated
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and relatively rarely just on the margins, relatively easier than they are today, for
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a moment where this would raise a big issue, but it was always marked out as something
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that people are curious about and never quite became a story that I would like to tell.
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But no, my father was in the Foreign Service and he was posted there, and that's where
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I was born and very soon after he was posted in Pakistan.
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So really, actually, apart from the story that the day I was born, apples were being
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sold in the market in Baghdad.
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And so my grandmother and whoever and whoever else was in the household abandoned my mother
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and me in the hospital and went to stand in lines to grab the apples.
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So their scarcity was clearly part of the economic story there.
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You know, there's relatively little memory of Iraq and, you know, really our childhood
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began in Pakistan in this sort of warmth and friendship.
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And then we came to Delhi in the early 80s and this is my home and I've more or less
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been here my entire life.
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But we lived in the Delhi, which was very much embedded in the Indian state.
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So it was, you know, my father was in the government and so we lived in government housing
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in all the, you know, traversing the lanes of Pandara Road and Khan Market when it was
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a really sleepy, small little spot with leafy trees and, you know, ice cream vendors.
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And when you could walk to India Gate without being hit by cars.
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And presence of government was very much the lives we had.
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My mother was a journalist and in many ways she shielded us from a lot of the public life
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And we grew up with, you know, as always happens, you know, work dominates family life.
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So it was really my mother who brought us up and so much of, I think, who I am and many
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of the choices I made in my life are a consequence of the influences of her being there.
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But it was a quiet, simple time.
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And yet it was actually a very tumultuous time when you look back.
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The 1980s were a crucial moment in, you know, in India.
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So the 1984 riots took place and my grandmother used to live in a defense colony.
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She was a young widow and lived there for the bulk of her adult life.
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And I have very vivid memories of the trauma that our family experienced as we were under
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the shroud of rioting and chaos.
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And you know, so many questions of who we were were asked of ourselves.
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My father's Tamil, my mother's Sardar.
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Does that make us secure in the midst of a riot or does that open us up to all kinds
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In some ways that moment kind of made me very aware of who I was as an Indian, this strange
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creature that doesn't come from any particular part and yet has all parts within her.
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And soon after, you know, as India kind of began to settle into the India that it became
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close to the big 1991 economic liberalization moment, we kind of saw through all of that
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as a consequence of being children of bureaucrats and living in these bureaucratic homes, you
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know, we often without really knowing that we were part of big changes that were about
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All this was happening around us.
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And then of course, you know, other pivotal moments, we were in school in Delhi as the,
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you know, in politics, national politics was changing, the BJP was emerging, coalition
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politics was emerging and we used to drive through the India gate in our school bus on
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And, you know, that's when my own political awakening, so to speak, also takes place because,
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you know, you see protesters and, you know, we saw these signs saying Article 370 and
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And, you know, that's when all these questions started coming.
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Which kind of became the, for me, it was the sort of political education that I got as
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a consequence of being part of these very pivotal moments in India's political life.
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And soon after the Mandal reservations, I mean, the whole Mandal agitation reservation
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commission followed by the agitation also unfolds.
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And my older sister, whom, you know, like all younger siblings just adore their older
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sisters, right, so it was total hero worship, was off to just to protest.
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And because I hero worshipped her and I had no understanding of what was going on, I joined
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her in this protest and neither she nor I knew really what we were doing.
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We were just going along with whatever was around us.
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But you know, that was the first political protest I ever participated in.
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And we came home and we'd of course lied to my mother and snuck off because she would
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certainly not have allowed us to go off unescorted at some young teenage age.
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And when the story was revealed, my parents had this mixture of, well, it's kind of cool
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that they're finally becoming politically active and that's something that they wanted
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to nurture and encourage in us.
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But at the same time, you should have listened to us and not lied.
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And, you know, so we kind of grew up in this interesting moment of a transition that India
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is going through in, you know, living obviously a very privileged life, but with a little
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bit of a bird's eye view into all that's going on.
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But you know, really just completely in some way sheltered from all of it, squabbling with
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each other and exploring the world like everyone does.
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I also led sort of a sheltered privileged life.
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My dad was in the EIS, kind of grew up in this little bubble where I imagined that my
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idea of India is surely everybody's default idea of India, we're broadly secular, tolerant
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And it's taken a long time for me to realize that, you know, I was certainly in the minority
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or even the fringe as it were in thinking that way.
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And gradually what happens through the years is that different kinds of layers fall off
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your eyes as you grow older.
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And especially today when it seems that our politics has caught up with our society and
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that we were perhaps deeply illiberal all along.
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And that's kind of been a realization that has just deepened with all the conversations
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I've had on this show, for example.
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Was there a path like that for you or is it that you had that distance in the sense that
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A, you were a little traveled, you were, you know, you had early years when in Pakistan
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and so on, you'd seen a little more of the world.
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And B, when you started working, you know, a lot of your early work in the 2000s was
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engaging with the real world and not quite removed from this sort of bubble that we might
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have been in when we were kids.
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So what's your experience of kind of growing as a person and learning to see all the layers
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fall off one by one and to appreciate the complexity of the real world as it is?
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So you know, in some ways we grew up in the midst of all of this emerging, right?
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So, you know, like all children, you absorb what you hear on the dining table and those
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become the fundamental and core value systems that you take with you.
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But you know, when we were in school, these were always questions.
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There was very much the emergence of new questions being asked about the nature of our secular
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identity, about the nature of the nation itself, about who we were as a people.
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And, you know, in some ways we would be the subject of a lot of intrigue in the sense
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of, you know, the identity question.
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It was unusual in the early 1970s for a Sikh to marry a Hindu.
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And even though this, we all come, I mean, our family was more or less cosmopolitan.
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My father's family had moved from, my grandparents actually met in North India in Agra and then
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in Dehradun and my grandmother, my paternal grandmother lived in Dehradun where my parents,
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my father was brought up.
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My father was born in Lahore.
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My mother was born in Quetta and my maternal grandfather was in the Indian army and he
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died when my mother was 18 months old in the war in what is now Myanmar.
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And so she grew up in Delhi.
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So, you know, I mean, in cosmopolitan context with relatively cosmopolitan environments,
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these kinds of inter-religious mixing are relatively, are more the norm.
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And yet it wasn't in the early 1970s.
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Half my father's side of the family and half my mother's side of the family didn't show
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And so we had grown up with this, you know, idea that in some ways genuine liberalism
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is about being open, curious and welcoming of different worlds and finding ways of those
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different worlds to mingle.
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So my Sikh mother kind of adopts Hindu religious practice completely.
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It was more of a spiritual adoption than anything else.
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And she would take us with her all the time to the temple and, you know, to various places.
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And so in some ways to me, when I would go to school and there would be this standard,
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you know, for sardars there was a 12 o'clock joke, and you'd listen to that and then someone
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else would show up and say, oh, I am yo, yet another yo, then yen, and everybody south
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of the Vindhyas is a madrasi.
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In some ways it kind of further consolidated for me the imagination of myself as something
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that I genuinely wanted to preserve and that shaped my own value system.
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And we were also, I mean, in school, in this very fraught period, Babri Masjid in 1992,
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we were in school when the Babri Masjid was collapsed or, you know, the whole Ram Janma
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Bhumi movement was picking up and the demolition of the mosque were all very critical moments
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where conversations were had with friends and peers in school, and many of them came
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from a very different view of the world.
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So that forced us, I think, to push much harder, or we were already being pushed, I guess,
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in having to form views that were genuinely our own.
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And I think this combination of who we were, or who I am, I shouldn't speak for my sisters,
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but this combination of who I am and having to actually constantly argue out why I believe
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in this imagination of India, that in many ways I felt I embodied, made me feel a lot
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more confident in my view and yet made me also be sensitive to the kinds of questions
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that were being raised about a particular world view, which was sometimes, which risked
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often being illiberal, even as it espoused liberal values.
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So my awakening kind of happened through these conversations with my peers, and I did travel
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a lot around India with my parents.
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My mother, as I said, was a journalist, and when we were quite young, she would go off
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and do these feature stories, largely with NGOs in different parts of the country, and
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whenever she had the opportunity, she would drag us along and we would go kicking and
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But now in ripe old middle age, that seems to have been a wise decision of my mother's,
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and I intend to do exactly the same with my children.
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And so we kind of saw, we were exposed to a lot of India at a time when travel was not
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such a regular feature.
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And unlike many friends whose families lived in different parts of the country, my family
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So for us, the summer vacation was going to our grandmother's house in Delhi, and
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therefore the summer vacation actually provided an opportunity to sit on a train and follow
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my mother wherever she was going to record stories and so on.
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And in my late teens, my mother set up this magazine, which was essentially translating
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vernacular press into English and sort of creating an aggregate, the kind of news stacks
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that we get now on our emails.
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So news mailers, hers were predated all of that in some ways.
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And it was really about trying to tell the story of different parts of India that would
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often be completely ignored or completely not known, because after all, this was the
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era before the internet.
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And we used to be dragged in, it was a mom and pop shop in a sense.
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And so there were papers all over and somebody would have to copy edit something and all
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these young interns from Delhi University would come to help her and we were the pesky
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But as a consequence, just by absorption, we also got to learn and hear what was happening
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in the Northeast, what was happening in Punjab, what was happening in Kerala.
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So that also embedded a deep sense of recognition of the diversity and the complexity
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that I feel I carry with me in terms of at least knowing that you have to be sensitive
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to it and that there's something in there that is worth preserving.
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So yeah, I think just being part of an environment where lots of what you believed in was constantly
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being questioned and constantly having exposure that sort of reaffirms sets of things for you
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shaped me in many ways and gave me a sense of pride and confidence in the views I had.
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Before we continue round that path, I heard an anecdote about, you know, you mentioned
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that your maternal grandfather died in Burma and he was apparently Ayub Khan's batchmate
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or something like that.
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So I heard that when you guys were in Pakistan, diplomats aren't allowed to go to Baluchistan,
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but the Baluch regiment invited your grandmother to go and speak to them.
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And your dad accompanied her as a chauffeur.
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You know, you seem to know more stories about my family than I do.
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I have to find this out.
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I didn't know this story.
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I must ask, you know, it's the standard sin of being the child of parents who like storytelling
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is that you start switching off at some point.
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So it's entirely possible that the story has been told and I never absorbed it.
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The stories are so kind of rich, it's quite fabulous.
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So during this time, during the 80s and you're growing up in the 91 liberalization,
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What is your developing conception of yourself?
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Like, what do you want to be?
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What are you interested in?
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Are you interested in a life of the mind?
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You've got different kinds of role models.
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Your mom, of course, being a journalist.
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So a life of the mind, but also engaging deeply with the real world.
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You know, your dad made this really interesting shift from being a civil servant
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to being a politician himself.
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So, you know, given all of these different possibilities,
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given that you are more engaged as you put it with politics
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and a lot of other people, you're thinking about these ideas,
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you're having them questioned, you're sharpening them.
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What did you think you wanted to be?
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Not when you grew up, because you're, I mean, you know,
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I was as much a confused teenager as any.
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So I never had any certainty of what I wanted to do.
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I was more, I was keen just to explore the world
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and, you know, was mostly just interested in, you know,
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trying to figure out life with my friends and just be.
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There was always a running sense of, I don't know if it was a value system
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that was absorbed or it was actively just, you know, thrust at you.
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And who knows, probably there was some elements of thrusting that
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whatever you do, it has to have a sense of public purpose.
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And, you know, so and now don't forget, like, you know, life in Delhi,
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cosmopolitan India transforms quite substantively after,
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you know, a few years down the 1991 path and it becomes slightly glitzy
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and glamoury and new professions start emerging.
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So, you know, I feel like I remember toying a little bit with the idea of advertising
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because that seemed like a cool thing to do.
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And then I toyed for a brief while with design.
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So my mother is an intriguing character because she really has
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reinvented herself multiple times.
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So she was a journalist, well, she was a mother.
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She didn't work for many years when we were growing up.
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And then she sort of goes back to her original career as a journalist
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and starts doing these feature stories on different aspects of social change
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and transformation that were going on in India.
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And during that time, she had taken us on one of these trips to Rajasthan,
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where she was documenting stories of transformation that were happening
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where the Indira Gandhi canal was being built.
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So we went to Bikaner, Jaisalmer, I have these vague memories of it.
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Apparently, and again, it became a household myth.
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So I don't know whether it's true or false, but it just it became part of me, I guess.
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Apparently, at some point, I sort of turned around and said,
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oh, I want to do quote unquote social work.
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I don't think I had any idea what that meant.
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But the claim was that I said it and it would get repeated to me often enough
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for me to think maybe I did say it.
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And it always stayed at the back of my mind.
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But there were all these other ways of, you know,
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but I was curious and wanted to explore other things to do.
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And my mother, as she was reinventing herself,
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went from doing this magazine to now becoming really interested in handlooms
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And she started sourcing handlooms from Tamil Nadu, particularly saris and bronzes
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and was building up a whole new business.
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So I got quite taken up by that and thought briefly that maybe I can be a designer
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then discover that I have absolutely zero skills there, just none, like none,
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none that even, you know, adoring parents would not encourage you to do that.
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But, you know, this I think this idea of in some ways being involved in the public sphere
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in some way or form always just stayed.
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And it really crystallized much later.
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I went to university, to Delhi University, and I did a degree in philosophy
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entirely because I was lucky enough to have got admission in a classroom with six people.
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And I was a relatively shy kid.
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Given how unsure I was of what I wanted to do,
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there was something quite appealing about being in a classroom with six other people.
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So it was really just that that drew me to this.
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And that was a really fun and exciting intellectual awakening for me
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the three years at St. Stephen's doing my philosophy degree.
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But I knew that I wasn't inclined to become, you know, I had a curiosity,
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but I certainly didn't have a fine intellectual mind of that nature.
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And so this was only something that I was doing for myself and I would find a different path.
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And in the course of that, Andre Beate had come to
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Stevens and was giving a talk and that sort of made me curious about sociology as a discipline.
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I started reading and thinking about it.
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And I discovered that there were these degrees that the UK was beginning to offer
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in social and political sciences, which seemed to be a nice kind of pathway for me.
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And in the process of beginning to start applying, because by the way,
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one of the things that was completely expected of us without ever being actively told,
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but you had to do it, was you finish your undergraduate degree and then you go abroad
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you get a master's degree and preferably in Oxford or Cambridge,
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preferably you get admission in both and then you have a choice.
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And if you don't, that's not going to be great for you.
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So our path was kind of set, although there was all this flexibility to pick whatever
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discipline you wanted, right?
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So I knew this, I had to go and do this.
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And, you know, that was sort of where one's notion of achievement was very much benchmarked there.
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And I thought this would be an interesting exploration.
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And in that process, I felt that perhaps then being actively involved in trying to understand
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these aspects of social change and transformation and the NGO sector sort of emerged as an obvious
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The thing that I've often wondered is why is it that it was never really an option to
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There were many friends and peers who were doing so,
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but it never was something that occurred to me as a possibility.
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It was never something that was encouraged within our peer group already.
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It was sort of, you know, I want to do things that will be part of India's development process
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and understand social change.
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NGOs were the obvious place to go.
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And that was sort of the path that was constantly, that one was constantly reminded of.
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And I think that the fact that that was never an option has shaped a lot of how I, in my
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professional life, think about the Indian state.
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But it was an interesting moment when, you know, all my friends, because of, because
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of Delhi and because of the kind of life that we led in Delhi, much of the, most of who
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came to college, most of those who became your peers were usually children of either
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journalists or the civil services.
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So we all came from very similar worlds and none of us were actually actively encouraged
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to go back into the civil services.
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It was also the late 1990s, right?
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So lots of new opportunities are coming up.
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And anybody that was interested in the private sector kind of took the CAT IIM route or
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aspired to the CAT IIM route and then wanted to go off to Wall Street.
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And those who are interested in doing something different, journalism became a really big
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TV journalism was just beginning to blossom.
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So those were areas that they all found themselves in.
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And those who were not quite clear about journalism or the private sector were all
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looking at quote unquote NGOs.
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And that's really what sort of set the path sort of.
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So it was all by accident.
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And really even, even when I had this vague idea that I'm going to work in an NGO and
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be part of some kind of developmental story for India, what I thought I would do and what
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I have ended up doing are two completely different things.
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So, so, so everything has been by accident in some ways.
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But at the center of it all, this idea that whatever you do has to genuinely have a public
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purpose to it, whatever form that may take.
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So I've discovered some interesting frames recently of examining oneself.
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One of them is a frame called the looking glass self.
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How we form ourselves kind of by what we see reflected in others.
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So if we get a certain kind of validation from behaving in a certain way, we kind of
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go in that direction, which is why it becomes really critical that we hang around with the
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Another powerful frame is a frame of thick and thin desires.
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You know, Luke Burgess wrote a book called Wanting about the Philosopher and his concept
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of mimetic desire, arguing that, you know, most of what we want is actually mimetic.
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We're copying someone else, you know, we want a fancy car because people have a fancy car
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or a young person may want to like get married and have kids because that's kind of what
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everybody else seems to want.
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And it seems to me that a couple of the things that you're speaking of could fall in the
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thin desire category that, oh, I'm expected to go and do an MA from Oxford, Cambridge
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In some cases, you even seem to be resisting it like the natural tendency to do the UPSC,
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though, as you say, I'm also the son of a civil servant.
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I never wanted to do anything like that at all.
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So maybe, you know, that is that wasn't a thin desire that you could have picked up
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from your peers at the time.
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But I'm curious about, you know, when you look back in retrospect, and certainly when
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I look back in retrospect, I find that many of the things I have wanted in my life, I
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now wonder why on earth did I want them?
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I wanted them for the wrong reasons.
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And the irony of thin desires, which are mimetic desires and thick desires are, of course,
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intrinsic to you and they're strong.
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But the problem is that thin desires can be incredibly intense, like you could really
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crave that Mercedes and the thick desires, whether it be a desire for quiet or being
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nature or just living a life of writing where you're just enjoying the process rather than
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seeking something from it.
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All of these, you know, are almost hidden underground within oneself and it takes a
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long time to kind of get there.
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So in your case, if you can look back, what was that sort of interplay?
#
Like on the one hand, you said that, you know, at some point you allegedly, according to
#
this sort of family folk tale said, hey, I want to do social service.
#
And then and then that gets reflected back at you.
#
And it is quite natural to imagine in looking glass self saying, huh, I'm getting approval
#
I can also feel good about myself and helping society and all of that.
#
And that's one way of looking at it.
#
But another way of looking at it is that as you engage more with the world, those are
#
really your deep desires that you want to make that kind of a difference and not just
#
do MBA and work in, you know, some fancy Wall Street bank and so on.
#
So take me through a bit of, you know, you're figuring yourself out in these in these
#
So it's a creative tension in a way, you know, between the thin and the thick.
#
And especially where and there's always moments of rebellion.
#
So so so my big moment of rebellion was actually not even so my sister was a rebel.
#
And therefore, I was always in the shadow of the rebel.
#
I didn't quite feel the need to rebel.
#
She keeps saying, see, I broke all the rules and that's why life was so much easier for
#
And the younger one just didn't have to rebel at all because we all together paved the path
#
So she shifted the family over to the window.
#
So if you ask her, she probably have a very different story to tell about growing up.
#
I often think about this with my two kids, what you do with the older one and then how
#
you think very differently with a younger one.
#
So like right now, we're just like all the attention is on trying to get the older kid
#
to like, you know, you really now need to start studying.
#
You're in the sixth grade and I'm like becoming my mother.
#
But, you know, nobody has bothered with this younger fellow who's just hanging around and
#
assimilating whatever he's hearing and, you know, is becoming a little too clever by half.
#
I mean, I never really had a particularly rebellious personality.
#
I was always a little quieter and I like to kind of, you know, work around the shadows
#
of what was expected and what was happening.
#
But, you know, I was also trying to find myself and in that process, I, you know, in that
#
and I was never a particularly good student.
#
I kind of spent a lot of time working, but, you know, with no particular capacity to be
#
particularly good at it.
#
It was just there was no question that the sort of accepted norm that I never really
#
pushed back against because I just imbibed it.
#
That's the thin part was that you just have to do really well.
#
And so I would go through the motions of having to do really well, right?
#
Like you'd lock myself up in my room and study for hours and, you know, not be listening
#
to music and not be with.
#
But, you know, basically I was just staring at a piece of paper and probably not absorbing
#
very much and, you know, kind of getting on with it as one tends to do and finding my
#
And at some point in the course of finding my way, I decided I'm going to do something
#
totally unusual and take the commerce stream, you know.
#
And so I did that for in that 10th, 11th, you know, CBSE, when you have to make all
#
these like absurd choices and at an absurdly young age and do weird things like commerce.
#
So I spent a month in that classroom and I really honestly, I was just really bored.
#
So it was the most depressing thing.
#
The most rebellious thing I had done was to take this commerce stream and I myself came
#
to the conclusion that this is not my thing.
#
I'm just not interested.
#
And there was always a sense of, I mean, it was also really interesting to grow up.
#
So the school we were in, we went to in Delhi had a very dominance of, it was sort of unusual,
#
I guess, for the Delhi in which we grew up.
#
It had a dominance of business entrepreneurs in the school and children from those families
#
And so their whole orientation to life, the world, to education was actually quite starkly
#
different to whatever we were imbibing within our own household.
#
And in some ways, spending time with a very different type of person and a lot of them
#
I mean, we had very close relationships and, you know, we made good friends.
#
It wasn't an isolated school life at all.
#
But in some ways, that was the rebellion.
#
It was like, you know, we were a completely different person with your peers and, you
#
know, did all the very different set of things at home.
#
And, you know, over time, figured out ourselves in that process.
#
So for me, when I walked into college, actually, that was a really great awakening because
#
suddenly there were peers and friends that were more like me in a sense.
#
And there was more of an intellectual and emotional connect.
#
But at the same time, it wasn't as exciting because the excitement was learning about
#
other ways of being, other ways of life, other value systems, other approaches.
#
And I think that there was no active rebellion simply because of these different worlds.
#
They all kind of, I was able to find spaces within which I could make sense of myself
#
and then slowly find out over time.
#
I mean, I think that it took me a lot longer.
#
I really came into my own, not as a student, but much more when I entered the professional
#
And in some ways, I did exactly what was expected of me.
#
But once I was doing it, I really began to enjoy it.
#
And I found myself, I found it in a confidence and felt that this is what I wanted to do.
#
And there's a lot more that I can do here where I feel a sense of purpose and I can
#
And I'm actually doing something that gets affirmation.
#
Because, you know, of course, even the most confident actually is deeply insecure.
#
So affirmation matters a lot.
#
And here was a space where I was genuinely, without too much effort, finding affirmation.
#
And that sort of helped me become myself.
#
And you earlier said that you weren't particularly good in any one thing, but you kind of did
#
it diligently because, you know, it was sort of expected.
#
But like, obviously, at some point, you found this, you know, beautiful meeting point of
#
what you love doing and what you're also good at.
#
And in a sense, it can become a virtuous cycle because if you do something you love doing
#
repeatedly, you naturally become good at it.
#
So, you know, what was that journey like you towards getting to where you are in the sense
#
you went to St. Edmunds College in Cambridge and then LSE and all of that?
#
What kind of things were you studying?
#
Why did you choose them?
#
Was it just because it was natural for me?
#
Or was there also an inner drive that, yeah, I'm curious about this stuff.
#
This is what I really enjoy doing.
#
When did you start kind of figuring that out?
#
Because many people go through their entire education without feeling that sense of purpose
#
and drive and so on and so forth.
#
And if you don't have that sense of purpose and drive, you're also not as deeply engaged
#
and not thinking so well about it.
#
You don't get to those levels of excellence and so on and so forth.
#
But in your case, even if you were a confused teenager, as you put it, you seem to have
#
kind of figured it out by the time.
#
Well, maybe because I didn't do anything particularly radical.
#
As I look back, you know, a little bit of, you know, a little bit of radical stuff.
#
Take a year off, go like, you know, explore the world, do something totally nutty.
#
I just pretty straight jacketed with fairly straight jacketed aspirations.
#
In old age, now I want to, middle age, now I want to.
#
Little bit of letting your head out could have been fun.
#
But that was just not the person I was, I suppose.
#
But did you daydream about stuff?
#
You know, in the most boring and narrow ways.
#
Okay, like I daydreamed of, I don't know, having, spending a year in a loft in Paris,
#
but, you know, for no particular reason, it just seemed to be a cool thing.
#
So really not particularly.
#
But, you know, I think what it was, you know, I guess, gosh, I guess what it was is that,
#
you know, for me, it was an internal struggle because I think that I was always a somewhat
#
more underconfident person trying to find a space for myself within a household with
#
very dominant personalities within an education environment.
#
I mean, I always kind of sought, my friends were also very dominant personalities.
#
I sought a certain kind of person.
#
And so, you know, I think for me, the beginnings of really becoming passionate about what I was
#
going to do were to, you know, as I sort of finished my undergraduate degree and went
#
to Cambridge and, you know, both just being on your, the usual things, like being on your
#
own, having to like be, you know, navigate in a completely different cultural context.
#
And like, don't forget, like late 1990s, we still, we were, you know, we had still grown
#
up in the world where you would go to the Archie's store and find some cassettes and
#
then listen to pop music that was at least two years old.
#
And so, you know, even a lot of the cultural connections that, you know, the globalized
#
elite today have, none of those existed for us.
#
So we were literally kind of that, you know, tipping point of that generation that were
#
thrown into this new world and computers were just coming in.
#
And I still used to write with pen and paper back in the day.
#
So, you know, getting to know, getting to navigate completely on your own was of course
#
a very important part of that experience.
#
But also just, you know, I really took to what I was learning.
#
I mean, I think what had attracted me to doing this degree in social and political sciences
#
was the idea that, you know, in sociology allows you to study society.
#
And I was very, you know, we were beginning to witness so much transition in our own lives,
#
just around us as India was also transitioning.
#
So we were really children of that moment or young adults of that moment rather.
#
And so, you know, I became fascinated by this and perhaps elements of my mother's
#
journalistic side were well embedded within me, just curiosity of trying to understand
#
how change takes place.
#
And also at the same time, a deep interest in politics.
#
So that kind of comes together in this classroom.
#
And boy, it was a struggle because you really do have to, you know, even though I was, you know,
#
one in a classroom of six and during our undergraduate degree in philosophy, basically
#
we spent all our time just arguing with each other.
#
So it was a phenomenal training.
#
You don't get that anywhere in the world.
#
It was just pure luck to have that kind of classroom with some phenomenally good teachers.
#
And so, you know, I had acquired a degree of skill.
#
But, you know, you do have to give the exam in a fairly rote learning way.
#
So the whole, the idea that you can, you have to now critically examine a question
#
and build out your own hypotheses and engage with material.
#
It took a long time to actually learn how to write.
#
And it was actually probably in that struggle of learning how to write that I also discovered
#
that I was beginning to really like what I was learning.
#
And, you know, then of course you get to explore all sorts of things.
#
So, you know, I did this random paper on rap music and what that said about, you know,
#
race relations and gender relations.
#
So, you know, it all sort of consolidated in my mind that, you know, I was genuinely
#
keen and excited about trying to understand the world around me and trying to,
#
and not just understanding it, but also trying to analytically make sense of it.
#
And I was slowly beginning to develop the analytical skills to be able to do that.
#
But I never really had an immediate inclination towards the academy.
#
Like to me, I was much more interested in, you know, I was asking myself real world questions
#
and wanting to understand real world transformations.
#
So it was never really an academic enterprise at all in my mind.
#
It was always something that I would like to translate into my work life.
#
And so I finished this degree and come back again, like now saying, okay, now what?
#
And this NGO story sort of starts emerging again as well.
#
You know, that's a place where you can be part of all of this, all of these changes.
#
And so I hung around talking to various people who were, you know, working in what was sort
#
of loosely called the social sector and most of the, you know, trying to understand what
#
non-profits actually do and found myself spending a few months working with an organization,
#
an NGO in Delhi called Udyogini that was basically working with, you know,
#
so the self-help groups, this Grameen Bank had just suddenly sort of taken off in a big way.
#
And this idea of microfinance had become, you know, after Mohamed Yousef got the Nobel Prize,
#
it sort of, you know, becomes a big part of how the development world is beginning to think about
#
innovation. And in India, it was beginning to translate itself into this self-help groups
#
movement, this idea of women coming together, peer-to-peer lending, which, you know,
#
was both creating a social space for women, but also financial security of a certain kind,
#
which had a sort of, at least in concept, an empowering element built into it.
#
And so, there was this proliferation of NGOs that were beginning to work on self-help groups
#
and linked to that, these micro enterprises, small enterprises that women-led self-help
#
groups could run. And that sounded to me like an exciting proposition, mostly because what they
#
wanted me to do was to go off and document these self-help groups, you know, and I thought that
#
would give me an opportunity to travel around India and also understand what was actually going
#
on. And because I was, because we used to travel a lot with our parents, I was used to sort of,
#
you know, being around, you know, in parts of rural India. So for me, it was an exciting
#
opportunity to just observe and see and be. And I think really that's when it consolidated in my mind,
#
because it was also that very exciting, you know, it's like, we were, as young adults in
#
post-liberalization India, we were beginning to really experience transformation in our own lives
#
in, you know, just so many ways. It's, you know, as a 20-year, 21-year-old, it's the small things
#
that you think about, right? When I came back from Cambridge, the thing I used to miss a lot
#
were coffee shops, and then Barista opens, like, wow. When we were in college, you know, going to
#
eat a McDonald's burger was so exciting that we stood in line for four hours when that Vasant
#
Vihar in Delhi's McDonald's first opened. So, you know, things were beginning to change and in
#
these very dramatic ways around us. When I was in school, my father went off to some international
#
trip and I went and he, in his telling, saved every dollar of his per diem to buy me Reebok shoes,
#
and then I wore them very proudly to school, even though we were not allowed to. So, you know,
#
all these consumer goods that used to be so difficult to get suddenly Khan Market is
#
becoming, you know, Reebok Market and Nike was opening up, things are really changing.
#
And in all of this change, there was also a very clear narrative of the state, like the state is
#
going away, it's exiting from our lives, you know, things are, new opportunities are opening up.
#
And we are witnessing all of this and a part of it and experiencing it and frankly enjoying it,
#
you know, we were beginning to see what real consumption could actually look like and
#
how much better our lives were. I mean, just, you know, by virtue of opportunities coming about,
#
and so many of my friends had gone into the private sector and, you know, were earning
#
very differently to how, you know, our parents' generation could even imagine. So, you know,
#
it was like there was this hope and possibility and new things that were beginning to present
#
itself to us. And I was curious to see, you know, what all of this was meaning, because on paper,
#
all this SAG stuff sounded super cool, you know, women coming together and lending with each other
#
and, you know, there's this massive empowerment that is happening, you know, India is changing,
#
not only in the cities and everywhere else. And so you get into the trains because planes were
#
still not so easily available, it was all very expensive to go places and you land up and it
#
suddenly I was like, oh, this is no different to the 10 years ago trip that I made. And I think
#
that, and in these conversations with women, you know, we talk for hours, similar, I guess,
#
to conversations like this, there would be meandering conversations, often quite stunted,
#
language was always a barrier, but gender was not. And so, you know, things would break down and at
#
least there would be opportunities to really engage in conversation. And for me, it broke
#
many things. It's just sort of, you know, in conversations with women, you realize how central
#
the state is to everything. I mean, you know, none of the trickle down had reached rural India
#
in the early 2000s yet. It was still mobile phones were not available to anybody. You know,
#
the roads were still half broken. There was this yearning for things that, you know,
#
the government brought for us, but there was no sign of any government anywhere,
#
except that it was very dominant in their minds. And I got very curious about what this government
#
is. And there will always be the local village leader, the local village panchayat person that
#
would pop up and pop into these conversations and was always both a patriarchal figure that
#
ran counter to this so-called empowerment narrative, but also the problem solver.
#
And that made me genuinely curious about how government looks like outside of Delhi. And also
#
reminded me that, you know, each time we celebrate the exit of government, there's also probably a
#
very central role that government plays in enabling social transformation. This thing that I was so
#
keen to study, that we were somewhere missing this trick. And it brought me back to the home I
#
grew up in, where there was lots of conversation about Panchayati Raj and local governments,
#
because my father was very actively involved in the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments.
#
And, you know, I had paid very little attention to them. But, you know, suddenly I was beginning
#
to see what these panchayats were. There was a tactile thing, there was a person, there was an
#
election, there was an office, there were things that these people were doing. And, you know,
#
I became witness to a lot to the two parts of all of this. So I was really beginning to get very
#
interested in understanding and learning more about this. And also always with the intent,
#
not of being a student of change, but of being somehow finding a role to play.
#
And perhaps because I only knew the state as the space in which one could engage with these
#
questions. For me, it was pretty central to study, you know, any kind of study of the state also
#
would require me to be actively engaged and involved in the state. And I think that that's
#
kind of where I took a pause to say, so what does all of this mean? And what should I do?
#
Combined with the fact that I was getting very bored in Delhi, and, you know, was itching to,
#
like, the sort of personal experience of, you know, exploring the world had only just begun,
#
it had not at all in my mind ended. I contemplated taking the GRE, but, you know, instead just put in
#
an application to the UK to do a master's in development studies, because it seemed,
#
for me, at least this whole experience of being out crystallized for me that I wanted to understand
#
development more. And I wasn't entirely aligned to the NGO kind of framing of this, because in
#
some ways, the NGOs as they were evolving in the at least at that in that moment, were really almost
#
functioning as small substitutes for the state, they were filling gaps where the state wasn't
#
visible. And even in some ways in all in the mobilization of self help groups, etc. The way
#
you know, my experience was telling me that these were small necessary innovations, but not
#
necessarily innovations of scale. And for me, the scale was only possible through the state. So this
#
big question of then how do you begin to engage with the state and so I felt that perhaps then
#
it's best to just take a pause and try and understand what I want to do. So a development
#
studies degree was an obvious thing to do, because that's what we didn't in India at the time have
#
much talk of public policy degrees. And you know, we did, I didn't really know enough about the
#
American education ecosystem, because all that we had exposure to was the UK. And while taking the
#
GRE was a thing that was always kind of at the back of my mind, you know, just going to the UK was a
#
straightforward thing. And that's how I ended up doing this development studies degree, which by
#
the way, in retrospect, I wish I had done differently, but nonetheless. And that's when
#
you know, it was clear to me that this is where I wanted to make my professional career, to be in
#
this development space in some form. And the UK was very deeply influenced by the Robert Chambers
#
participatory development framework, it also its development studies degrees. You know, this was
#
also the UK or I think the Western left academia also grappling with the complexities of
#
globalization and what this means. And a lot of the concerns around what we were learning was
#
about the consequences of quote unquote, neoliberalism on development trajectories of
#
countries like ours. So I was exposed to a lot of these things. And in some ways, it also sat in
#
sharp contrast to what I was living and experiencing. Because after all, we were also,
#
I saw the gap and the limits of what globalization and neoliberal policies were doing. But you know,
#
particularly when you look at the kind of inequality, that it was just not being able to
#
bridge. But at the same time, you know, we were all living the good life and partaking of it. And
#
the fact that I could be there in LSE studying this also told you that, you know, there were,
#
there are these contrasting tensions that needed better resolution. And so I was also keen to be
#
able to better understand these, you know, how these resolutions could take place. But it was
#
always very clear to me that the way to do it was to really just go back to the ground something
#
I just always and maybe because I learned by being on the ground, it just seemed to me that
#
the ivory tower of the academy is just not my thing. And so it never I never thought that I
#
would have a career in research, I thought that I would have an active in a career of being
#
what we call now practitioners, although I have no idea what that word means is somebody creates
#
a category, and then you just adopt it. So I thought of myself as a quote unquote practitioner.
#
And the obvious place to locate myself as a as a practitioner was a sort of international
#
development world. And that's what I had set my sights on. So you know, and I'm just kind of
#
thinking aloud here, because it's a really fascinating narrative of how you kind of zeroed
#
into the particular area that you now study. One, it seems to me that, you know, if if you want to
#
solve problems, there are a number of different ways that one could approach solving problems.
#
So, for example, you could say that I'll do it through the markets, I'll be an entrepreneur,
#
you know, like Grameen Bank, for example, that, okay, here's a problem that can be solved as a
#
whole, here's something innovative, I can do, let me kind of get in there. Another way is to
#
possibly do it using the state in some way or form. So either you enter politics, or if politics
#
is downstream of culture, you try to shape the demand, you know, through the think tank world
#
or whatever, and you try to sort of in different ways, either be part of the state or work with the
#
state to actually make change happen and solve small problems. And then there is the NGO space.
#
And as you pointed out that the mindset at that point in time very much is that we shall, you know,
#
whatever the state isn't doing efficiently, we'll try to kind of do something in that domain.
#
And, and when you point out that, as you travel through the country, you realized the centrality
#
of the state in the lives of people who are not like us who depend on it for sustenance and
#
welfare, and so on and so forth. It's a failure of the state. It's a failure of the state in two
#
ways. And one way is that, of course, it is not delivering those essential services that a state
#
should like education or health care or whatever. And at another level, it is still constraining the
#
private sector and private individuals from actually coming in and solving many of these
#
problems. And in something like education is really kind of both, both of those. And it's
#
interesting how systematically you kind of go through this bouquet of options, and then you
#
narrow down and sort of realize that, okay, the place where one can make the most practical
#
difference at scale is getting the state to work better. Because there you make a tiny little
#
difference. And at scale, it can impact millions of people, you know, this is a point that for
#
example, Kartik Moolidharan makes a lot has made a lot in his episodes, he's done with me that
#
he's obsessed with this, because you do a little bit of tinkering in the margins and millions can
#
benefit and you can't get that anywhere else. And, you know, I had a civil servant, Ashutosh
#
Saleel also on my show. And he was also, again, a driven person and very unlike the public
#
stereotype of the bureaucrat. And he was also kind of talking about this aspect of it, that I can
#
manifestly, visibly change the lives of people by doing something that, you know, the state is so
#
incredibly powerful in that sense. And at the same time, it's ironic that as you've pointed out in
#
various places that servants of the state actually find themselves powerless, though the state is so
#
powerful, but we'll explore that dichotomy later. But just to sort of continue that personal journey,
#
how is it that you begin to kind of narrow down further from this? And how is it that you then
#
also resist the typical frameworks that exist? Like you mentioned that when you were doing your
#
MA, you would have liked to have learned about development economics in a different way.
#
What do you mean by that? And when you talk of ivory tower academics, and so on and so forth,
#
you know, what do you mean by that? Like, what what do they miss that quote unquote practitioners
#
don't, you know, because one increasing, although I have had many, many academics on the show,
#
and many of them engage with the real world in very real ways. But one complaint with which I
#
think all of them agree with me is that a lot of academics is really this giant circle jerk is
#
professors speaking to each other in language that nobody else can understand if they themselves do,
#
and it really has no connection with the real world. And also it is often sort of hostage to
#
certain academic fashions and ways of thinking about the world, which are, you know, no longer
#
applicable. Like the word neoliberal really triggers me by the way, because it's so often
#
used by these academics. No one really knows what it means anyway. Yeah, no one self identifies that
#
way. No one can define it. No one has a clue. And if it is meant to be some kind of way criticisms
#
of markets, I'm like, hey, everything good in your life is because of the voluntary actions of
#
these markets. So tell me about that journey of you're getting clarity, because I can imagine
#
a young person in your place, easily giving into the temptations of giving to conventional thinking
#
in one domain or the other, whether it is in the NGO space in India, where you have that narrow
#
vision of supplanting the state, whether it is within the development economic space where
#
you have your typical fashionable frameworks. And, you know, how did you resist that kind of
#
conventional like our mutual friend, Pramila Satyanand, who's worked with you at the World
#
Bank described you as quote unquote, brave and outspoken. She said she's always been brave and
#
outspoken. And, and this is kind of mind blowing, because if I was making the kind of journey that
#
you did, I don't even know how I would arrive at confidence leave alone being brave and outspoken,
#
right? Because it's you're always the temptations to fit in with conventions and then be a star
#
within that little silo that may exist for that little thing must be so severe. But you haven't
#
done that. So take me a bit through your, you know, did you know from the start that those
#
particular parts are to be avoided, that those frameworks are incomplete? Or, you know, was there
#
a process of discovery involved there? So Pramila is overly generous. I'm neither brave nor outspoken.
#
I'm just trying to make my way around the world. But, but, you know, the one thing I have to say,
#
I'm extremely lucky. And it's really just by accident. I've just encountered some amazing
#
people, friends, mentors, all of whom have just sort of stayed with me. And it's not because of
#
any great aspect of my own personality. I've just been really lucky. I mean, there's no other way of
#
putting it. And they've always sort of, you know, encouraged me along the way. And that's really
#
been part of the, it's really been shaped me in, I think, every single way. But, you know, I think
#
why I don't fit into any particular orthodoxy is because it was all a journey. It was a little bit
#
of, you know, I began a little bit confused with some vague ideas of what I wanted to do. And,
#
you know, didn't quite, and nothing in it, no one view of the world fully appealed to me.
#
And there was always, you know, like, I would always almost get stuck in the contradictions
#
that I was observing, right? So really, actually, the struggle was always don't let that just pull
#
you down and leave you in stasis, you know, try and find an answer and, you know, try something
#
else along the way. So, you know, as a consequence, even my educational journey, I'm not a one thing.
#
It sometimes becomes a problem. I don't know how to describe myself. And so I'll use very vague
#
terms like public policy, you know, researcher or social scientist. But, you know, there is no
#
single academic discipline into which I anchor myself. There is no single view of the world.
#
I have a certain normative framework within which I try to center myself. And that too evolved,
#
I think, very much from that those early years of traveling around mostly North India, actually,
#
of experiencing this sort of missing state that everybody was talking about. And that gave me a
#
very clear normative conception of the core public goods that the state must deliver.
#
And, you know, whether the pathway is through markets or not is a matter of debate,
#
but that the state has to enable the market to function effectively so it reaches the last
#
person. To me, that's the absolute, I mean, that is my ideological bias if there has to be one.
#
And that has always been the driving force behind everything else that I am exploring.
#
And maybe that's why there was no particular type of institutional framework within which I
#
actually fit. So the NGO stuff has a role and it's deeply valuable. When you look at much of
#
the innovation that has taken place in India on things that I care about and I study from education
#
to social protection, all those innovations have come through both organized NGOs and the somewhat
#
more chaotic ones, not chaotic ones, but less organized, slightly more like social movements,
#
but not entirely. And they've really been the backbone of the development story in India. So
#
I really deeply value them, but I also felt that was not for me. And I spent some time in the World
#
Bank, where really I did think that this would be, I mean, in the end, I always thought of myself
#
as a fairly straight-jacketed, straightforward career risk that this is like a large bureaucracy
#
in which I will always be able to meander my way through. And I found that the time I spent there
#
was deeply, deeply impactful and formative. I was lucky enough to work with or be the research
#
associate for some just phenomenal people. And I learned from them more than I ever learned in the
#
classroom. And that sort of set me up for the professional I am today, so you can blame them
#
for everything. But also as a large bureaucracy, I started finding it's too large and you get
#
completely boxed in and you have to follow the rules in a bureaucracy. Those are the terms of
#
the contract you make with the bureaucracy. And that wasn't quite for me. And my interests were
#
less trying to please the boss above and much more trying to ask curious questions about the
#
parallel world in which I was interacting with the Indian state. But what the World Bank did,
#
back to the thing of this, where you fit and what is the role, it gave me a really deep insight into
#
the state. And I realized that, again, it further reinforced for me that my understanding of the
#
world and where the questions that I'm passionate about will find answers is through a better
#
navigation of the state. And that's where the whole governance question became central to my
#
work. And I did not dismiss markets at all as a beneficiary of the market and an active participant
#
in one, although I know I have zero entrepreneurial skills. But to me, maybe it was a reaction on
#
reflection to the fact that at that particular moment in the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was
#
such an excessive dismissal of the state and such a warm, unquestioning welcoming of the market
#
as something that was genuinely free, with less engagement with questions of information
#
asymmetries, power dynamics, social context that shaped the way markets are as much a reflection
#
of society. And so I kind of reacted to that very deeply as there is no orthodoxy and the market is
#
not the orthodoxy, even though most people around me believed it was. And so I said,
#
I want to engage with the state. So maybe there is an orthodoxy in my belief of the state.
#
I do strongly believe that the state has a significant role to play. And that's how I
#
became obsessed with the idea of what is it that the state needs to do better. And one is not blind.
#
You don't have to go outside of your little bubble to know the extent to which the state can be
#
coercive, can misuse its power, can completely disempower even the most empowered citizen.
#
As children of bureaucrats, we all know what powers of bureaucracy can do in days of rationing
#
when you needed to get your license quickly or your passport or the extra landline with
#
three teenage children living in the house. That was the biggest cause of squabbles when I was
#
growing up, that one landline that we would fight over. And so for me, that's where this whole
#
governance question started becoming big, because it's not an unconditional acceptance of the state.
#
It's a deep recognition that the state needs to have its power firmly checked and balanced.
#
And where does that come from? And indeed, while you can imagine that the state has a
#
facilitative role to play in social change, can it genuinely do so? That was another big question
#
for me that kept coming up repeatedly. So I've been in search of those answers. I don't have them.
#
And I see the limits of the state. And I can also see increasingly so how the coercive powers of
#
the state can be used to distort markets in ways that are fundamentally so deeply disempowering that
#
it challenges one's understandings of what the state can achieve. And yet there is no other
#
organizational principle that makes sense. So I kind of am dedicated to the idea of how do we
#
work through this organizational principle in a way that genuinely functions effectively.
#
Yeah, I agree with all of what you said. I remember in the early 2000s, and I'll put a
#
link from the show notes, I'd written a piece for the Wall Street Journal arguing that the
#
reforms of 91 didn't go far enough. That yeah, we should have celebrated then they got hundreds of
#
millions of people out of poverty, which was a humanitarian win. But they left a lot undone.
#
And as far as the rhetoric of the late 90s, early 2000s is concerned that the state is dying and
#
markets are good. I would actually argue that that may have been the rhetoric among city bred
#
English speaking elites like us perhaps. But for the rest of the country, the Maibab Sarkar was
#
still dominant. It's still, you know, to again go into your extended family history, there is
#
an anecdote I read about your father-in-law Shankar Pillai Krishnakumar in his early days as
#
district collector, which speaks to the mentality of how people view the state. And there is this
#
article on him which says, quote, as a district collector back home in Annakulam, he had organized
#
Shivratri festival on the banks of the Periyar, where priests were replaced by officers. As
#
prasadam, they distributed title deed to the landless, stop quote. And this seems to me to be
#
a great metaphor for how we actually look at the state that on the one hand, it is our biggest
#
religion, Maibab Sarkar is a bigger religion than, you know, any of our official religion, so to say.
#
And we always have this vision of the state as sort of doing patronage. And I think that, like,
#
I don't think anyone holds that caricaturish view that the state should not be there. I think I'd
#
agree with something that you've written about in the past, that what we really need is a strong
#
state that does a few things really well, rather than a weak state that does many things badly
#
and gets in the way of others actually sort of doing things. And you can respond to this if you
#
want. And my next question is really about what you said about your years at the World Bank about
#
sort of A, the mentors you had who taught you a lot. So I'd like to know what kind of things
#
you learned from them, who were the people who influenced you. And two, you spoke about how you
#
got insights into the working of the state by working there and by doing the kind of projects
#
you did. And I'd love to, you know, hear about concrete illustrations of that examples of that,
#
you know, what were the big TIL moments for you during that phase of learning?
#
So, you know, my professional career kind of also takes off at a point where there are,
#
there is quite a fundamental shift in the narrative of the state in India,
#
as you say, in these two very contradictory ways, right? Like, on the one hand, there's
#
this celebration of getting the state out of the way. And I just love the Gursharand Das script
#
because it sort of summarizes that moment so well, you know, India grows at night when
#
the state sleeps. And really in more ways than one that was necessary. I mean,
#
certainly the excessive license, Raj, of the state, you know, was very much part of the
#
economic challenge that India confronted. And the limits that the state, the Indian state is not able
#
to support capital or labor is, you know, just in every which way. It's not just about labor
#
regulation. In every which way, it seeks to undermine the market. And at the same time,
#
it doesn't substitute for market either. And so we end up in this chaos that we have.
#
And then I'm seeing and thinking through the normative expectations of the state and the power
#
of the state. But there's also a very fundamental change that is going on, actually, in the global
#
approach to these big questions of development, state, citizens. And it sort of it begins,
#
I guess, in the 70s and 80s with a sort of framework of participatory development and
#
participatory research and the idea that sitting far away in your AC room, you have no idea what
#
ground realities are, and you cannot make anti-poverty programs with that. And this is all stuff that was
#
very much in the discourse that the so-called development world, in whatever form it existed,
#
from the NGO to the international development banks, were having with each other. And in the
#
international development banks too, I think, and I don't know that we've reflected enough on this,
#
but you know, the big moment, all the way through the late 1970s, the Bretton Woods institutions were
#
really about infrastructure, right? It was building big infrastructure. There was a
#
particular imagination of building the, you know, commanding heights of the Indian economy.
#
And that would, over time, facilitate markets to do what they wanted. And in fact, they were
#
beginning to realize, and I think with all its strengths and limitations, and Narmada, Bachao,
#
Andolan played a role in that, of the limits of some of that. And these institutions, therefore,
#
were also beginning to try and re-engage with what it meant. So on the one hand, you're pushing
#
for structural adjustments, smaller state, in a particular framework for the economy.
#
And yet, these are also fundamentally statist institutions. So what is the state supposed to
#
do, was this big kind of, it was never cleanly articulated as that, but it always remained this
#
big question mark. And so it kind of said, the state is supposed to focus on quote-unquote
#
poverty alleviation. So it goes from big infrastructure to grassroots questions of
#
poverty alleviation and pathways out of poverty. So it kind of walks its way down the ladder to
#
quote-unquote the people, but then it doesn't know what it's supposed to do. So it starts adopting
#
all this language of participatory development, of participatory planning, of local governance
#
coming into the grammar of development. And India was doing its own thing. And this is where I think
#
our social movements, and at least I think they played a very, very crucial role, in that it
#
recognized the draconian nature of the state, but was also convinced that the state needs to
#
do its job vis-a-vis its citizens better. And it framed it in something that has deeply influenced
#
me. I spent a little bit of time engaging with these questions around this idea of citizenship.
#
And it goes back, you spoke to the Maibap Sarkar. One of the biggest challenges that
#
post-independence India in the nation-building project was that whilst there was an attempt to
#
fully clothe Indian citizens with political rights, the socioeconomic rights of citizens
#
were always a question. It was placed within the constitution neatly into directive principles
#
of social policy. And it was a matter that politics would evolve and find its way through,
#
navigate through. So democracy kind of also evolves in this really interesting way in India,
#
in that the democratic space becomes a space of articulation of rights and dignity
#
very effectively. And the 1990s are this great moment when you see the flourishing of lower
#
caste politics, particularly Bihar-UP as the great colonels of where all of this happens.
#
But in an economy that is not delivering. So the only site for empowerment becomes the state.
#
And that sort of limits in some ways what the state is able to, how the average citizen's
#
imagination of the state is. It is about access to parts of the state that you were not able to
#
access. And that acquiring of the power of the state is in itself acquiring dignity.
#
And while that I think is one of the greatest victories of democracy,
#
it also closed off space for this larger question of socioeconomic rights,
#
which were then being picked up in this grammar of rights and citizenship by social movements.
#
So saying the Sarkar is not your Maibab, as a citizen, we have to start collectively demanding
#
these rights of the state. And so this fundamental attempt at redrawing the terms of the social
#
contract that was not evolving in the formal political space, because the formal political
#
space was building out, I think, a very empowering social contract, but on different terms. And that,
#
in a way, kind of opens up this really important space of governance and accountability, really
#
about how does the state actually engage citizens and how do citizens engage the state in ways where
#
the terms of that engagement are shifting from this Maibab patronage to something that is within
#
a grammar of citizenship, dignity, and rights. Not that the World Bank was thinking of it this
#
way, but it certainly recognized and adopted this recognition that as you move into this domain of
#
poverty alleviation, the state exists, it is central. And the question of how the state
#
actually fulfills its responsibility becomes core. And it adopts this idea that at that level,
#
this engagement of citizens and state is really crucial. And you see this huge proliferation of
#
literature in development studies that draws from sociology and political science into its own
#
body that looks at these questions of terms that have been used, co-production, co-governance,
#
social accountability, essentially trying to articulate the centrality of citizens playing
#
a role in placing those checks and balances on the coercive arms of the state. And through a
#
process of active claim making, extracting governance out of the state, and at the same time,
#
also breaking down boundaries of state citizens. So the Weberian imagination of bureaucratic
#
autonomy, which still is central to our understandings of what bureaucracy should do,
#
but not a distanced state, a distanced bureaucracy, but an embedded bureaucracy.
#
So now the whole grammar of development is shifting and there's an emerging consensus across
#
the globe on this. While India's social movements are experimenting with ideas of citizenship and
#
rights, the global development world is beginning to acknowledge that citizen voice is kind of the
#
way it was articulated, plays a very crucial role in shaping the dynamics of the state.
#
And the state in some ways has to be embedded in a constant dialogue with the citizen.
#
And that was the time when I sort of entered into the World Bank with my own interests in
#
these questions of governance and citizen participation. And you know, the World Bank
#
had just built out this big World Development Report of 2004, which became a kind of the
#
holy book, so to say, of the time I spent there, which had basically tried to unpack this idea of
#
the state and try to better understand what are the conditions under which the state can actually
#
function effectively in ways that deliver to citizens. And it brought in these different
#
perspectives of citizen-state relations in what was then famously termed as the World Bank Triangle
#
of politics, the compact between politics and bureaucracy and voice. And each of these are
#
sets of interactions, principal-agent interactions, which ultimately shape how governments deliver.
#
So I'm walking into the professional world at a time when this question of how governments can
#
deliver better is at the center of the global development discourse. There's been a big shift
#
from thinking of the bureaucracy as a distinct and distanced entity from the citizenry that it's
#
supposed to serve, and a recognition that the state needs citizen-led checks and balances for
#
it to be able to function better. And therefore, this idea that citizen voice is at the heart of
#
it. And that really sort of crystallized and gave an analytical framework for me within which to
#
start understanding what was going on. And it did seem like this really exciting moment where
#
there was a consensus around the need to rethink the social contract, which is embedded in ideas
#
of democracy. So also, just engaging with the state and traveling around the country,
#
what became increasingly clear to me is that the more the citizen finds ways, the more we as Indians
#
find ways of constantly engaging the state and keep pricing those sites and nurturing them,
#
the more that dialectic between us keeps continuing. And so for me, democracy was a
#
very tactile thing. I didn't really think of it in any grand terms, regardless of what was going
#
on in the context of my personal life and my parents and so on. For me, it was just about this.
#
It was just about the ability to be sitting around in a little circle with these self-help
#
group women and they're talking about themselves. And then we would always talk about because I was
#
always thinking about politics too. And we would discuss politicians and the Sarpanch would show
#
up and there'd be some gossip about the Sarpanch and which was always done in whispers. But the
#
fact that these spaces existed and we took them for granted seemed to me to be something that
#
there was something in it that was really important. It starts crystallizing then
#
in this idea of citizen voice and the relationship between politics and bureaucracy.
#
And when I came into the World Bank, three economists, Lan Pritchett, Junaid Ahmed and
#
Jeffrey Hammer were just posted in Delhi in the social protection department. I was working,
#
I think, in the Rural Development Unit and they were three of the main authors of this
#
World Development Report. So now this is the time where they actually get to take these
#
nice grand analytical frames. We were talking about the limits of the academy. I have a great
#
respect for the academy. It's easy to paint it as an ivory tower, but I think the ability to step
#
back from the real world and actually analytically unpack what you're seeing in ways that allow you
#
to not so much theorize. Theorization is of course crucial, but it gives you the tools to start
#
understanding how societies function and the conditions under which actions take place and
#
societies change. Without that framing, everything is just lots of events. It's random events that
#
take place. So while it wasn't my personality to be locked into thinking about those framings all
#
the time. For me, the frame only matters when I see something on the ground and I'm trying to
#
make sense of it. So the ground was most important. That's why doing a PhD was never even on the cards
#
for me. But here were these folks that had done all of this thinking and built out a really
#
exciting framework who now got the chance to engage this framework in everyday policy.
#
And the World Bank is of course still five times removed from the ground, but you're still dealing
#
with arms of the state and pushing the state to start thinking in these different ways.
#
And that really was the education I hadn't got, which I got then. It was a very exciting
#
moment. So now I'm saying 2004, within that range of four to seven when I was there.
#
India's social movements had also acquired global recognition for thinking about these
#
questions of citizen state contract with this grammar of citizenship rights and
#
these ideas of right to information, right to work, right to food were all crystallizing and
#
lo and behold, 2004 happens, a government at the center shows up and suddenly there's an
#
opportunity to convert these ideas into law. And I think that was also, the World Bank too,
#
was recognizing that this was an important moment. So trying to understand what all of
#
this was doing to this sort of new welfare architecture that was building up is where
#
we began. And what we were trying to do was actually quite exciting that I was a research
#
associate on a study that on what was on rural service delivery. And it was basically saying,
#
let's break up services sectorally and try, so public services, so health, education,
#
there was a whole other plethora of schemes. We do development by scheme. So some five,
#
six schemes were hanging around and what eventually got pushed out and NREGA came in.
#
But the idea at any rate of food for work and kind of programs and try and really understand
#
what level of government should perform what level of function. I mean, in a sense,
#
part of the governance and accountability framework was a recognition that there were
#
all these layers of bureaucracy that had been built in. And in these layers of bureaucracy,
#
each one didn't quite know exactly what it was supposed to do. And as all bureaucracies also
#
have their own political economy and it's essentially a power dynamic. Each one was
#
trying to do what the other level of the system was trying to do, which was creating a sort of
#
spaghetti in there. And that was sort of leaving the citizen outside going, now what am I supposed
#
to do? This is just something that I take my fork and I keep twirling around, but it's not
#
really sitting in my fork and I take it up to my mouth and everything falls down. So something is
#
off. So really it was a very systematic exercise around trying to understand what actually is a
#
fundamental foundational question of governance. What level of government should be performing?
#
What level of function? And a compliment to that is in order to be able to perform that level of
#
function, what are the resources, financial, human capability resources that need to be given at that
#
level of government for the government to operate to perform that level of function? So it sort of
#
opened out a new world for me as we were thinking about all these like really lofty questions of
#
voice and citizenship and et cetera. There's also this very prosaic, quotidian, but foundational
#
question. How can government respond if at the level at which claims are being made on it,
#
it simply doesn't have the power and capability to do so. And that again has stayed with me all
#
through my explorations with the Indian state. So we were basically slicing and dicing with the
#
precision of an economist these sectors to try and understand how they operate at the grassroots
#
and then thinking through using first principles of public finance and accountability exactly how
#
to allocate functions at the right level. And that was just a phenomenally interesting experience,
#
both theoretically to actually take an analytical idea and start parsing through it and build the
#
frameworks within which understanding first principles and then mapping first principles
#
to real world of state functioning. And then I was tasked with working with the team that was
#
going to different levels of government from the panchayats to the municipalities to try and
#
actually understand what they actually do. So what are the kinds of functions, what are the kinds of
#
roles that they're given and then looking at what the policy was saying. So it sort of opened up
#
this whole new world around, which one had heard of about because it's such a standard trope,
#
policy is made in some AC room and implementation is somewhere else and outcomes, the whole narrative
#
of outcomes had also sort of entered the lexicon of how we were talking about the Indian state,
#
particularly when it came to its core public goods functions. And you would hear this constantly,
#
often either from the perspective of abandonment. So it just can't be done. So why do we have to
#
think about the state doing education? This should be about markets or on the other hand,
#
it has to be done and the state will do it and we will not engage or debate or dialogue with
#
what is the way to do it. And so, you know, put more money in here, even if the state can't absorb
#
and spend all of this money. So there were these different discourses of the state that were also
#
emerging at this point. So, I mean, I was not making sense of all these different worlds. I
#
was just doing a very simple exercise, which opened up all of these debates and dial and
#
discussions. But it also made me learn how to think analytically, how to use different disciplines to
#
acquire knowledge and then place them together within a normative framework. Because if you
#
don't have that normative framework, you can go all over the place. And the core thing that
#
Lant and Jeff really taught me, which was, you can't get so obsessed just with crafting
#
the sculpture. You have to ask the big question of what you're sculpting.
#
You know, so when you are thinking about when the question was about India's education system,
#
ask the big question. Why is it that we have been able to build schools and children are not
#
learning? Don't get stuck at saying we need to build more schools. You know, don't be afraid of
#
asking that question, even though the orthodoxy will not allow you to engage in that dialogue.
#
So that's sort of, you know, and I like that because I was always a little bit unsure of
#
which orthodoxy I was going to fit in. And so here I was being encouraged to just think about
#
frameworks, build out the clouds and build out the graphs as you see them and then step back from
#
them and try and position them within this normative framework that you want to understand
#
the world in. And then there were these little tools, you know, I was helping Lant with this
#
development policy review, which is a sort of big World Bank document, helping meaning I was just
#
the RA. But I learned a lot about mentorship from that, in that he would say, so here are these
#
things, this is the framework, you know, why don't you write it? And then I would be like,
#
oh, God, this like, you know, and he, this is a big guy, and everybody knows about him. And he's
#
asking me to write something, and I'm going to do this really badly. And, but, you know, he's
#
saying, write it, so I better do it. So I diligently go and do it and give it my best. But, you know,
#
to have that freedom that, you know, you're just told, like, here's the framework, I want to see
#
what you can produce, and then I'll work with you and help you improve it. But, you know, just go
#
do it show, build the confidence in yourself. I think that that from personally really helped
#
me, it taught me how to be a researcher, it taught me how to read, it taught me how to write in ways
#
that were linked, you know, in making my philosophy training, of course, helped me make logical
#
arguments. Although, you know, my husband will say my arguments are always illogical, but that's
#
because I'm always right, and he's always wrong. But anyway, the, but, you know, also to be able
#
to have the precision that policy analysis needs, which is to really be able to pass through to get
#
to the heart of what is the core objective of that policy. And then, and then build up from there
#
to see how does that objective actually ultimately get shaped within the institutional design
#
to give you the kind of outcomes you have. All along, looking at the empirics, so looking at
#
the data to see whether the data is actually making sense with, you know, how the story of
#
implementation is unfolding. And that just has stayed with me always. Lots to double click on.
#
And I'll start with perhaps a naive question about what you described as a shift in thinking
#
from a Maibab mentality to a citizenship mentality. And when I actually look at India, even today,
#
I feel that most people still think of themselves as subjects of the state and not really citizens.
#
I mean, you know, if you look at a lot of the popular agitations around the country,
#
you know, therefore more reservations for a particular caste or a particular community
#
or whatever. A standard trope of many local elections has been farm loan waivers. It's like,
#
and they're useful as an anesthetic, but obviously they're not solving the problem in any core
#
fundamental way. But again, that's, it's just become a standard sort of trope that, hey,
#
Maibab Sarkar and it'll forgive our loans. And similarly, a lot of analysis about the 2019
#
elections was that it wasn't just a cult of Modi that won the BJP that general election,
#
but they were actually doing improved welfare delivery in the Hindi heartland. And that
#
really helped. And again, pointing to the fact that it is a Maibab state that people are sort
#
of looking at. And those of us who speak about citizenship and all that, you know, either we are
#
sort of more elite circles, though the CAA protest, which was so wonderful, would seem to
#
give a lie to that. Is that framing aspirational when you talk about going from Maibab to citizenship?
#
Is that then an aspirational framing, which people within the field are doing to say that this is
#
how we should make the state act and this is how we should make people demand,
#
whatever the demand from the state, or have there also been signs of that actually happening on the
#
ground where people are demanding their rights as citizens and not asking for hands out, you know,
#
as a particular interest group and so on and so forth. So what are your experiences in that regard?
#
And is it just an aspirational framing done by people like us? Or on the ground also, do you
#
find a subtle kind of change happening? No, it's a work in progress, right? It is aspirational.
#
There's no argument there. But in a way, the imagination of the modern nation state was an
#
aspirational imagination, right? And actually, you know, when I think about the terms of the social
#
contract, actually, in a way, it's almost like the aspiration enchanted us as a citizenry with this
#
idea of what the modern nation state was going to deliver in that magical moment of independence.
#
And over time, the state has always disappointed us so deeply that we've actually become completely
#
disenchanted. I mean, it's a simplistic way of putting it. But I do think that as a consequence,
#
what we really are asking aspirationally of the state is very, very little. I mean,
#
look at our conversation about governance. It's like dbt se khate me shayad mera paisa aa raha hai.
#
Shayad I'm saying because abhi data nahi hai at a national scale, but perhaps let's for the sake
#
of argument say it's more efficient than in the old days when money was being handed out by the
#
sarpanch. So governance is good. Are you kidding me? Is that what we should expect of our state?
#
You know, we perhaps we laid on too many aspirations on this. I've been thinking
#
about this a lot, you know, as we see the transformations and the big questions of
#
the nature of Indian democracy, the nature of Indian state, how we think about, you know,
#
the prosaic party politics, but how we also think about the larger ideological battles
#
that that, you know, we are living through, we are in that battlefield in some senses.
#
And I often wonder whether perhaps the terms of the constitution laid on too much expectation
#
of social change on the state, that law and the arms of the state would collectively be able to
#
sort of, you know, literally bring us out from the evils of society and that in a way we never
#
went through because of our history of colonialism and also the independence movement debated many
#
of these elements, you know, but through the 1930s, 1920s, 30s and 40s in particular,
#
you know, we didn't have this conversation in a deep way with ourselves as a society.
#
We had this conversation through our imagination of what the modern nation state would look like
#
through the vision of founding fathers largely and a few founding mothers. And the expectation
#
was that this the modern nation state will facilitate that social conversation and democracy
#
would enable and empower that conversation. I wonder whether that was expecting too much,
#
that in effect, actually, the instrument of the state cannot bring about deep social change
#
of this nature. And that has to emerge through a dialogue with society. But here's the irony,
#
I think that the space for that dialogue with society comes through democracy. I mean,
#
we weren't building a nation state in a vacuum. And that's, to me, the big, you know, we are
#
constantly debating the civilizational question of the Indian, you know, in the end, there was
#
a moment and we were not building a modern nation state out of a vacuum, but the constitutional
#
framework provided a moment within which we framed our expectations of state and we framed the terms
#
of our social contract. And that is the big sort of juncture of what is India today, which shaped
#
what is India today. And the state's own ability to be responsive to it because it didn't go far
#
enough, perhaps, because democracy also placed political compromises on the state very quickly,
#
very, very early on. The entire attempt at land reform is a really good example precisely of that,
#
the kind of compromises that democracy is intertwined, of course, with the pursuit of
#
political power, which places compromises on what the state should and shouldn't do. Very quickly
#
started showing the limits of what the state can achieve. But on the other hand, if we didn't have
#
democracy and if it didn't come with arms of the state that were able to, you know, much of what
#
India has achieved, we just simply wouldn't have. So I don't know if there was ever an alternative.
#
It would always be messy. It would always be disappointing. And to me, that is why the
#
aspirational conversation on citizenship matters so much. Because if we don't constantly push that
#
imagination, we will always remain caught in this. Some welfare benefit came, one cylinder showed up,
#
some cash showed up, some money came, I built my house, one toilet was built, remains the expectation
#
of the state. And I don't think it's just romantic activism, although it's often dismissed as that.
#
But to me, what was so powerful about the social movements that were pursuing the building blocks
#
of a welfare state within a framework of rights was that it actually also was placing duty on
#
citizens. So it is not that the state is going to give this to you, you have to place claims on the
#
state. And that means that there is a very fundamental tactile way in which the social
#
contract was to be framed, which is necessary, I think, in the context where democracy was sort
#
of built from the top down. And elements of democracy, like the power of voting, have become
#
so deeply ingrained in society. I mean, look at our politics of today, we disregard electoral
#
outcomes very quickly. And it's across political parties, although perhaps more sharply in one
#
of the present day, where this sort of buying up of elected representatives is such a common
#
feature. You see it even in panchayat elections. Gram panchayat elections are meant to be
#
apolitical non-party elections, but of course there's party affiliation. You see mass movement
#
across parties, depending on whoever is in power in the given day. So in a way, while there's
#
complete social disregard for the outcomes of democracy in its most fundamental way, the act
#
of voting is so core to what defines our understanding of citizenship. It's something
#
that you just cannot, I don't think you can ever take that away from the Indian citizen. We all
#
line up for hours and hours. I mean, you know, the data of course tells you that poor India,
#
the poorest in India vote most frequently, but there is something so magical about standing in
#
with everybody together. All the women, because I stand in the ladies line with all the women
#
from across classes, we're all standing there waiting, whether it's a municipal election or
#
a national election, it's so core to who we are. And yet it gets disregarded. So perhaps in that,
#
the whole story of citizenship actually is something that we need to nurture in that space
#
outside of elections. And that shapes our expectations of the state. And the way I think
#
about this, you know, you're right that like, you know, we are still beholden to the state. We still
#
expect the state will come and, you know, be that my bar. But perhaps that sense of beholdency and
#
patronage or that acceptance of patronage comes from the fact that somewhere along the way,
#
we also lost our aspirations of what the state can do. And so we will take what we get.
#
And then we limit, I mean, as an elite populace, I find it really a bit depressing and disheartening
#
that we now talk about governance in this way. So yes, of course, delivery is at the heart of
#
governance. But, you know, what are the terms of that delivery? Like, elite drawing rooms are full
#
of debates and dialogues and conversations about these great expectations that have been failed of
#
our politicians. So as elites, we are asking a lot of our state, even though we are buying out
#
all public services through the market anyway. Yet when it comes to the rest of the country,
#
we are quite okay saying, oh, governance has improved because we managed to, you know,
#
get some cash into somebody's bank account. Hell, there's a lot more to governance than that.
#
There's a lot more to the experience of citizenship. And that's what we should be debating.
#
So we'll talk a lot more about governance in the state. But before
#
that, I wanted to sort of double click on, you know, what you said about the
#
founding of the nation state is also being a similar kind of aspirational moment.
#
And I have a couple of comments leading to a question. And one, it strikes me that that
#
founding was really, it was an aspirational moment for the elites who framed our constitution and
#
designed the Indian state who weren't actually elected. I mean, this was pre democracy. And
#
that founding moment, which we have normalized and we take for granted. And of course, we celebrate
#
this nation state, both you and I love, both you and I love India. But that founding moment
#
gives me a lot of disquiet because if you look at how Siddharth Patel and VP Menon helped put
#
this nation together, bringing all these different princely states using either coercion or promises
#
that were later broken, it seems almost to me to be like an act of fast track colonization.
#
You know, much as we speak about the progressive ideals of our, you know, of our pioneering early
#
leaders, you know, this also speaks of nationalism, if not imperialism itself, the way the nation
#
state was brought together. But that's just an aside. My question is also more about that
#
this aspirational by the elites and it's a high minded aspiration to build a particular kind of
#
society with much more equality without the original sin of caste and, you know, much more
#
equitable and so on. I feel that the end was great, but the means were flawed in terms of using the
#
coercive power of the state as a means to do this. And what that did was that it shifted the balance
#
between state and society firmly towards the state. There was a centralizing impulse, a lot of power
#
lay in the state, especially as for, you know, decades till the nineties, you know, the voluntary
#
action within society that's expressed through markets was never allowed to come into being.
#
And given all of that, A, it's perfectly natural that we should have this Maibab mentality because,
#
hey, what else could we have? We've lived with this for decades. And that also seems to me then
#
that outside of elite drawing rooms, as you said, rethinking the state becomes a problem for two
#
reasons. And those are that it is ossified, it is ossified both in a sense of what it is
#
with the design and incentive set in place and incredibly hard to change within the political
#
economy. And it is also ossified in the imagination of the people at large, where we have kind of
#
given up on it. Or if we look at it, we look at it for handouts or as a particular interest
#
groups taking a claim, but not really thinking of the fundamental nature of it. And, you know,
#
Subashish Bhadra wrote this book called Cage Tiger about India. And one of the key insights in that
#
book is taking a look back in history and pointing out how each nation state was founded at a
#
particular point in time and was essentially shaped by the circumstances of that founding.
#
So you have, you know, such an incredible constitution in America, which, you know,
#
we keep looking at as an example, especially in the way that they protect free speech and we don't.
#
But it came out of that tumult of protesting against the taxation of the British and therefore,
#
you know, the way the states came together. So it's much more federal than we are, for example.
#
And there is this deep cultural quality of individual freedom that has remained through
#
that. In our case is very different. I agree with you that, you know, our founding fathers,
#
or one can use that term founding fathers and mothers, or our early politicians as it were,
#
could not have done anything different. The country was falling apart. We didn't know if
#
the central center would hold. It is natural to centralize power. You know, it is natural
#
for someone like Ambedkar to say that we don't want it to be too decentralized. Because if you
#
look at villages, there is cesspit of, you know, prejudice and caste and all of those things. So
#
let us centralize. So all of those impulses are completely natural, even Nehru's economic impulses,
#
which were so disastrous for us in hindsight. But at the moment, they were quite the fashion
#
of the day. And what else could the man have done? So I am not criticizing them, but I am saying that
#
in a sense, therefore, nation states, whether it is America, whether it is us, whether it is other
#
nation states, become products of a set of accidental circumstances. That's how the world
#
was at that time. Now you have the constitution. Now you have the state. And it feels like it's an
#
almost impossible task to change it. And those who try to change it, you know, are necessarily
#
working on the margins on small increments, which do make a big difference at scale.
#
But fundamentally, you can't really do anything about the beast. So again, you know, from an
#
as an armchair commentator, this is my view from a distance. And this is my lament from a distance,
#
as it were. And I always think I'm perhaps being a little too pessimistic. And you're much closer
#
to the beast. And you worked with it in different ways. How would you respond to this view?
#
Oh, man, some days I feel really pessimistic. I am not that. I'm an eternal pessimist. And
#
occasionally there'll be some, you know, little sparks of optimism. You're absolutely right. I
#
don't disagree with any of what you have said. But I also think that, so look, had it not been
#
for the centralizing impulse, the ability to accommodate, you know, just simply would not
#
have existed. Right. So it's just like, I mean, the Indian state is just all these contradictions
#
coming together. It's centralization that enables federalism. And then an accommodation of all
#
forms of identity with all kinds of like quirky compromises. There is a lot of coercion that in
#
bringing together what is the modern nation state and in some ways, excessive, the excessive powers
#
that have been given to the state to legitimize the state itself. And at the same time, there's
#
all these little sites of accommodation that are slowly, slowly opening up or that sort of become
#
core to the identity of the nation. There are deep challenges, the cesspools of sin, as you say,
#
that exist that need to be, you know, engaged with, and that society needs to find its own form of,
#
a newer form of organization that is embedded in these principles of equality and justice and
#
fairness. And what is the way of doing it, but by creating instruments from the outside that would
#
enable all of these changes. And yet at the same time, if society has not fully bought into these
#
changes, it will find its own way of distorting. And in so much of the Indians, the story of the
#
Indian state is about these precisely these distortions that democracy is pricing open spaces,
#
but democracy also creates these contradictions of power politics that make you compromise on all
#
kinds of principles of democracy. But if we didn't have that, we wouldn't have these sites
#
of empowerment that, you know, in more ways than one, you sort of end up taking two steps forward,
#
three steps back, that the economy is so tied to the state that it's not able to achieve its
#
potential that essentially makes the state the only site of empowerment. And so democracy opens
#
you up to new opportunities, but all those opportunities are basically looking to grab
#
the state because there is nothing, there's no other form of social mobility. There's no other
#
form of freedom. There's no other form of access to power and expression of power in a deeply
#
hierarchical society where, you know, the psychological consequences of caste are so
#
significant on stripping dignity that, you know, you access power to be able to reclaim that dignity
#
often by dispensing power in exactly the same way. So we're living with all of these contradictions.
#
That's why I think I was, I am still, I guess, seduced by this idea of keeping that,
#
finding ways to keep this conversation of citizenship alive, because ultimately that's
#
the only way that we will find, that we will be able to find a settlement out of all of these
#
contradictions. And no society will ever find perfect settlements. Absolutely not.
#
I don't see any other way because what, you know, and we get exhausted by it. That's why we get so
#
quickly disenchanted. That's why we as a nation are so disenchanted with the state that we
#
expect it to perform badly. We expect it to be corrupt. We expect it to be inefficient. We
#
expect it to be apathetic. We may want to be it because that gives us power, but we expect it to
#
behave in a way that is completely contradictory to the goals and aspirations that give it
#
legitimacy and power in the first place. At the same time, we are also quite disenchanted with
#
democracy, you know, but yet we keep going to vote. Look at how we as, it's not just a drawing
#
room conversation of a disaffection with what politicians can do across, you know, from
#
the topmost echelons of economic and social power to, you know, to the real world where
#
the rest of us live or, you know, you see a disenchantment with the ability of the
#
people's expectations of what the politics, such a normal thing that we all say it's so
#
embedded in our imaginations of the state. And yet, you know, we keep giving more and
#
more opportunity in the hope that it's so, you know, that is why I feel like the only way out
#
of these contradictions is to remind ourselves that we are actually very young as a nation,
#
that the project of democracy was in fact so audacious in some ways and so aspirational.
#
And despite it, you know, despite all odds, we've kind of held on to it and we've distorted it and
#
messed it up and done all sorts of things with it that would make that often make a mockery of the
#
core principle of democracy, but it's there. And so these are grounds of citizenship, you know,
#
I mean, these are grounds of practice of what it means to then become democratic citizens because
#
that idea of being democratic citizens was not the core organizational principle of our society.
#
It was something that we have adopted and we've not fully given up. We may flirt with
#
authoritarianism all the time. We may even expect that those in power that quote unquote rule over
#
us will be this way. So we don't really see so much social anger against, you know, excessive
#
uses of the powers of the state, yet we've not fully given up hope because we also do keep pushing.
#
So I feel like for me personally, the project of the state is a project of trying to,
#
you know, you should never be enchanted by the state because that's a recipe for disaster.
#
But at least believing that there's possibilities of what the state can do, because those are the
#
only ways in which we will be able to actually build a genuinely democratic society where
#
core, I mean, I firmly believe that, you know, there is a core element of tolerance that is
#
also lives in this very contradictory way within our extremely intolerant society.
#
What India can actually achieve is in being able to nurture that that kernel of tolerance that we
#
have. And when we do it, we do it really beautifully. It is quite amazing to think that, you know, in the
#
end, like, look at this country. You know, we can be from Chandigarh and Calcutta, we can be from
#
Amritsar and Tanjore, and we can be talking to each other in all ways and forms. There is no other
#
part of the world that has that. And there's a beauty in that. There's an ability to be
#
genuinely whole in that that makes me feel very proud of being me. And I think that, especially
#
when I was studying in England, and there were so many European students around me, that's when I
#
really began to be alive to, you know, there's all these multiple languages, and I don't speak any of
#
them. But nonetheless, you know, I can claim to be a Hindi speaker, and I can really understand a
#
little bit of Tamil just a bit. And thanks to my nani, I learned a lot of the choices of abusers in
#
Punjabi. And that all becomes a whole. And it makes me, it just gives me all these explanations,
#
whereas, you know, at most, my Swedish friend will know English and a little bit of French.
#
And then there's, you know, this sort of a very, you know, that your ethnicity defines your sense
#
of nationality is very different to what we are as Indians. Yeah, in an early episode, I did with JP
#
Narayan. At one point, I was on my usual negative pessimistic lament about how India is so illiberal
#
and look at gender, look at caste. And JP very correctly cautioned me and said the opposite is
#
also true, which is of course a cliche, but the opposite is also true in the sense that in many of
#
our lived realities, if you look at our food, our clothing, and so on and so forth, we are also
#
deeply liberal, we are a mix of, you know, influences from all across the elegant churidar
#
kurtas of our prime minister, of course, have an Islamic origin, you know, so much of the language
#
that he speaks, he may not realize it, you know, comes from elsewhere. So there is a lived reality
#
there that is also, you know, a beautiful meld of all that is good about the world. And that's a
#
beautiful way to define ourselves. Before we, you know, go into our break, a question about,
#
you know, a phrase you used earlier, where you spoke about how your years in the World Bank and,
#
you know, dealing with people like Lant and Jeff Ammer helped you develop a normative framework.
#
And I want to double click on that and ask you precisely about what that normative framework was,
#
what were the descriptive frameworks or ways of looking at the world that got you in the sense,
#
before you think about how the world ought to be and how we ought to get there, you also think
#
about how the world is and kind of figure that out first. So I'm gonna ask you to take me on a
#
journey to defining your normative framework in concrete specific terms and telling me about how
#
you got there. So I'll do the other way around. Sure, let's do the other way around.
#
So my starting point was precisely how do we as a society build out opportunity
#
in a more equitable way, as in there will always be distances of all kinds,
#
but what is a facilitative role that society can play that allows you to
#
overcome, maybe overcome is not the word, but allows you to not just be defined by certain
#
types of categories, categories of gender, categories of religion, categories of
#
economic well-being. And what precisely are the roots to that? And, you know, we've talked so
#
much about it, so we don't need to cover all ground. But, you know, again, I felt that the
#
state plays a central role in that. And the question really was, where does the role of
#
the state begin and end at one level? But also what is it about the state that keeps failing
#
that we are not able to do these things effectively? So, you know, the fact that you
#
walk into a school and there's no teacher, the fact that you go to the health center and,
#
boy, you'll fall ill just by breathing. The fact that, you know, there was always these stories of
#
money is not reaching, of, you know, which used to be dismissed very much as corruption,
#
but it seemed like there were some other things going on, that the panchayat didn't quite know
#
what it was supposed to do. You know, there were all, what I was witnessing was a lot of
#
state failure. And I guess for me, the question was to try and understand beyond the tropes of
#
state is corrupt, state is inefficient. What is it about the state that allows it to fail
#
repeatedly, constantly, all the time, and trying to get away from the easy thing,
#
which I thought was easy, which was to just say state needs to get out of the way. And so where,
#
and that was my frame of mind as I walked into this opportunity at the World Bank. And
#
suddenly we were talking about the state, but we were not talking about the state as a monolith.
#
We were breaking it down into all its multiple entities. What is it that makes up the state? So
#
there was, you know, thinking about the elite structure of the state, the politician, the
#
policymaker, that really, when you're sitting at the World Bank, you encounter a lot of, but also
#
sort of breaking it down to its component parts. How does a policy start actually converting itself
#
into a design, into sets of rules, into frameworks of implementation? How does the, you know, the role
#
of public finance structures coming into that? And then all of that collectively and cumulatively
#
shaping the dynamic of the citizen engagement with the state. And in that we were asking very
#
complex questions about principal-agent relations, about how do you think about, you know, the long
#
route of government that builds up on a series of relationships between the citizen, the politician,
#
and the bureaucrat, to the direct engagements with the bureaucrat and the citizen. And we were
#
observing, you know, all the time how all of these different pieces were beginning to come
#
together. And I think what I was able to do from all of this was to pull it all together into being
#
able to understand how to locate the state within this framework of state-society market.
#
And also within that build out a better understanding of what the core organizational
#
principles of social life are, and how they engage with institutions. So that you need to
#
understand these dynamics of state-society interactions became a key element of how to
#
build out an analytical framework. That we need to look very closely at principal-agent relations,
#
but what I think I would keep pushing back on is that there is a broader context within which
#
these relationships get shaped. And for that you need to understand better the social structures
#
within which these relationships are embedded. That to be able to then, whilst looking at the
#
component parts of the state, be also able to build out this broader understanding of core
#
first principles that shape the state. So why do first principles of accountability matter?
#
Because that's at the heart of what essentially shapes the expectations and the terms of the
#
social contract. And then the institutional life emerges within that. So if you don't start with
#
that premise, you know, you're talking about these institutions just as independent entities,
#
but they're embedded in this larger context. So it also has meant that one always wants to go back,
#
I feel like I always want to go back to say, are we asking the right question? Are we asking,
#
are we looking at it in terms of the right framework and locating it within this dynamic,
#
this complex dynamic of political economy and markets, and then trying to unpack it.
#
Really eventually with the purpose of better understanding why and how the state can deliver
#
in a more equitable way so that there is equal opportunity.
#
So is this normative framework then an approach more than a particular vision of how the government
#
should act or how you can get them to act that way? Yeah, I would say. I don't think I am wedded to
#
any particular way, but I'm wedded to a set of norms. And it's about the interaction of those
#
norms which will give you the kind of outcomes you're seeking. So I don't think, you know,
#
I don't think I necessarily want to lock myself into saying, for example, vouchers in education
#
are a bad thing. Hell, I went to a private school. I mean, I send my children to a private school.
#
But I also firmly believe that it is core to the social contract that the state be able to provide
#
the best quality education to all its citizens. And then it is for citizens to make choices of
#
where and how they want to, you know, and after all, the choices of whether you want to seek
#
public goods through market or through the state are also very much deeply embedded in larger social
#
contexts, you know. And it's like I spend a lot of time thinking about primary education and,
#
you know, the kinds of choices that we make it while state failure is one of the reasons why
#
most Indian parents for a rich are putting their children into private schools. There's also a lot
#
of social signaling that is built into it. So it's about the social context in which these choices
#
are being made. And those are also shaping markets. So it's that dialectic that really
#
I get excited about. And also for me, from a policy point of view, too, what you really need
#
to ask yourself as a policymaker is what is the logical sort of thread through which this choice
#
I'm making is going to take me? You know, it is we get caught a lot in, you know, wanting to make
#
compromises. We'll do this, this, this, and this, and then you'll get this medley of everything.
#
But actually, you really have to ask if I'm adopting design principle A, where is that design
#
principle going to lead me to in terms of the end outcome within this? So how are all these
#
different signals going to interact with each other to give me that outcome? We don't think
#
about that enough. Can you give me a concrete example of that? That would be fun, where you
#
can talk about a particular issue. And one approach could be to just make all these Jogaru
#
quick fixes and band-aids along the way. But if you start with design principles, and you think
#
about how they would interact with how, with the context of the real world and the real world
#
limitations that exist, you know, can you give me just two? Okay, so, so let's take the right to
#
education. Okay. Embedded in the right to education, which by the way, is a law I don't like,
#
but anyway, so there were different normative perspectives of what a school system should do
#
that were all coming together that resulted in the policy decision of the EW, 25% EWS,
#
which was embedded into the right to education. At one level was the idea that there was this
#
grand principle of equitable opportunity for equitable school system opportunity for all.
#
The left believed in this idea of, you know, equal opportunity and, you know, private markets
#
having to play a very central role in contributing. So therefore, EWS is an important way in which
#
the state could guide the market in a particular way. The right loved it because it was the
#
beginning of vouchers. So you get a little bit of this both, but nobody was willing to give up
#
on the idea of what or nobody was willing to reimagine in this context, what the public
#
school system would be like. So you are going to invest in public schools, government schools.
#
You're also going to give this EWS quota, which essentially was going to operate like this funny
#
compromise between left and right. It's effectively a voucher system. Maybe you're going to put some
#
money into that also. And essentially you never actually thought through what is the education
#
system you're building. While the broad principle exists, the normative frame is there, there are
#
these multiple compromises you are making. Everybody is going to be happy. So it was this
#
unique thing, right? Like everybody, those who were pushing for vouchers were like, yay,
#
this is the beginning of something. Those who were arguing for equitable school systems and
#
private school systems can't be so elitist in that it completely blocks off a whole
#
part of society. Everybody was happy that, okay, this is a way of achieving that.
#
And then there's this big behemoth of the public education system that we were also not giving up
#
on that sitting over there. There's only limited resources that you have. So you have to at some
#
point make a hard choice. Either I'm going towards pathway X or I'm going towards pathway Y.
#
And then I'm going to wholeheartedly invest in that. You can't have all three systems playing
#
around. So what have we got? We've got this weird medley of things where you build out
#
disincentives in the system for private schools to actually sensibly implement the EWS. You build
#
disincentives in the system for public, for government schools to sensibly invest in their
#
school's effect beyond the inputs that you were paying for. And your education system is kind of
#
sitting between all of these things saying, you know, now we've all started saying quality
#
like a mantra. So we keep talking about it, but we never really thought carefully what is the
#
outcome that you are going to get when you start entering into the market and introducing these
#
vouchers in the market while you also were investing in the public system. So you didn't
#
have all your resources invested in one thing, nor were you building out a social consensus around
#
that one thing. And you still got your public schools going. You don't have enough money to
#
put it in there. You're not also billing. After all, anybody who can is still going back to the
#
private school saying EWS quota. So where is the social consensus that needs to be built out to
#
ensure that the government school system is actually going to be genuinely accountable?
#
So, you know, the state is trying to do too many different things, striking easy compromises,
#
because these are quick and easy and everybody gets happy. But it doesn't think through from
#
beginning to end what its logical outcome of each of these pieces of this policy that it is
#
designing are going to look like. And we are now obsessing about EVs as the answer to all the,
#
you know, the Delhi pollution too, apart from big questions of climate change and energy
#
transitions. But we are not going to ask ourselves the question of what kind of public
#
transportation systems make sense as we are rapidly urbanizing and becoming bigger, right?
#
We're not going to ask, and you can't ask the question about what kind of public
#
transportation systems you need without asking what is or thinking through what in fact is the
#
urbanization trajectory that we want to facilitate and enable and what is the kind of urban
#
infrastructure we want to build in which people... So what is your city for? Is your city for
#
people who are going to come and go as a working population, the circular migrant,
#
or is your city for people that are going to come and stay and work? Then you need a very
#
different kind of infrastructure. What kind of housing you will build? Where are you going to
#
create the workspaces? Then you start thinking about what kind of transportation you want and
#
in that, what type of car you have, whether it's a hybrid and EV, petrol or diesel,
#
is the third, fourth, fifth question. But our policy impetus is to first ask,
#
oh my God, there's a lot of pollution, climate change is becoming a big thing. Now we're all
#
talking about energy transitions. Let's start now incentivizing EVs. And you'll get the EVs,
#
but you'll still have more cars on the road than you can accommodate, which you don't need. And it
#
doesn't solve any of the big policy questions that you were trying to resolve. These are both
#
sensational examples and they're so good. And I actually think like what happened... And the
#
RTE is a horrible law. I've had episodes on education with Kartik Muralidharan and all,
#
I'll link them from the show notes. But I think what happened there is both the right and the left
#
got it completely wrong. They were granted one little dogmatic point of principle that they
#
stated in whatever it was. And it's easy for them to feel good and accept that for tribalistic
#
reasons. But if you just take a step back and think about what you're really aiming for,
#
nobody got any closer to that. And I would really believe that in the end, all of us have the same
#
aim, which is better education and everyone's... But you know, Amit, on that, I think there's
#
another part, it goes back to so much of what we've been talking about this, how we think about the
#
state, the story of the terms of the social contracts, citizenship versus MAIBA, normative
#
frameworks of the state. It's also... If you look at... We've done a little bit of this work
#
at CPR and my colleague Priyadarshini did a really nice series of interviews with people around
#
education reform from the 70s onward. And actually the genesis of that project was asking the
#
central political economy question, under what conditions did the political economy open space
#
for education reform or why not? And when we were in conversation, actually, Lant was then heading
#
up this group called RISE that was doing a series of studies on education reform. RISE,
#
I forgot exactly what it stands for, but I'll give you links to some of this so you can put it
#
so the full research and systems of education, I think. But when we started debating this question
#
and thinking through what a research project around it could look like, the one conclusion
#
we all came to was actually there's very little... In the formal political space, there was almost no
#
political ownership of education reform, even from the Kothari Commission onward. There've been
#
these moments where big commissions show up and then they do these things and each commission
#
starts off with zero sense of policy history, so it will arrive at a problem and say, I'm the first
#
one to discover that schools exist and children don't learn. But the complete absence of a
#
education as a core political agenda, the complete abdication of the political class around this
#
question basically meant that, in a way, it opened up space for different parts of civil society,
#
both elite and not, to present their own views of the world on what an education system should
#
look like. And that's a really healthy thing. That is what societies, democratic societies,
#
should be about and how different perspectives come to the political table. But ultimately,
#
good politics is about striking good political compromises and then having political ownership.
#
In the absence of that, it's this jostling of ideas that doesn't actually then build in
#
core ownership. And so you end up with this kind of very broken, confused policy,
#
which further disenchants all of us. So it's like, okay, if the state can't do it, let it not do it,
#
I will go and find a different way to get the education that I want. Because as a society,
#
we are very committed to getting educated. In the early 1990s or mid 1990s, when I first started
#
exploring these NGO development type conversations, there always used to be this, you know,
#
India needs to educate itself, but there's awareness needs to be in this very patronizing
#
way. I hate the term awareness and behavior change, but this patronizing idea that the
#
vast majority of the Indian population doesn't want to educate its children was very dominant
#
in how our thinking on education and policy emerged. And it's actually the global development
#
framing of this. But, you know, we stopped talking about that. Everybody wants to educate.
#
The challenge of bringing the children to school, there may be dropouts, there may be
#
attendance issues, all sorts of implementation challenges. But the idea that you need to raise,
#
quote unquote, awareness of parents to send their children to school, even for girl children,
#
which apparently was the last mile that we had to cross. I mean, you know, that's just accepted.
#
Everybody wants education. Question is, where will I get the best education from my child? And what
#
are the factors that contribute to the decisions I make as a parent about what that education should
#
look like? The elites really can be so patronizing. Awareness, education, and then you'll have elites
#
talking about how the population is a problem. And you are also part of the population.
#
And it isn't even a problem, really. I'm reminded by everything, especially the example of
#
more EVs, like you said, of this great line I remember, and I'm quoting him with permission,
#
Rajesh Jain was speaking about the Prime Minister's office. And he said, they think like day traders,
#
not Warren Buffet. And I think that's exactly the problem, that you're thinking of the short term,
#
you're thinking of some narrow aspect of the problem. But we need people who can take a step
#
back and think in a more holistic way. And perhaps we need the incentives which force
#
people to do that. And I don't know where they are. Let's take a break. After the break,
#
we'll come back and talk more about it. Have you always wanted to be a writer,
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Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with Yamini. I hear about many things
#
about her interesting life and policy and fixing governance and the Indian state and
#
so on. And just in the break, I was sort of telling her about how Gaurav,
#
who owns his studio and edits my show, has a warren in his home and house cars where there
#
are pet civets and he feeds them coffee beans and they shit it out and then he harvests that. And
#
that's why the coffee today is so good. And sadly, you know, Yamini is not gullible enough to
#
kind of believe that. But before we get to weightier sort of subjects, I noticed that,
#
you know, in a recent column, I think it was you wrote about the hard and you took kind of lessons
#
of the state from dad and so on and so forth. And one typically, like whenever I encounter
#
anything by you, whether it's a talk you've given or whether it's an article you've written, it's
#
like, you know, it's damn serious. And in person, you're kind of full of energy and talking about
#
other things also. So tell me a little bit about what you do to unwind, what you do to chill and
#
relax and all that. And we'll get to the serious stuff because we do have to save the nation.
#
But before we save the nation, you know, what do we do for time pass?
#
You know, I have the silliest taste in TV shows. I watch everything. It's mostly utter rubbish.
#
And one of the funnest things I do with some of my girlfriends is to exchange notes on
#
which are the silliest shows we've watched and the joy that gives. So at one point,
#
one of my closest friends was obsessing about Korean soap operas. So I watched Crash Course
#
in Romance and loved it, like hours were spent just staring at it. So I do tend to waste
#
a fair amount of my time. And this OTT platforms have really been the end of anything,
#
because at least, you know, back in the old days, you'd have to find a channel, then you'd have to
#
fight with everybody to decide what you wanted to watch. And there would be some compromise and
#
and then it would be done in small spurts. But between Netflix Prime, Hotstar and whatever else
#
is available, there's enough opportunity to binge. So I think I'm binging more than I should,
#
which is how the hard article came out. But you know, I enjoy spending time with my friends.
#
And that's always a source of great joy and fun. And then I have two children.
#
My idea of relaxation is to tell them all the things that they've done wrong, which is
#
everything. Their idea of relaxation is to be cocky back with me. And so we have this
#
constant interaction. But they're at a really fun age. And so this is, you know, before they get into
#
fully preteen and they don't want to see their parents and they're no longer infants. So there's
#
a lot of things we can do together. It's fun to rediscover so much of like your city, rediscover
#
places you've gone to with them because they're observing things in new ways. And it kind of
#
forces me to relearn a lot of things. So that's really one of the funnest things. The nicest good
#
phase of parenting before they start like becoming teenage and angsty and I'm going to
#
have to start chasing them to study and do well in their exams. So yeah, that's so yes. But my
#
vice these days is OTT platforms and a nice gin. I like nice gins too. I'm not so sure about OTT
#
platforms. I wish I had more time. You know, when I think of myself- They are rubbish things. They
#
occupy too much time. I really think it's really a bad idea to be binge watching. It's like you wake
#
up in the morning feeling really sleepy and you can't admit to everyone at work that I'm really
#
tired because I didn't go to sleep on time. I was watching some rubbish. Was it John Lennon who said
#
no time is wasted unless you feel it is wasted. So, you know, if you're enjoying it, that's great.
#
And I wonder, you know, when I think of myself as much younger, I was always in a hurry, but
#
getting nowhere fast. Right. And you have a different conception of time. There's so many
#
things you want to do. You're so intense. And with age, obviously, even though you get closer
#
to death, I think you tend to relax a little bit and chillax a little bit. How have you changed?
#
Like how has parenthood changed you? Has just getting older and like I'm approaching 50. Does
#
that kind of change you where you and especially in the kind of work that you do, I guess it's
#
imperative to have a longer time horizon for everything because immediate gratification is
#
really hard. You have to tell yourself I'm playing the long game. So how have you changed in that way?
#
Well, I mean, certainly a sense of patience and it kind of grounds you to realize that,
#
you know, it's a long arc. And at each point in time, things change and you change. And
#
as long as you are kind of grounded in the person you are, you know, everything else
#
is the drama that surrounds you and you can engage with it and exit from it.
#
As you want. I mean, I've never looked back with any kind of sense of
#
nostalgia. I look back with a sense of joy and excitement of whatever that particular
#
phase of life had to offer. And I laugh at myself sometimes about, you know, all the
#
things that I used to worry about and, you know, feel like, oh my God, if I have children,
#
I will not have a career or if I spend three months in maternity leave the whole, you know,
#
I will not be able to ever get my feedback. And it's just like, why were you unnecessarily
#
hassling yourself and working yourself up into knots and delaying decisions for no particular
#
reason? Because actually life is a long arc and, you know, you kind of fit yourself within that
#
and there'll be good times and bad times. And so I guess it's just, you know, I'm probably much
#
more impatient in my everyday behavior because you just get set in your ways. And then it's like,
#
you know, if I don't get my coffee first thing, as soon as I get up, I'm just in a crabby mood
#
for the rest of the day. But at the same time, I feel much more confident and grounded in myself.
#
And, you know, there's a willingness to be, you know, a lot more patient about these things,
#
about life and what it has to offer. And at the same time, it doesn't take away from hunger.
#
I think that one of the, there's always a hunger, or at least I've always had a hunger to
#
do more or to experience more. There's a hunger of ambition. There's a hunger of achievement. I mean,
#
all of us have it in different ways and forms. So I don't think the hunger goes away in any way.
#
It's just that there's a certain patience with it and a willingness to say maybe there are other
#
ways of achieving your goals. But at the same time, there's also a constant reminder that,
#
gosh, you are growing older every day. I guess I worry about whether you can reinvent yourself
#
constantly because that takes energy. And you have to be a lot more flexible. And I guess I
#
wonder whether as you grow older, you become more and more inflexible and set in your ways too.
#
Friends of mine keep talking about longevity, not just in terms of lifespan, but healthspan.
#
So their contention is we're going to live for many more decades. And you and I, according to them,
#
will certainly live till 120 and largely healthy lives till 120. So, you know, if you are playing
#
the long game, yeah, well, there's sort of time. Was it a conscious decision for you to be in India?
#
Because both you and your husband could plausibly have, you know, had very different lives abroad
#
and, you know, lived the intellectual life, lived the life of the mind, found a lot of
#
satisfaction in that way. And yet you are here and life isn't always easy, you know, especially with
#
your recent travels with CPR and so on and so forth. And maybe if you are up to it,
#
we can talk about it later. But even if not, are there times and I find this is true of many,
#
many people like me and people of my generation who once made a conscious choice that we want to
#
be in India. Right. And so many people like that who made that choice at around that time in the
#
90s are now actually thinking actively of a way out. And it makes me really sad, you know.
#
So was it a conscious choice for you that this is a work I want to do, this is a problem I
#
want to solve, this is what excites me, this is my milieu, my people, my world. And do you sometimes
#
wonder about the counterfactual? Do you sometimes think what is even the point? Let's just go live
#
our lives properly. You know, that's such a live question in my mind these days. You know,
#
I think there certainly was a point, especially in my early career, where I think for both of us,
#
we could have been anywhere. We were also fairly internationalist in the kind of career choices
#
we made. The fact that, in fact, when I joined the World Bank, I had always thought, you know,
#
this is where I will make an international career. So, you know, being in India was
#
not something that I consciously thought about. There was a certain excitement about being
#
in other parts of the world, particularly around the sort of, you know, there is a certain kind
#
of cultural affiliation as a consequence of pop culture and having been educated in the western
#
world, that I could have quite easily lived in the UK or the US without thinking too much. But
#
life kind of happened in India. And as life happened in India, I became more and more
#
embedded here. And over time, it's all it's actually been a conscious choice to be here,
#
both because professionally, I mean, you know, I really have I really deeply care about India,
#
you know, and I feel like I have an opportunity to really do exciting things to learn to experience
#
and perhaps hopefully to contribute in the process and be part of this milieu with all
#
its challenges. But this is this is this is, you know, I mean, I have that kind of sense of
#
inner patriotism, nationalism, I don't know what word it is, but it's just it's an
#
emotive connect. And that emotive connect is very strong and has grown stronger over the years,
#
actually. I was less conscious of it when I was younger. But also, I think that, you know,
#
it is a privilege that there's many privileges that we have, like, you know, life in Delhi on
#
an everyday basis can be quite painful. And certainly, you know, between pollution and dengue
#
and, you know, public transport being what it is, it's all chaotic and difficult and all that
#
all of that. But it's home. And for my especially with my once we had children, I, you know,
#
I feel like it's a privilege to be able to grow up in your home at some level. I, you know, it's
#
for me, it's not parochial, it's actually a huge advantage to be able to be in a place
#
which has memory, which has connections, which has a deep cultural connection and a deep social
#
connection and deep familial connection. And that's a very rich way for our children to grow up.
#
It's a very rich way to live life that I can be around my parents as they grow older. And for my
#
children to have this long sort of endless list of cousins that they, you know, every birthday has
#
a cousin's party, then there's a school party, then there's a friend's party. So it's quite painful
#
sometimes. But it's a nice way to live. So I just feel like there's a lot about being here that,
#
you know, that overrides all the everyday challenges. And it's a very deeply connected
#
life. It's a very deeply social life. And that sense of kinship and network is something that
#
makes life rich and full of quality. And I hold that very dear. But above all, it's like, you know,
#
for me, it's like, professionally, I can't imagine being anywhere else. Because I really do,
#
what makes me excited, what makes me feel passionate, what gives me a sense of belonging
#
is to be able to work in India on issues of India and to be empirically grounded in its reality.
#
I think where I started, you know, in my professional journey was very much around
#
the idea of trying to understand, interpret and be part of this transformative moment that
#
I was growing up in. I became a young adult in and increasingly so I think there's so much change
#
that is happening in India as a society, we are coming to terms with who we are, what we are,
#
as a polity, we are trying to make sense of ourselves. And I don't think that I can be able
#
to, I hesitate to think that I to be able to say too much about the dynamics of these transitions,
#
I mean, even now, you know, we all live in our own self-constructed bubbles. And in that bubble,
#
you see the world that you want to see, you don't always see everything. But then you're even more
#
further removed. So what would my contribution be? And that's a question that keeps coming
#
up in my mind. There are many arguments to that, you know, it's always helpful to take a step back,
#
to be a little distance from your context, to be able to understand it better, to have more
#
experiences in different contexts, which also help you bring something back. So it's always
#
possible that one will go away for periods of time. But really, this is where this is where my sense
#
of belonging and sense of purpose is. And I think this it's very important for me for my that my
#
children have that sense of belonging and purpose. It saddens me as you say that so many of our
#
generation actually, it's this funny cycle, you know, when when we were in college, we were at
#
that tipping point, you know, the world was bursting, the global economy was growing so
#
many opportunities emerging all over the world. And everybody moved, you know, we all went off
#
to study. And like I said, even I could have just stayed on very easily. It was just a set of
#
accidents that I came back and ended up working starting to work my work life in India. But lots
#
of friends went off. And many came back, especially around the 2007 eight night, you know, I think
#
many things happened. The big crash combined with that people were reaching the point where
#
they were getting married, having children. So life cycles, also parents were getting older,
#
people were making choices of where they would anchor themselves. So a lot of people came back
#
and there was an and in that tooth and in that phase of coming back, there was a huge optimism
#
and you know, an excitement that we will both you can have an aspirationally good life. Because
#
after all, we are all children of privilege. And you know, we want to keep that we keep reminding
#
oneself of that fact. But as children of privilege, you could both enjoy the privilege
#
and actually by as a consequence, do something really, you know, we have the opportunity to do
#
something creative, something different, you're not bound by lots of, you know, things, we are
#
freed up, you know, in ways to be able to leverage the opportunities that our privilege has given us
#
to do something different and adventurous and exciting, and that will have an impact. So it
#
was both things, I think that brought a lot of people back and and part of that also kept me
#
keeps me going too. And it's very sad to think that suddenly, you know, the, you know, everybody
#
is looking to fly out again, because, you know, in the end, for all its flaws, elites frame,
#
you know, elites play a role in shaping society. And in fact, our job should be to be more sensitive
#
and sensitized to these big questions that India is asking of itself and being able to use our
#
privilege to participate in these questions and collectively seek answers rather than have to run
#
away. But, you know, the realities of our polity, our economy, our society also create conditions,
#
which are, I think, encouraging people to look for alternative options.
#
In a context quite different from the way I'm going to quote it now Pratap,
#
uses his great phrase, tyranny of the compulsory identity. And in a different context from how he
#
meant it, I sometimes think that even my being Indian, for example, is an identity, I contain
#
multitudes, I am an individual, I'm a citizen of the world, I am a chess and poker enthusiast,
#
you know, I'm a podcaster, and all these are really different things. And I guess one has to
#
balance how you think about them and how you think about notions like what is my responsibility
#
towards India. I find it quite easy to articulate what is my love towards India, you know, but
#
notions of what is my responsibility, how much should I compromise on other aspects of my life
#
and care about this. And this is stuff that I kind of think about. And you mentioned the sort of crash
#
of 2008 that brought many people back. One of them was, you know, a classmate of yours and a good
#
friend of mine Mukul Chaddha, who worked in Lehman Brothers, though he wasn't there at that fated
#
time, but I'm sure something he did like the flapping of the wings of a butterfly may have
#
contributed and he came back. My general question before we get back to the narrative of your life
#
and then the narrative of the Indian state and the stuff I want to discuss there is about
#
intentionality. Like in terms of the way that you live your life, the things that you do,
#
how much have you thought about intentionality in terms of like, for example, one could say that
#
some people become more intentional about nurturing their friendships and they make it
#
a point that, OK, these are the sort of things I have to do or more intentional about nurturing
#
relationships that one might otherwise take for granted. And I guess, you know, one complaint
#
one can have against many parents if not most parents is that they don't think hard enough
#
about it and what it involves. And you can also, I guess, be intentional towards parenthood.
#
Equally, you can be intentional towards your me time, you know, which might even involve
#
watching K dramas for, you know, for six hours every week, which is perfectly fine if that's
#
how you kind of relax your mind. If that's your thing, if that's what relaxes you, that's great.
#
So, you know, in that shaping of the self, in that I think for the first half of our lives,
#
most of the shaping of the self is largely accidental. You have your genes, you have the
#
circumstances, you have family, peers, all of that. But I guess as one gets older, one can then,
#
you know, get more intentional about it, that this is who I want to be, this is the kind of
#
life I want to live, this is the best version of myself. And I'm guessing that must especially be
#
true for someone like you, who would be incredibly busy because of the kind of work you do,
#
especially in unexpected recent ways. So, you know, so how do you think about all of this?
#
This is a good question. I don't know that I've over thought it so much. I think that there's a
#
broad set of parameters around what I do and the kind of sense of consciousness, perhaps
#
of over-consciousness, maybe of positionality and what that means in terms of privileges
#
and opportunities. And maybe a lot of how I think about my life is built around that understanding.
#
But I don't know that, you know, there is a, so I guess I actively like, I like the space I have.
#
I like the space I have in terms of both my professional growth and I like the space I have
#
in terms of having what I think is, you know, a relatively whole personal life and family experience.
#
And the intentionality is to try and, you know, hold on to it. You know, maybe, I mean, I think
#
that what this does is that it kind of locks you in and you're not as adventurous as you could be
#
because there's always lots of opportunities and new adventures to be had. And so maybe,
#
I, you know, the sense of, for me, the sense of adventure actually finds this nurturing and
#
nourishing in my professional life because I, you know, it's one of the great advantages of
#
being in India and being in a place like the Center for Policy Research is how diverse it is
#
in terms of the kinds of people you interact with. I guess diverse not in terms of, diverse in terms
#
of the kinds of interests they have. So, you know, you can be exposed to a conversation on foreign
#
policy in the morning and you can be talking about, you know, education policy in the afternoon and
#
by the evening you can be, you know, talking about urbanization and electric vehicles and, you know,
#
all of that can happen in the period of a day and it can happen between, you know, a conversation
#
with an intellectual who's been sort of theorizing about some of these issues to a diplomat who's
#
actually in the thick of things to a civil society activist who's kind of approaching
#
it from a different point of view to all my colleagues who are constantly, you know, in this
#
very nerdy way opening their minds up to different questions. And so, you know, just by virtue of
#
being in that space, regardless of how much contribution one has to make in it, it's an
#
adventure in and of itself and it takes you into different places and different worlds
#
in that process. And so, I kind of feel like, you know, you get lulled into thinking that
#
you're opening your mind up and exploring lots of things as a consequence of that. So, I guess
#
somewhere at the back of my mind that sense of comfort, you know, maybe you are too comfortable
#
and so there's all these other things that you just don't know you might have or opportunities
#
you have. But at this point in time they bother me less. I kind of, you know, feel like this space
#
is a nice space. It's one to be nurtured and it has all its challenges and a new adventure
#
will be a bit of a compromise and I probably, you know, it's this constant conversation with
#
myself. Are you really like just being a middle-aged and boring and stuck in one thing and not open to
#
new places, new ideas, new adventures, new experiences. But what new directions have you
#
flirted with? Well, in terms of even where I am professionally, it was never a... there was no
#
path to chart, right? It was sort of... I was feeling my way around and opportunities
#
found themselves, made their way to me and I was excited and curious enough to be able to grab each
#
of those opportunities, right? So, it wasn't... I mean, I was at the World Bank and a lot of people
#
I was working with were getting posted out and there was an internal bank administrative
#
question also and, you know, I kind of felt like, okay, this is a good opportunity to...
#
this is not quite fully what I wanted to do, so let me just... let me explore what else would come
#
my way. And that's how, you know, after meandering for a little while, I ended up at CPR. You know,
#
there wasn't any particular one thing that I was going to do there. I wasn't going to join a team
#
that had a particular task. There was this broad idea that, you know, you're interested in questions
#
of accountability. There was some funding that was beginning to make itself available. So,
#
lots of experiments unfolding in the Indian landscape around this sort of citizen state
#
accountability question that needed documentation. So, I went along with it, you know, and of course
#
Pratap, who can tempt you to do the strangest of things by giving you... by making it sound both so
#
easy and so exciting at the same time. So, it's like, you know, think about it. You'll walk into
#
a building with really interesting people who are, you know, talking about things that you find
#
interesting in different ways. And, you know, if you don't like it, it's two years. You can go,
#
you know, you can go off and do other things, but you'll get a nice education for two years.
#
And it's an opportunity to just explore yourself. And I thought, wow, who will give you a job like
#
that? You know, you get paid to just kind of hang around, learn, experiment. And, you know, if it
#
works for you, you can build up on it. And if it doesn't work for you, you can move on. And so,
#
you know, the whole thing was a process of innovation, of experimentation. And what we
#
built out in Accountability Initiative was a lot of trial by error and new ideas came. And, you
#
know, being the head of a think tank and having a career in research was never something that I
#
really wanted to do. Again, it just suddenly an opportunity opened up and it came my way and it
#
seemed like an exciting adventure and I took it. So, you know, those are the kinds of adventures
#
and explorations I've had, which also take you to different parts of the world, take you to different
#
parts of India. I think, you know, just traveling around the country, you know, looking at everything
#
from how the school system works, to how the health system works, to how elections take place, to
#
how government works, to discussions on economic policy. It's just such a wide range of
#
experiences and things that you hear about and listen to that each of them become their own
#
adventure. Just the way that your role changed and at one point you took over at CPR and all of that,
#
how does that change sort of the perspective that you bring to the work that you do? Because at one
#
level, you know, as a researcher or as someone who's thinking about some narrow subjects,
#
but enjoying broader interactions, you know, it can be stimulating, but you don't really need
#
to do much more than that. You're part of an interesting little ecosystem, but when you're
#
in charge, then the larger questions pop up of, you know, how do I sort of nurture or mentor the
#
people around me? How do I enable an environment where ideas can flourish? How do I build this
#
ecosystem up? You know, and even larger thoughts about, you know, what do think tanks do in India?
#
You know, in the US, for example, they function pretty differently. There's like a revolving door
#
between the government and think tanks. Over here, there isn't really that. You are just,
#
you know, if you're in a think tank, you're in a think tank. The government has its own bureaucracies
#
and civil service to, you know, implement whatever has to be done. And at times, I'm sure that
#
you also then have to build relationships with the state and work together with them. You know,
#
one of my friends, Ruben Abraham, describes his think tank earlier, the IDFC Institute,
#
and now Artha Global as a think slash do tank. And I guess, you know, what you do is also in
#
the domain of think slash do where you're actually working with people to try and make a difference.
#
So what is that process like? Because sometimes when I think about the political marketplace,
#
it strikes me that, look, politics is downstream of culture. And if you really want to make change
#
in the political marketplace, for someone like me, it seems that the obvious way to address that
#
is to address the demand end of the political marketplace. Whereas what a think tank typically
#
is really doing is you're working on the supply end, where you're taking papers to politicians
#
and bureaucrats and saying, okay, you've got your problems. Let's sit, let's talk. We'll help you
#
figure these out. Here's the data, here's the thinking. And there are times I think that the
#
progress there would, A, there would be hardly any immediate gratification. It would be slow and
#
incremental. Whatever good happens would largely be unseen. You would never get credit for it,
#
and so on and so forth. So how has your thinking had to change since you actually took over as
#
the head of this important think tank? That's a great question. But let me answer by stepping
#
back to the adventures I had that preceded my taking over from the president of CPR.
#
So CPR is a really unique little ecosystem in that I encountered the institution at a time when it
#
was kind of rejuvenating itself into this new, into what it became. And I guess in that sense,
#
I was part of that process. When I first came, Pratap was in the process of really trying to
#
build this space that sat at the intersection of research and of actually the academy and policy,
#
which is quite different to how think tanks were envisaged more broadly, and I'll come to that
#
later. But it was also the value systems of what he was trying to build were very much at the heart
#
of the kinds of people that were coming in. So the idea, the value of academic freedom,
#
the space for the sort of non-hierarchical space, and non-constrained space for experimentation that
#
allowed different types of people to find a space. So you'll find some pure academics
#
as your colleagues, and you'll find people who spent their lives in the bureaucracy and
#
in between souls like me who are doing a little bit of everything. And we all kind of found a space.
#
But also, in my first office, I had my room, and the colleague in the room next door to me
#
was my friend Michael Walton, who's a few years older than me, I'd say a couple of decades,
#
without revealing how old I am or how old Michael is. But you've already done that revelation.
#
But I mean, literally, and Mike was still amongst the younger people at CPR. So
#
in fact, the joke used to be, it's not CPR, it's Sleepy Hour, or Center for Persons Retired.
#
Because all institutions go through periods of evolution. And there was a period before
#
Pratap came to CPR when it was following a particular logic where a lot of people that
#
had been part of the, mostly bureaucrats who had been part of the Indian state, come and find a
#
home here and do really important things. But it had a different kind of generational impulse.
#
It took a few years to suddenly see the whole place transform. Many of us were attracted by
#
the possibilities of CPR. And as we began to use the opportunity of this free space to build out
#
our ideas, we also then brought in newer people. And suddenly, Mike Walton started becoming on the
#
top of the heap of the age structure of the institution. And we were in the middle,
#
and there was lots of younger researchers that came in. And actually, until recently,
#
the vast majority of what was CPR were actually young researchers in the age group of between 25
#
and 35. So we really brought the age down from 70 to between 25 and 30, average age to 30.
#
Please do that to Parliament also.
#
But it takes time. So I guess, I mean, the reason I'm going into this history is that in a way,
#
we were really witness to an institutional transformation. So what institutions do and
#
how institutional culture and value systems are embedded into institutions and how those changes
#
take place was something that was very live to the professional experience of being at CPR.
#
And I myself, partly intellectually, because I was interested in the state, so you automatically
#
think about institutions, was also trying to find, carve out a space. And so in that process,
#
I had spent some time with social movements. I'd also encountered one of the institutions
#
that has influenced my work and my approach most, Pratham and the Asar Center that does the annual
#
survey of education, that really pushed the whole agenda of learning outcomes in a big way. And
#
Rukmini Banerjee, who's again, as I said, I'm really lucky to have all these phenomenal mentors,
#
and she's someone I count very much as somebody who's both mentored me and shaped me and whom
#
I've learned a lot from. And, you know, one of the things that really that I learned from some time
#
I spent with Asar, trying to understand how the Asar survey is done is that what it's trying to
#
do is beyond just the collection of evidence. So it's really trying to, so the act of collecting
#
evidence is also an act of empowering citizens. So coming back to my favorite theme, this question,
#
the idea of citizenship, that these surveys were being done in partnership with local NGOs,
#
with people whose children are going to school, with diets. So teachers who are being trained
#
in the district education training institutions to become teachers, to be part and parcel of the
#
life and times of the school and to actually try and learn and understand what in fact the school
#
is providing to its children when they come to learn. And then using that to facilitate a
#
conversation that is not just limited to you and me as we talk about policy, but to parents who
#
are thinking about how to educate their children. And so this idea that an intellectual space or a
#
policy space can also be very closely integrated with the space of action was something that I
#
learned from Asar and I adopted in a lot of the early experimentation we did at Accountability
#
Initiative. And that also then constantly pushed me to ask this question of what is an institution
#
and what are the kinds of cultures and values and people that an institution brings to it.
#
So all of this was sort of collectively part of my own education and evolution and a lot of it
#
also shaped some of the thinking I did on the Indian state too. And so when the opportunity
#
came to go from the silo of one research project into actually thinking about an institution more
#
broadly, without it being intentional that it was an exciting byproduct, suddenly it pushed me to
#
start thinking about what does it mean to think about institutions in a more real, live way.
#
And there were many very crucial questions. Just the dynamic of CPR, it's partially a public
#
institution and partially a private institution. Partially a public institution in the sense that
#
one of the... So A, its purpose is very clearly public. Towards the end of our first segment,
#
you talked about how policymakers are just thinking about the incentives are to think about
#
the here and now. And in fact, the early paper that the founder of CPR wrote, Pai Panandikar,
#
on why a place like CPR needed to exist was precisely this. That in some senses,
#
the incentive structure of policy making is so much focused on the short term,
#
that there is no space for that long-term thinking. And that is the purpose for why a space like this
#
needs to exist. And in building up that space and building an institution, it chose to be
#
both public in its purpose, but also quite actively public in how it sourced its financing.
#
So the Indian Council of Social Science Research, which was... I could be wrong,
#
but I think it really came... It was a product of the late 1970s. I should know exactly when it
#
entered the ecosystem. It was basically the Indian government's way of creating a space
#
that would, through financing, support these institutions of social science research. And
#
CPR's big growth actually came from being part of that grantee or a recipient of support from
#
the ICSSR. So the idea of the public, even in terms of the funding, it's not quite a public
#
university, but it does have a strong link with government. And that it was also a place where
#
many retired bureaucrats came. So the public culture was also embedded there. So the publicness
#
of CPR was at the heart of what it is as an institution. At the same time, it was struggling
#
to break free from some of the throttles of public institutions, to be able to be genuinely
#
autonomous, to hold on to the value of academic freedom that was really baked into the culture
#
of the institution. So how do you balance these tensions? How do you balance the other really
#
interesting intellectual question? Because I have always been committed to the idea of decentralization.
#
The Indian state was deeply centralized in its founding moment, or whatever, in its early years
#
for a logic. But that logic shifts, and the Indian state needs to be deeply decentralized,
#
and excessive centralization is abhorrent to me. But here's an institution that actually grows on
#
the back of decentralization. It's a very decentralized institution. And yet, it's coming
#
to a tipping point where excessive decentralization means that you're now confronting a new challenge.
#
How do you ensure that the sum of its parts is not greater than the whole, and the identity of the
#
whole needs to be centered, even as you hold on to what makes the magic work of being decentralized?
#
So it's like my intellectual life is suddenly in direct confrontation with the big institutional
#
question. And I think most importantly, in some ways, what does it mean to be doing public policy
#
in the context of a very changing dynamic of the Indian state? We've been talking about the
#
state so much, but when the relationship between state and citizens in 1970 was very diff 73 when
#
CPR was founded is very different to the relationship between state and citizens in 2017.
#
The role of the state, the function of the state, the complexity of the state,
#
the presence of markets, all of this, the logic of what you do is so different.
#
And therefore, what is public policy about? Is it actually having a seat on the table to draft
#
policy? Or is it about building a discourse around policy? And again, that was always
#
baked into that. So what I think is different about CPR to many think tanks
#
is that building discourse was at the heart of where we started. So it was just the culture,
#
publish or perish. That's how it was. You weren't measured on anything except your ability to be
#
part of a core policy public conversation and your ability to publish in the best quality journals
#
out there. And you were sort of left to be free to do precisely those things. So how do you then
#
balance being part of the discourse with this question of do you have a seat on a table? Or do
#
you contribute to the dialogue that facilitates a seat on the table? And what does impact mean?
#
And as an institution, we have constantly struggled with this, because we get nervous.
#
Or actually, I'm very deeply uncomfortable with the idea that an external agent or a
#
set of technocratic experts or researchers or people who are not formally part of the state
#
and therefore not genuinely accountable as well should be the ones to actually do the policy.
#
And I think that we do need to have a much deeper conversation in India about what the role of
#
policy, who should be making policy and what is the role of the public in different ways and forms,
#
whether it comes in the form of think tanks or NGOs or experts or private sector lobbying.
#
How does all of this collectively contribute into building a discourse on policy that facilitates
#
the actual design and implementation of policy? And we always shied away from trying to say that,
#
well, we made this policy because of this tension. And that tension has always been very real and it
#
feeds therefore into who are you as and what is your institutional identity? And then how do you
#
actually in the 21st century present your comparative advantage and share that with the world?
#
So these were some of the big institutional questions that I confronted and I think,
#
and we are still sort of dealing with those tensions. And it all cumulatively made me,
#
I think, acquire a deeper sensitivity to some core ideas about institutional life,
#
which also shape how to think about the state. Ideas around purpose, ideas about organizational
#
culture, norms and values. So ideas of the tensions of centralization and decentralization.
#
And then from a policy making point of view, also questions around multidisciplinarity versus
#
singular approaches. I think the fact that CPR is actually a very multidisciplinary space,
#
I personally feel that policy is not something that is just the disciplinary hold of the
#
economist. Actually, the sociologists, the political scientists, the anthropologists,
#
all of them collectively, the environmentalists, all collectively contribute to shaping policy
#
because policies are a reflection of society. And the big mistake we make is that we limit
#
policy just to the economist's worldview. And it is all of these things together,
#
which contribute into what makes a genuinely inclusive and effective policy.
#
And I want to talk about a couple of these tensions that you mentioned and one is obviously the
#
decentralization, centralization tension, where I'm completely with you in, you know,
#
believing in spontaneous order, believing decentralization is good and everything
#
shouldn't come from the center downwards. But the danger of that also is that one, how do you
#
maintain whatever your core values might be? Two, there is a danger that the work might be
#
very diffused and not speaking to each other as it were. How do you think about that? How
#
does one maintain that balance? So that's a very difficult question in an institutional context,
#
you know, and I would not have been alive to it had we not been confronted with these big questions
#
even in our institution, right? Like, I mean, the ability to be, to operate in a completely
#
decentralized way actually is what really spurs creativity in more ways than one. And it also
#
creates a nice kind of competitive spirit, right? You know, you kind of measure yourself to your
#
peers and everybody is kind of, you know, that itself builds up the organized and organizational
#
culture of excellence. But what does it mean to exit out of silos and start talking together
#
when your incentive structures are still very much built within your decentralized silo?
#
I don't think at CPR, we found the right answer because you don't want to impose centralization
#
from the top. I mean, the big, you know, the big problem with the Indian state is it imposes
#
centralization from the top and, you know, you don't get ownership and innovation from the bottom
#
up when you do that. So how do you build incentives to work together, to build out cross conversations?
#
And how does that, you know, actually, are you in an environment that enables that? So, you know,
#
for example, one of the reasons why multidisciplinary research is so hard to actually
#
get, although I think it's so essential, is because your incentives as a researcher is to
#
publish in peer review journals. And the peer review journals are looking at a particular set
#
of methods. And if you don't comply with those methods, you won't get published. If you don't
#
get published, then you won't be taken seriously. And so the economist will only follow one way,
#
the sociologist will go another way. And those cross conversations don't happen.
#
I mentioned earlier that I always think that doing the development studies degree was not
#
necessarily wise is because I'm the product of the opposite. I did everything,
#
little bit here, little bit there, little bit there. So you become the master of
#
jack of all trades and the master of none. In a way, it frees me up. I can build methods as I
#
go along. I'm not bound by anything. But then I'm also like, you know, have bits and pieces of
#
everything that may not allow you to have the disciplinary rigor that you need to be able to
#
really arrive at a set of assumptions and frameworks that would allow you to logically
#
seek certain kinds of conclusions. So it has its strengths and limitations. And so when we talk
#
about it in the context of government, we keep saying coordination, coordination, coordination,
#
which is a very nice thing to say when you have to write a research paper, an impossible thing
#
to achieve when you're running a small institution. So imagine what the challenge government has to
#
face with it is. And how do you then deal with these, the external environment and the signals
#
that you get from the external environment that also constrain you from working across silos?
#
I don't have a good answer. But I think that's at the heart of the institutional question,
#
really like good, you know, the creative magic of an institution will be in its ability to try
#
and break all of these and in ways that are organic. So really, perhaps it is just about
#
more conversations, more adification. You know, everybody is so busy because we think that we
#
have to get to our emails and respond to all of them. And there's deadlines and we have to meet
#
them and meetings and conversations with colleagues and all these are all fun things to have, but
#
can come in the way of getting things done. And boy, we used to complain so much. The only thing
#
that CPR, when I was a faculty at CPR and not president, the only real imposition that CPR used
#
to place on us was to attend like, you know, weekly meetings. And we said weekly meetings,
#
we have things to do, we can't attend weekly meetings. So it became fortnightly meetings.
#
And then we said fortnightly meetings, what a waste of time. This is nice adification,
#
but we all have work to do. And we all have small children, we all want to go home. So we said,
#
okay, once a month, and actually you'll lose a lot by not keeping these spaces for conversation
#
and dialogue. So I think that in our settings, the seminar room is a really important space.
#
And we've tried to find different ways of holding that seminar room together by bringing in different
#
voices, different perspectives and bringing everyone together. It just organically then
#
creates opportunities and ways for coordination to happen. But it needs to be nurtured. It's a
#
long game. That's why the patient story, you know, you can't actually do structural reform,
#
system systems reform with a sleight of hand overnight, one small idea that you impose,
#
it needs deep nurturing and everybody has to be on board with it, which is not an easy thing.
#
So my friend Ajay Shah and I have just started this YouTube show called Everything is Everything
#
episode five release today. And the name resonates with us for many reasons, which we described in
#
episode two. But one of the reasons we like the name is that it refers to the joys of being into
#
disciplinary, that you're applying multiple frames to look at the world. You're not looking
#
at a narrow economist point of view or a sociologist point of view or whatever, but you are accepting
#
that the world is complex. Everything is interlinked. One way of looking at anything,
#
one hammer for any particular nail will just be insufficient. You've got to apply the whole
#
vision. And while you've spoken about it, I want to kind of dig a little deeper on that particular
#
tension, not just in an institutional context of being multidisciplinary versus having specialists
#
and silos like Ajay and I keep lamenting that so much of academia is because of the incentives
#
of the publisher Paris, the journal game forced into hyper specialization. And that is a great
#
loss of intellectual capital to the world because you have some of the brightest people in the world
#
working on things that don't have any impact on the real world. Now I see a trade off here
#
and it's a trade off, not just for an institution, but for an individual. You know, earlier when you
#
were speaking, I, you know, without meaning to flatter you, I thought, okay, you know, there's
#
a term Renaissance man. You're like a Renaissance person. You've got, you know, a broad interest
#
and you're not just allied to one particular way of doing things. We released an episode today
#
about Oppenheimer, who was a Renaissance man, you know, and you have less and less of those
#
kinds of people in the modern world. And there is that classic trade off that if you are thinking
#
too broadly, you get better at connecting dots, but you might get details wrong in any particular
#
field that you talk about. And a hyper specialist would know, he would catch you out.
#
You know, but at the same time, the dangers of hyper specialization is that you get lost in
#
the weeds and sometimes you're not seeing the bigger picture and you're just being dogmatic
#
about the vision that you see. But especially when you aspire to apply that to the real world
#
and actually change the way the world works, you have to take that step out and think broadly.
#
And I'm guessing that this is a tension that A, you mentioned you deal with within the organization,
#
but also as a thinker yourself, you know, how do you manage this? Because surely and like there
#
are some areas of which you have deep knowledge and you'll want to like certainly the Indian state,
#
I can't think of anyone who might know it better than you. But the temptation is that let me just
#
study this. And for example, write the definitive book on it. And I'm the world expert and blah,
#
blah, blah. But at the same time, you know, you want the bigger picture, you want to step out.
#
So how do you manage these contradictions?
#
You know, you have articulated the existential crisis I have better than I would be able to
#
articulate it. But this is exactly the problem. It's like there is everything that is so exciting
#
that you want to kind of build out each of these things. And, you know, sometimes I wonder,
#
in hindsight, there's a flow to the whole thing. Like I can piece it all, I can connect all the
#
dots and tell you a really nice story. But the honest truth is that it's like I'll start with
#
one thing and I'll go down that path and then get imp, you know, it's like, it's not good enough.
#
It's getting impatient. Maybe it's too small, or maybe it's too large, or maybe it requires too
#
much detail and too much being in the weeds and I get bored in the weeds. So I want to step out and
#
like get excited about the next thing. And so that is me. You know, it's the jack of all trades,
#
master of none. And I justify it to myself by saying that in actual fact, the policy world is
#
a social world. It is deeply complex. And there is a role for everyone. There is a role for
#
the person that is deep in the weeds. There is a role for the person that is extremely
#
careful about ensuring that every single bit of that sculpture is just perfectly chiseled.
#
And there is a role for the person who's saying, let me ask whether we needed to make this culture
#
in the first place. And there's another person who's judging whether this is a good or bad
#
sculpture, all of those together. And so perhaps the answer is in collaboration. So I have gained
#
hugely by working closely with all kinds of people from different disciplines, different approaches,
#
different understandings. And at different moments in time, we have had tensions over
#
being in the weeds versus big picture. How do you ask the question? Because each discipline
#
has its own particular logic. But we are able to kind of collaboratively come together. And
#
I think that's the magic. I do think that if we are open to working together in these collaborative
#
networks, it really brings a lot to the table that then ensures that the shortcomings of being
#
everything and everywhere are overcome by the ability of the expert and the person that is
#
focused on the detail and in the weeds to pull you back. And you contribute to the person that's in
#
the weeds. And I really worry a lot about how, you know, when we are teaching policy actually
#
increasingly now, we get so caught in ensuring that we are giving students the skills to chisel
#
beautifully. And we just don't bother with this bigger picture question. So the next generation
#
of people who are interested and excited about public policy will come with this one skill.
#
Sometimes it's like I get jealous because I don't have that skill. But then you say ask the big
#
question and they're not able to think through because you haven't given them the analytical
#
tools to be able to think through those big questions. And I think that's a very big question
#
about the pedagogy of public policy that we need to engage with a lot more.
#
I also want to ask you about what you think of your role and you may not define it this way,
#
but I would. Your role as a public intellectual and I've spoken to many guests on the show who
#
are uncomfortable with that term. I think Ram Guha is, I think Pratap might be, but I think it's an
#
important term to use and I use it very deliberately because I think what the danger also is that yes,
#
elite shape the world and you want to be able to influence the elites and build those ideas and
#
contribute to that discourse and that really matters. But I also think that you want to leave
#
a repository of ideas and work that can communicate to a larger audience that might have a chance of
#
affecting the demand end of the political marketplace as it were. And I think that is
#
super important. Like I think Ajay and Vijay Kelkar, for example, wrote in Service of the
#
Republic and Pranay Kutasane and Raghu Jaitley wrote their book Missing in Action. And I think
#
it's important to have those works out there. So you have little, a body of work, someone who's
#
coming new into the field can access some of the existing thought on it instead of being forced to
#
take it up in haphazard ways by osmosis from where they work. And I think that's important. In fact,
#
if there's one complaint I have against Pratap, who is one of the people I admire most in this
#
country is that he hasn't written enough books. He could write like important primers on probably
#
three, four, five different subjects. And he hasn't. And equally, when I sort of look at
#
your work, like your insights on the state, and I'm kind of saving it for last, I'll get to that
#
right now. But your insights on the Indian state and the way it works and the misconceptions and
#
how we can tackle this are so deep and so nuanced. And yet there should be a book,
#
there should be a YouTube series, there should be so much more. So is that something that you've
#
thought about? And so many people I asked this question to are just out of sheer modesty won't
#
define themselves that way. But you are a public intellectual. These are important ideas. It is
#
important to shape the discourse, especially when so much of the discourse is so polarized and so
#
simplistic and so corrupted. What do you think about your role in this?
#
So I don't like the word public intellectual, and not out of any sense of humility or anything,
#
but that is not the role I crafted for myself. And I think by describing myself that way,
#
I would be an imposter. But I do have a deep sense of purpose that emanates from the idea
#
that we need to be participants in a public discourse. And so your engagement in the role
#
that we are playing in what I think is at least, CPR is not necessarily or a think tank by definition
#
is not necessarily a public institution, but its purpose is to engage in the process of policy
#
making, which is broadly public. And therefore its purpose is not accumulating market share.
#
Its purpose is contributing to a particular kind of imagination of the public and the role that the
#
state plays in that public. And so you have to be as transparent and as communicative as you can be
#
in building up that discourse. So for me, public writing is part of that process. It's also just
#
a disciplinary tool. It's like if you don't actually force yourself to express your argument
#
in 800 words, we are great at having opinions, but you should have the ability to actually
#
articulate it properly. But that's just a side element. The real objective is just that,
#
and to engage in a dialogue, a broader dialogue that goes outside of your own comfort zone.
#
But I'm also very cognizant and conscious of the fact that in the present day in this era of
#
hyper communication and constantly having to be present in the public, where does the core sense
#
of identity and purpose lie and what is your primary community from which affirmation is
#
crucial? And I think that what often happens is that there's a rush to do the public thing first
#
and there's a lack of patience with building the building blocks. So what really makes me nervous,
#
and CPR has done this a lot, Pratap used to say it, and I completely agree that because we all
#
like to write and we all have lots to say about everything, op-ed writing is just a thing. We do
#
it all the time. But the point is that you cannot confuse public policy engagement with op-ed writing
#
or being part of the public discourse is one element of what you do. But there is a whole
#
set of things that contribute into that. And so when somebody wants to do, young people want to
#
have careers in public policy, they think it's a glammy thing to do because you can get your
#
byline in a newspaper or talk to Amit Verma and everybody wants to and all of that. But actually
#
those are, if you don't have that core foundation, all of these and you don't actually
#
and you're not anchored in a particular, I like the word community of practice, although it sounds
#
vague, but because it kind of allows you to say it's different disciplines, it's a particular
#
approach to the world, it's a particular kind of framework of building institutions.
#
So you have to be anchored in that because if you don't have that, then you don't have,
#
where is the legitimacy which your voice is bringing to the table? So if you're a journalist
#
writing an opinion piece, your core identity is being a journalist. You've been out there,
#
you've looked at stories, you've collected stories, you bring a particular set of professional norms
#
and values into then how you're interpreting the world in an opinion piece. If you are working in
#
the space of public policy and you want to articulate a vision, you're in the public sphere,
#
your legitimacy has to come precisely from that set of shared norms and values. And this is a
#
profession that is so, it's vague, it's still emerging, you know, I mean, when I first started,
#
you know, the way people used to think about anything that a quote unquote public policy
#
person would do, it would be like, it would be NGO. It's the Punjabi way of, you know,
#
I would be, that was my identity, without really knowing anything. There's no other way of describing
#
what you do. And it has evolved over time. I mean, the idea that there is such a thing
#
as a public policy professional, a set of spaces like think tanks. These have all kind of become
#
very much part of the elite ecosystem. More recently, CPI's own origins, don't forget,
#
it never described itself as a think tank. It was a center for policy research. It was a research
#
institution outside of the university that engaged in real world problems of policy. And over time,
#
this idea of a think tank kind of emerged in and became part of our vocabulary. And so we became
#
categorized as a think tank. And that's how we are described now. But these are all new. And so I
#
think we do have a very important role to play also in shaping the norms and values of this new
#
profession. And going back to the engagement with the public or constantly being presenting your
#
ideas to the world, it is really about being able to step out of that space and draw the
#
legitimacy that you have from that space to engage in this dialogue. Because ultimately,
#
the publicness of what we do matters. And so if we don't express our positions or our ideas or
#
engage in a dialogue with this sort of very ephemeral thing called the public, then we are
#
also being non-transparent. And for me, actually, there is always the ambition of more. You can pull
#
it all together, build your frameworks, write these books, do this definitive stuff. And that's
#
very much something that is on in that long to-do list of many things to do. But also building a
#
public institution or building an institutional environment that enables all of this to happen
#
is also a core part of that contribution. So again, there's different phases in life. And
#
this was the institution building phase, which didn't quite come to me because I wanted to do it.
#
It came as an opportunity, and it gave me a chance to do this and make this particular
#
contribution. And there are other ways in which it can be done too, which are always open for
#
exploration. And what's really, I mean, the thing that gives me a lot of excitement and hope and
#
energy is how much the young student in India is just dying to learn. I mean, when we were in
#
college, we were hanging around at the front lawns of St. Stephen's College at any excuse to run out
#
of the classroom and gossip and drink tea and get up to all sorts. The idea of moving yourself from
#
that front lawn to get into a bus and go to listen to a talk, that was for the nerdies. That's not our
#
thing. But boy, it has changed. And it really speaks to the hunger and the excitement and the
#
desire of young India to learn and to engage. The people that come to CPR seminars most are young
#
people. They're just always, from Delhi University, they're just always following what we do. They
#
show up, they listen, they engage, they ask questions. And that just gives me a sense that
#
actually there's a hunger for more public conversations about democratic life in India.
#
And that's also, and there are different ways in which it can be done, but I see ourselves as making,
#
as the contribution we are making is in facilitating these dialogues and contributing into them.
#
Yeah, and this young energy, the hunger to learn, especially among young people from small towns is
#
something that gives me a lot of hope. But what also gives me despair is kind of the politics of
#
the day. And this must make life so difficult for you because a lot of the politics about, you know,
#
part of what you are engaged on, almost a core assumption is that the truth matters. But nowadays
#
we are engaged more in narrative battles and the truth. Our discourse has also become like that.
#
And, you know, actions tend to be based not so much on what would constitute good governance,
#
but what would be good politics and how, you know, it would be perceived. And, you know, how much of
#
a barrier is that for you across two dimensions? And one dimension is, of course, a dimension of
#
actually working with the state to, you know, make change happen. And the other dimension is
#
simply what is happening with you guys right now. If you're comfortable talking about it, the way,
#
you know, your tax free exemption taken away, the other issues that you had, which have made it so
#
difficult for it to function. I mean, clearly the government is after CPR. You know, first of all,
#
why? Because a lot of the work that you do doesn't even seem to have anything to do with politics.
#
It's all about helping the state to function better. It's about helping to understand the
#
world better. So at some level, I don't even understand why. But at another level, what is
#
that like? Like, is this a set of new constraints that you now have to take for granted and somehow
#
manage to work under? So I think there are different pieces here. I think, you know,
#
you had asked me this question earlier. I don't know if we ever actually dealt with it.
#
You know, part of what policy research or think tanking is about is really about engaging the
#
state, right? Like that is at the heart of it, that's its core purpose. And sometimes it engages
#
the state to say, get out of the way. And at other times it engages the state to say, better get in
#
the way and like fix yourself to do it properly. And here's a set of ideas that we have that you
#
may want to consider as you do that. But it is fundamentally about constantly being in dialogue
#
and conversation with the state. And India doesn't have these kinds of, you know, the revolving
#
door story that is so typical of the think tank world in the US, which is really where the idea
#
evolved and emerged. And in this term has sort of been adopted by everybody without ever defining
#
it. But what it does have is a very constant engagement with a wide community. I think that's
#
one of the, you know, it's a lesser, it's, we don't talk about it enough and we don't celebrate it at
#
all. Because in some ways the bureaucracy and the technocracy that is the Indian state tends to be
#
quite closed. It's after all, it doesn't like lateral entry. It's, you know, it is a, you struggle
#
your entire early youth to get into the UPSC. And then once you do, it's just you have a strangle
#
hold over it and it, you know, doesn't always absorb ideas. And at the same time, the state is
#
deeply aware of its own limitations. It understands that when it is engaging with the world of complex
#
policy questions, it needs a diversity of views. And therefore it's always looking for different
#
ways to seek expertise or to seek perspectives, to seek points of view. It's just baked into
#
the DNA of the state, no matter what the politics of the day looks like. And it does it in different
#
ways, which is in many ways the modus operandi of an institution like ours and all other,
#
many of our other think tanks. It does it by setting up committees and then inviting experts
#
to be part of those. So you actually get engaged in dialogue. Eventually what decision is made is a
#
matter of many factors, including partially the closed mindedness, partially the nature of politics,
#
a whole set of things. But those dialogues, but those spaces exist. It does so also by often
#
commissioning research, which organizations like ours pick up quite often. And increasingly,
#
which is a piece that worries me a lot and is also an existential question for institutions
#
like CPR, it also is seeking to farm out core functions of the state to, you know, what I can
#
broadly call non-state entities. These range from the big four consultancy firms to boutique
#
consulting firms to NGOs to think tanks like ours. But in all these different ways, and I
#
worry about the latter most because I really do think that that is leading to a hollowing out
#
of the state. If the state is not able to actually build its own capability to write an RFP, to do
#
basic procurement, to do, you know, a set of basic things which are core administrative functions of
#
the state, we have a lot to worry about. And when it brings in these external actors that become
#
part of the state, the big questions of what do you leave behind? You come, you fulfill your task,
#
you exit out, and large amounts of money are getting paid to all these entities that are
#
outside of the state. What is left except a very hollowed out state? So these are big questions.
#
But the larger point is that, you know, there has been a history of engagement. It finds different
#
ways despite the fact that it's very closed. And it continues to do so. And that's really the kind
#
of space that institutions like ours occupy. We sit in the interstices of these. And what has also
#
been particularly important if you look at the history of my career and engaging with the state
#
is that increasingly the locus of action is moving, not necessarily because of politics or because
#
the state wants to reorganize itself, but just by the nature of things that has to be done from the
#
center to states. And state governments are much more occupied even in this very centralized
#
structure. They are really at the heart of where the implementation happens. So they are very much
#
more occupied with questions of here and now. But they also recognize that there are, you know,
#
big design questions and capacity questions that they need to ask and answer themselves.
#
And we've been seeing repeatedly how much state governments are also reaching out for these kinds
#
of engagements, dialogues. And there's a tension because there's an impatience with the kind of
#
approach that CPR has. So CPR is going to say, look, I'm not going to tell you here are the three
#
things you need to do. We are deeply uncomfortable with that. But I can tell you, like, if this is
#
the thing you want to do, this is the logical consequence of your actions. I can tell you
#
whether you're asking the right question. I can bring and convene lots of expertise around the
#
table for you to engage in and be embedded into a particular type of community where you learn and
#
you can find answers for yourself. But really, the bureaucrats' incentives and pressures are to
#
find those three quick things that they can do. And I can see it when I see it from the
#
bureaucrats' perspective, I get it. But that's the sort of creative tension that we've constantly
#
been trying to work with and engage with. And it is in that world of policy and policy engagement
#
that this larger politics kind of finds its way. What is worrying about the push towards
#
branding and quick communication and quick PR is that it papers over all these complexities.
#
So the incentive is, what is that one thing that will be a nice grand announcement that I can make?
#
And I'm not going to then pay attention to those architectural questions that I need to ask and
#
answer to see, is this what the state is able to do, capable of doing and actually doing it?
#
And it's very boring for them to have a little group of people like CPR types and others who
#
are sort of saying, well, hang on a minute, but there are going to be, you have to ask,
#
can you actually do this? Have you budgeted for it? What does your expenditure pattern look like?
#
There's all this detail that makes up the state. So what we do has always sat in this tension. And
#
as this hyper communication of what policymaking is all about is becoming more and more, I think
#
that's where the public role of what we do as an institution has become much more central to our
#
own identity of ourselves. That we feel that it's really important to keep creating spaces where
#
some boring op-ed can be written on a particular issue of policy, which will not give you a nice
#
fancy headline, but will really get into the weeds of the issue. And a hundred people may not read
#
it, but three people who really should be reading it will eventually read it. And that's really
#
important. So holding onto the rigor of public communication and debate in this hyper Twitterized,
#
hyperactive kind of world has been a very important part of how we've also shaped our
#
own identity in all of this. Where does all of this stay within the particular political moment
#
that we find ourselves? I think there's been a history. So while we were trying to respond
#
to some of the questions, whenever the authorities open up sets of questions, there's reams of
#
paperwork. So I've studied the state by studying its circulars and papers and documents. And then
#
I've been living this life also of contributing to the papers and documents of the state.
#
But there was a very interesting set of things I saw, which I think tell us a lot about public
#
institutions. I mean, I don't think the present political moment is just the present. It has a
#
history and we need to understand that context. So the relationship, the kind of communication
#
that CPR had with many of its funders, including government in its early moments of founding,
#
the issues are always petty matters and quotidian matters. I need funds for X,
#
Y, purchase some land there, some X, Y, Z here. And there's always back and forth, 100 rupees,
#
20 rupees, 30 rupees. That's the nature of negotiation. But all of this was done within
#
the backdrop of a core set of principles. So the principles that were being debated were,
#
what does it mean to create genuinely autonomous, long-term institutions of excellence?
#
So if you need to attract talent, what are the kinds of facilities you can provide as an
#
institution to those talent? And then you start wondering about office space, desk,
#
well, I guess in those days, no computer, but file typewriter, research associates, housing,
#
and so on and so forth. And so you get into grant negotiation. But really the logic of why you are
#
doing all of these things comes from the fact that you are really asking the question of how do you
#
create a long-term institution of excellence? And what are the core principles that shape that?
#
And then how do you build its foundations? Over time, both in how government views institutions,
#
as well as how the larger ecosystem of funding views institutions has shifted quite dramatically.
#
Government started getting obsessed. So once you make the rules and the rules start dominating your
#
purpose, then all you're interested in, rule follow kiya ki nahi? Yeh nahi pucho gaye ki rule banaya
#
ki? So our communication with a lot of our government supports also starts transforming
#
into have you followed X rule? Have you followed Y rule? And then we'll get a bit crabby and say
#
this rule is so unhelpful. And they will say, but it is a rule. And then we will say, okay. And then
#
we'll be thinking about how do you kind of build an institution with these rules? And what are
#
ways of working around them? But the rules dominate. And similarly with the non-state funding,
#
how do you after all research or public activity of this nature? All of that has to be supported by
#
financing. I mean, there's no getting around it. And in the early days of institution building
#
in India, 60s, 70s, 80s, perhaps with a few exceptions, India didn't have private capital
#
that could invest in institutions. And so we did have international philanthropic institutions.
#
The Ford Foundation played a really crucial role. You can't look at one Indian institution
#
of excellence today that did not get an endowment from Ford Foundation in the 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s.
#
IIT, IIM, CPR also I might add. But the modus operandi was very different. It was endowments.
#
Giving you an endowment that will sustain the institutional backbone or backing a set of ideas
#
and an institutional structure that would enable that for you to be able to build out.
#
To a degree, even the big Indian philanthropists of the time were beginning to do precisely the
#
same. So Tata's name will come up always with institutions of excellence in India. You see the
#
kinds of investments they've made and those institutions remain at the top echelons of
#
creating globally competitive students. But there wasn't that much local competition.
#
There were these international philanthropists. And as the world changed post 1990s, the emergence
#
of the Silicon Valley philanthropists also just changed how they thought about philanthropy.
#
You're no longer supporting institutions. You're supporting projects. You're supporting a set of
#
ideas that will give you a particular outcome. But you're not thinking about the institutional
#
backbone into which you would build it. Even as CPR was growing in the time when I came to CPR,
#
there was this expansion of global philanthropy led largely by this many of them were US led
#
Silicon Valley philanthropists who also don't think about the world as boundaries. For them,
#
the nation state is an old idea. There is a problem in the world and it's a problem I want
#
to solve and I will seek different ways and spaces. And if they happen to be in a country,
#
that's fine. But if they're not in that country, as long as they're working on that problem.
#
So that's how this sort of new sets of resources were made available. But those resources were
#
never thinking about institutions. They were about projects. So we started getting quite
#
projectized. We were very lucky that we were able to build long term research ideas by
#
constantly getting new monies for these in these projectized form ways for these
#
programs at CPR. So we built out initiatives, my initiative on accountability, my colleague
#
Navro's initiative on climate, Partho's initiative on urban. These all have actually had a history
#
over a 15, 16 year history of incubation and building up at CPR. But they were all built on
#
the back of these project funds. And all you would get for the institution were overhead.
#
So you're just sort of leaving institutions very vulnerable to taking 10% overhead, 5% overhead
#
for administration, for long term security of its talent, etc. But nobody was willing to engage in
#
that conversation. And I think Indian private capital, whilst it was beginning to mature and
#
started looking at philanthropy in a big way, was waiting to be convinced. And perhaps it's both
#
ends, I guess you could argue whether we played that role well or not. But it wasn't completely
#
convinced that this kind of intermediate space and policy was where it should anchor a lot of
#
its philanthropy. So that has always been a challenge. And I think because Indian
#
philanthropy is also sort of in a nascent state, sorry, it is also trying to make these,
#
there are important distinctions, supporting institutions with endowments, supporting ideas,
#
supporting the university, which the public university is atrophying. And so where can the
#
next generation of knowledge creation actually come from? It is also, you know, trying to,
#
has to mature to understand distinctions between, you know, what is conflict of interest? What is
#
the distinction between research, policy, lobbying? And all of these are things that you have to be
#
very sensitive to because that's what builds, shapes the purpose and norms of the institution.
#
So, you know, in a way, CPR kind of our growth path was led by this broader philanthropy that
#
was coming from across the globe, partly because Indian philanthropy was still in conversation
#
with itself and with institutions like ours to find its way. And, you know, it does, of course,
#
important questions of what is, you know, where and how should Indian institutions be funded,
#
but that's a very deep societal question. And the world of ideas is not going to be limited
#
by boundaries of nation state. It has to have an interaction and an approach. And in fact,
#
as an institution, our presence evolved both in interacting very deeply with Indian institutions,
#
but also interacting very deeply with global institutions on questions of global public goods,
#
on presenting an Indian perspective in the university, in the UN, at the World Bank and so
#
on. And that's really important because you have to have these, especially on as the challenges of
#
the globe are changing and it's confronting questions of climate change, it's confronting
#
questions of pandemics and so on and so forth. You need to have these diverse perspectives that
#
come from countries that can shape those agendas. I think some of the work that my climate colleagues
#
at CPR have done is so central to this, you know, and that means you have to have networks,
#
which means that funds have to flow from across boundaries. If we are okay with cross border
#
funding for running large parts of our economy, surely you should also have cross borders funding
#
for supporting the generation of knowledge and ideas. But really, the heart of this question
#
has been what does it take to genuinely build institutions in India for India, where principles
#
of autonomy, academic freedom and the end goal of excellence remain at the heart of it. And I think
#
India lost the space to have those conversations. You can see it in the sort of history of CPR's
#
own documentation. And that's where you find yourself in this present moment, where then
#
political agendas will dominate. You know, if we as a society do not have patience for knowledge
#
generation that doesn't necessarily fit into silos of university or NGO. If we as a society
#
do not value shaping or contributions into public discourse that are at that intersection of the
#
academy and policy. If we as a society don't value long term engagement with questions of policy in
#
ways that are completely freed of voices of either capital or domestic capital or international
#
capital, and freed of government perspectives, then we need to be investing in those institutions.
#
And that investment means that we need to be willing to give large endowments and cherish
#
and value and hold on to ideas of academic freedom and institutional autonomy. And we're
#
not good at it. Like, look at all our public institutions. They've all fallen apart precisely
#
for these reasons. So I think the challenges that CPR faces really have their roots in all of this.
#
And then, you know, the political moment creates an environment where when these are not valued by
#
society, then you become vulnerable to the politics of the day. So for me, the politics of the day is
#
less interesting. Those are things that you have to navigate. And it throws up very important
#
policy questions, right? I mean, that's the stuff that really gets us all excited. That's what we
#
should be free to do. And, you know, that's what we should be supported to do. Even in the moment of
#
your suffering, you're a geek enough that you're analyzing your suffering. Yeah, really. Not only
#
am I geeky and nerdy, our entire building is full of geeks and nerds. I'm a big fan of geeks and nerds.
#
And I think it's incredibly short sighted of philanthropists also to, you know, go project
#
by project or even idea by idea. Like that then changes the incentives for you also. Then perhaps
#
you have to cater to what you think will be fashionable for the funders in question. And
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has fundraising been a big part of your job? Is it a huge headache? Oh, yeah. I mean, look,
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fundraising was a big part of everything that we do, right? Because we are kind of hopping from
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ground to ground. But really, our institutional imagination was to, you know, and this was our
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collective project, right? How do you build a sustainable institution? So how do you actually
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strengthen the institutional backbone? And that basically means that, you know, that funding can't
#
be glamorous. It can't be about, I'm going to solve, you know, India's health crisis by funding
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health, a project on health research or, you know, accountability and health, or I'm going to solve
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climate change or I want to engage with climate change and only support climate work that, you
#
know, obviously you can support parts of that. But if you don't contribute into the institution
#
and there's no institutional space for all of this to come together, it's going to be short lived. So,
#
you know, pushing and trying to convince funders that this is what they should support and how
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they should support has been a big part of the job and a big challenge. We've not been very good at
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it. That's what kind of, you know, opens up all these questions about, you know, foreign funding,
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Indian funding, et cetera, et cetera. But also like at the heart of it, you know, I think we have
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not been, we've perhaps not done a good job or there isn't enough of a collective thinking around
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what role does research play in the making and shaping of policy. And that's not just an Indian
#
question or an Indian challenge. It's a global question and a global challenge. And it's always
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sat in tension with questions of impact and how policy gets made and what role do external actors
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to the state actually play in contributing into the state. And we've not been able to really,
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you know, we've tried very hard. I'm convinced of the sweet spot that we occupy. But, you know,
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the challenge had been to convince the rest of India that sweet spot is something that's worth
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preserving. And in, you know, times of very polarized politics and heightened political
#
sensitivity, that does create its own challenges to, you know, any willingness to be risky.
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I can't speak for what goes on in the minds of funders. But I do think that what all of this is
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should remind us is just about what the consequences of chilling effect can be.
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Those who have access to the power of the state and the tools of the state are most certainly
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going to deploy them. It is our role as participants in the public sphere to impose checks and balances
#
within the framework of whatever role we choose to occupy. And I think pushing back against
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chilling effect is really important. Research's role is to, you know, constantly encourage
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engagement with ideas. And that engagement with ideas is by definition critical. So what does it,
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you know, for me, this question of what is critique, because, you know, one of the questions
#
that constantly come up, you know, are, is it the role of public policy professionals to be
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critics of policy or to be supporters of policy? And to my mind, it's neither. It's about looking
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at a question and analyzing it and engaging with it. And if you don't critically engage with it,
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you just ain't doing your job. So it's not about criticizing a particular politics or a particular
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type of politics. It's being objective, rigorous, and from a particular normative framework. I mean,
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you know, you and I can argue about whether the state should be so heavily involved in welfare
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or not. And it'll be a fun conversation to have between the two of us. But, you know, and I will
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come with a normative framework and you will come with a normative framework. That's an argument,
#
right? That there will always be, therefore, a certain set of biases that come into your
#
interpretation of the world. And the source of those biases will be different and many.
#
But that is not being political. Being political is to say, I support, you know, is an active act
#
of support. Whereas engaging where you're accepting and saying this is good and challenging and saying
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this is wrong is actually genuine public engagement. That's the space we have to preserve in India.
#
We don't value it, unfortunately. We should have that welfare state argument one day,
#
but not today. Meanwhile, talking about talking about the chilling effect. I mean, it reminds me
#
of what Advani said in 1975 about those who were asked to bend, chose to crawl. And, you know,
#
and I can totally imagine funders now, you know, staying away from something that could be frowned
#
upon. And it's a huge problem. Let's sort of talk about your insights on the Indian state right now.
#
Like you have a great talk on YouTube, which are linked from the show notes called The Case of the
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Powerful Powerless State, where you make the point that the state at once is both powerless
#
and powerful. You cite how repeatedly government functionaries or low level bureaucrats will say
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that, oh, the state can do a heck of a lot if it wants to, but I can't do anything. While in
#
that particular context, they are the state. Tell me a little bit about your analysis of this and
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this fascinating formulation of powerful yet powerless. So, you know, in all the years of
#
traversing the local state, this thing would keep coming up, you know. So we have a collective
#
imagination that I have also imbibed of the local state being this corrupt, apathetic, nasty set of
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actors all grabbing power. And, you know, it doesn't take very much to have that reinforced
#
because you just have to walk into a panchayat office or walk into a BDO's office or sit in a
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DM's meeting, and you can see how that power is aggregated and deployed constantly to the citizen,
#
to the average person. We've spoken about the My Baap Sarkar. You can visibly see it in every
#
tactile way, and the trappings of power, the Lal Bhatti Gari, the, you know, the 10 peons holding
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onto your lunchbox and your files, it's all very much part and parcel of, you know, this
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the materiality and the lived reality of the state and why, how power is presented to society.
#
And yet, you know, this thing would keep coming up again and again and again. You know,
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I, you know, if we wanted to, we could do these, I don't, I feel like I'm a cog in a wheel.
#
You know, this sort of this constant narrative that one would keep hearing of,
#
you know, the state constantly being asked to do things, but asked by somebody else,
#
and then all that they are doing is, you know, running around, like sort of chasing their tails,
#
filling up these forms and sending them back. And again, like my initial reaction was just
#
to dismiss this as this is just, you know, yet again, this corrupt state, inefficient state,
#
just feeding off its own inefficiency. But, you know, it also sort of sat in contrast with
#
two other things. So one of the early things we did when I came to CPR and was beginning to
#
experiment with this idea of accountability initiative with Pratham and Asar, we had been
#
talking a lot about what parent-teacher communities, your school management committees,
#
so in that phase, this whole community participation, community planning,
#
citizen-led accountability was baked into all of our schemes and programs.
#
And what we were sort of thinking about in conversation with Pratham and my own interests
#
and what the kind of approach that accountability initiative was beginning to take is to sort of say
#
that if these new sites are being opened up for citizens, for people to engage with government,
#
government is sort of inviting people to come and participate. It's a new and unusual thing.
#
What are the ways in which we can actually facilitate and contribute into that? And so
#
in many ways of the way Asar survey is done, that, you know, local organizations, local civil society,
#
people from the area whose children are going to school or who have an engagement with the school
#
are participating in trying to build evidence to understand, how do we find other ways of building
#
all of this? Because the idea of planning is nice and paper, but its practice is so complicated.
#
And there was a lot of experimentation going on. Many RCTs were also being done. What does
#
awareness on AIX, some information dissemination on why do to how people engage the school, the
#
panchayat, the health center and so on. And what we felt through the conversations with Pratham,
#
we said, you know, why get locked into just one tool? So when you're doing an RCT,
#
your experiment is controlled, right? So you don't have space to innovate, to change,
#
to be responsive. And so we said, we don't really want to do a study as such. It's not an
#
evaluation to prove a point. We have a hypothesis. We normatively believe in this hypothesis. Let's
#
experiment to see how it actually unfolds. And we'll use planning as a tool. So we said,
#
we'll choose a set of villages and we'll keep going back and forth, engaging with the parent
#
teacher association, knowing fully well that when you first land up over there, you're going to have
#
a while to build trust, to build relationships, to try and convince parents to come to these
#
meetings, because a lot of this was on paper and not in practice. So we began this in these
#
joint teams and we started going repeatedly to a set cluster of villages in just outside of
#
Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. And in the course of those, after the sort of first set of early
#
interactions in a couple of villages, we found the PTA, you know, quite enthusiastic and said,
#
okay, why don't we start doing this planning business? That opened up a whole new Pandora's
#
box because planning means the first question that anybody will ask you is, what am I planning
#
for? What is the base of my plan? And as it turns out, it is not very easy to figure out out of
#
those many lakhs, thousands, crores that are allocated by government, how much of that actually
#
reaches the school over which the school has control so the school can make a plan.
#
That information actually doesn't exist anywhere in the world. So the first recognition for me was,
#
oh my gosh, actually the value, but I had spent some time thinking about right to information,
#
working with the right to information campaign. And this question of citizens having information
#
on the state was front and center on my mind, but I never thought about how the state actually has
#
so little information about itself that when you go to the block, you go to the cluster office,
#
you go to the district, nobody could actually give us a good answer. And it turns out that there is
#
no good answer. There's no one magic number. You actually have to peel the onion of the budget in
#
all kinds of complicated ways and arrive at some kind of guesstimate because also the state is so
#
centralized and distrustful of itself that it constantly ties up monies to decisions that a
#
level higher is going to make. So this is a great irony of the Indian state. As the instrument of
#
social change, it necessitated that the state be distanced from society. Yet in its everyday
#
function, it was totally embedded in society, dispensing patronage, grabbing where it could,
#
et cetera. And then the logic of development is pushing the state to participate, to invite,
#
to engage, but it doesn't actually, because it has to be distant, it doesn't trust its grassroots
#
functionary. So it's tying everything. So literally a school at that point in time,
#
we calculated out of these, you know, whatever 15 lakh crores that were allocated by government of
#
India within the range of that number, was getting about 15,000 rupees. That was also
#
broken up into three line items. One for teaching learning material, 500 rupees. You can buy a globe.
#
You can buy a little chart when you want to teach the kids to your discretion as a teacher.
#
Otherwise teachers didn't have any freedom to purchase teaching learning material. It
#
would be sent from the state government, all the material that was produced by the learner,
#
people sitting in the state capital. Then there was a little for school development. So you have
#
a, you know, you, you, you had some, you needed to do some small amounts of money for that. And then
#
for school maintenance, you could buy a register, buy some chalk, buy some repaint your blackboard.
#
And so, I mean, even this 15,000 rupees, we did not trust the school to have it free for itself.
#
And here is the pay PTM saying, what kind of plan am I supposed to make if the money is locked like
#
this? So we discovered, you know, these two things, a lack of information, B lack of trust,
#
everything is tied. So actually the guy on the ground doesn't seem to really have the power in
#
all practical terms to do anything. And then we also discovered how when you see a problem,
#
so one of the villages where we finally made headway, they wanted to do such a simple thing.
#
The roof was broken there, you know, the cycle of attendance and the, and the calendar of the school
#
don't match the real world, agricultural, social activity, cultural activity of the village. So
#
children often miss school because they've gone somewhere else, they're helping out in the field,
#
whatever. There's this one phase in the rainy season where according to this parent teacher
#
association, children actually are free to come unbroken attend classes. But because the roof has
#
been broken for a couple of years, the classrooms get flooded and it gives us the teacher the classic
#
excuse not to show up, not to teach. So they wanted to, this is a very, it's exactly why
#
decentralization matters. They just wanted to fix the roof. And they were willing to give their own
#
labor free of cost to do so, but the materials had to be purchased for which money had to come and
#
under one of these development maintenance line items. But the months passed and no money showed
#
up, no money showed up, no money showed up. So it became a bit awkward and embarrassing. And I
#
thought I would write a nice little real world paper, which of course now I couldn't. So my
#
incentives also started increasing to find out like who are care. And we went, you know, through
#
the layers of the system all the way to the state capital to discover there was some tiny problem
#
about names and bank accounts because at that point they were transitioning to to e-banking
#
that prevented the money from going. But nobody in the system knew. And heck, nobody in the system
#
cared. And so when it came to this parent-teacher association knocking on the door of the cluster
#
officer and the block officer, they did not have answers. And they were then like, you know,
#
wanting to be as far away from these characters as possible. So these experiences, whenever I
#
thought back to those, it constantly made me realize, it reminded me that actually these local
#
our systems are so tight that these local governments actually so controlled and so
#
centralized, they have no power to do anything. So when they're saying I'm just a paper pusher,
#
they actually are genuinely, you know, there's something here that needs to be engaged with.
#
And then, you know, in when we started doing, so in order to understand what exactly was going on,
#
we began to do in different ways qualitative interviews. My first foray was a study with
#
Shrayana Bhattacharya, who I still think has some of the greatest insights on the state as much as
#
she has insights on gender and Shah Rukh Khan. My most popular episode was with Shrayana.
#
But I swear she knows more. I keep pulling her back saying, let's do more on the state, man.
#
But she, but so we, you know, together, we were kind of spending a lot of time talking to block
#
officers experimenting with different, we did some time use studies and different ways of trying to
#
understand what exactly was going on. And at the heart of that was this record, what we realized
#
through these constant conversations was how much this imagination of the post officer actually is
#
close to their lived reality. There is no flexibility to determine the course of your day. Our time use
#
study showed us very clearly, you know, literally there'll be an order from the top and you have to
#
immediately implement it. And, you know, there is no such thing as a job description for a block
#
education officer. He's basically responding to whatever is coming and forwarding it on.
#
Once I was hanging around in Madhya Pradesh and, you know, we were waiting, waiting, waiting for
#
the BEO to come to do an interview. And then he shows up, you know, as BEOs do on his Enfield
#
with his Ray-Bans and, you know, sort of, so he starts walking very, you know, by now it's
#
already 11 o'clock and madam has been sitting there for quite some time. Shows up to see me,
#
takes off his Ray-Bans, very excited because, you know, it's exciting that Delhi madam has come.
#
And so then we start talking, you know, I thought like this guy looks like he's quite a dude,
#
but it turns out that he had been told in the morning that there is going to be a mandatory
#
surya namaskar in all the schools for the attendance period and he needs to tell all his
#
cluster resource officers. So the structure at that time used to be that there was a CRCC,
#
a cluster resource center coordinator who was in charge of 15 schools. A senior teacher was given
#
an administrative job, had to go to all the schools to monitor that this was happening,
#
report back because he had to report to his DEO. DEO must have had to respond to DM. DM must have
#
had to respond to up the chain to state government. And so therefore this is what he was doing. So,
#
you know, it was seemed a bit banal then to ask what he thought about the school and learning
#
and these bigger questions because this is what was being asked of him. He was busy doing this,
#
he was a busy man. You know, his phones, he had three phones, they were all buzzing and
#
somebody was coming in with some parchi here, some parchi there and, you know, so he was collecting
#
all this information and someone was being ordered to type it all up. The computer next to him was
#
not working. So, you know, of course there's all of that. You know, it really like in this very
#
real way tells you like the actually the expectations that the system places on its lower officers
#
are expectations of responding, not expectations of performance. And, you know, through the
#
and as these conversations were built up in different parts of the country, we just, you know,
#
in different ways, I was studying the local bureaucracies, whenever we would ask questions
#
around what could you do, you know, if you if there's three things about the education problem
#
that you would like to solve, what would they be? There would be a little bit of humming and
#
hawing, no real answers, no great grand thinking or even pedantic thinking or any thinking at all.
#
But it was all but you know, you'd get these strange things that the state can do something,
#
it can do a lot. And, you know, at some point, I just didn't even notice these things. It was
#
my RA Vinci who said, Isn't this a strange thing because he is the Sarkar and, you know, that
#
to me really brought it home to me. And when we would have conversations with higher levels of
#
officers, those conversations also always were about how incompetent the lower bureaucracy is
#
and how they can't do anything. And, and it made me think because in my institutional life, if I
#
don't trust my colleague and my juniors to actually do the jobs that I have allocated to them, hell,
#
I wouldn't get anything done. And I kept wondering, like, how can we get how can the state get things
#
done if it doesn't actually control if it doesn't trust itself and trust its people. And it's that
#
together that sort of shaped this idea of, you know, the state is powerful, you ask anybody in
#
the state, they will talk about the trappings of power, they imbibe it, they exude it and they
#
shape they presented that shapes their person that shapes their purpose. And that's why they
#
want to be part of the state. And yet, when they're in the state, they are actually incentivized to
#
function in these in this very powerless way. And the internal hierarchy of the state has got
#
rarefied in such a way that it seeks legitimacy in this story of the inability of the of the story
#
of the incompetence of the local state. And so it deploys hierarchy in a way that further undermines
#
the the dignity of the of the individual. So think about how these meetings would take place,
#
right? You'll have the there's a hierarchy of IAS and state card, there's a hierarchy of district
#
and block. And always the meetings were never about saying or rarely were they about, you know,
#
asking about problems or trying to approach things with a problem solving way. It was there's an
#
order, it has to be implemented. Why have you not done it shouting, screaming, you know, generally
#
sort of presenting positioning of hierarchy. And that is the framework in which these individuals
#
have to also it also is actually fundamentally deeply disempowering. And and so, you know, through
#
a lot of my work on the state, I've been trying to present that how disempowering it is and how the
#
artifacts of the state. So these circulars and orders, we studied Delhi's schools reforms. In
#
fact, that's a I have a long paper, which I'm in the process of converting into a book on it. You
#
know, I was really interested not in the question of what type of reform, but what actually happens
#
when you want to change systems, and how do these local actors respond. But the only way the state
#
talks to itself is through orders, we had like 8000 orders in a period of three years, 8000
#
orders, that's not even the beginning of the it's only the tip of the iceberg, all coming in the
#
form of circulars and orders that the schools get. And the language of the orders are legalese, you
#
know, because that's the language of bureaucracy. So it's about, you know, what you should do
#
mandatory, you know, there will be penalties. That's how the state talks to itself. So its
#
language is also very disempowering. And I really wanted to be able to bring this out because I
#
think it's a very important part of the conversation that we have to have about the state. Because what
#
we expect of the state as this participatory, communicative, engaged, yet distant autonomous
#
Weberian actor is completely divorced from it from the reality of how it operates. And its lack
#
of trust has legitimized, you know, Lant has this nice phrase of accounting for accountability,
#
it has legitimized means of accounting, so curbing discretion, so that you can trace every little bit
#
of the paper down to the officer and not giving them the space to make decisions about whether
#
they should spend the money buying more teaching learning material or fixing a roof. Because that
#
is what accountability is, rather than thinking of the core of the account, what is the core purpose,
#
and how does that legitimacy of purpose get built up in the profession within the state? So
#
teachers talking to each other about teaching, doctors talking to each other about being doctors,
#
about, you know, engineers and so on, all of which has been taken away into this accounting based
#
accountability, which I think is a fundamental problem. And the other piece of work that I'm
#
very influenced by that helps me sort of place all of this into and build out analytical frameworks
#
is work that by Akshay Mangla, who's sort of who really centered this question of norms and how we
#
understand informal norms and how we understand the state. And in his sort of study of Indian
#
bureaucratic norms makes this very interesting distinction between legalistic norms and deliberative
#
norms. So legalistic norms are sort of this obsession with rule following. And it's also
#
what he what I think is curious about this obsession with rule following is that it's
#
rule following for administrative activity, but it's not rule following otherwise, because
#
there's a lot of like rule bending that is going on for private accumulation of power as an actor
#
of the state. And then there is, you know, a more embedded state that is more genuinely in conversation,
#
seeking feedback, deliberating, engaging, that's the sort of deliberative norms of the state,
#
which in his work, he finds the state of Himachal Pradesh has a lot more of than
#
the state of UP or Uttarakhand. And I think that's a very nice way of trying to understand the
#
problem. And it goes back to this larger question of politics, right? When your politics becomes
#
polarized and wears towards authoritarian control, it closes off the space for these forms of
#
deliberation. And absent these forms of deliberation, you don't get a state that is genuinely able to
#
empower itself and be responsive to the tasks that it has to set up for itself. So, you know,
#
I think that that's a these are sort of in the conversation on state capacity, because now it's
#
become quite the norm to say the Indian state lacks capacity. Sometimes we say capability,
#
there are slightly different things, but those nuances are not core to the argument I want to
#
make here. We've kind of, you know, lost out on thinking about these aspects of the state. So we
#
think about it in terms of rules, contracts, incentives. We don't think about it in terms
#
of actually it is an organizational animal that is evolving. It has a culture, it has a structure,
#
it has a system, it has an informal way of operating and communicating with itself. And those
#
informal ways shape its culture, which actually make it quite resistant to being able to be
#
responsive to the tasks that it has been given. So when we try to reform by trying to shift the
#
terms of the contract by trying to bring in performance incentives, which are all good
#
things to do. And you know, those are the kind of sort of typical toolkits that we have when we
#
talk about building state capacity or building its capability. We actually missing the point
#
because all of those can be can be subverted if you don't actually build that core culture,
#
or engage with the culture as it is and find levers that can shift it. It's a long term thing
#
is going to happen overnight. It may not happen at all. But I think that was where the starting
#
point is. And that also brings me to another piece of the discourse on the Indian state
#
in the present moment that I get uncomfortable with, which is a discourse around technology.
#
It's not that I'm not anti that technology, or I don't think you know, those are not my challenges.
#
What I worry about is that we quickly jump onto the technology as the answer, without thinking
#
about this element of the state. And so the technology can always be subverted. And that's
#
what we want as a society. So you know, when in Delhi airport was impossible to get through all
#
the elites that want state out of the way when it comes to their private businesses are, you know,
#
tweeting out to to Civil Aviation Minister that we are standing in lines for too long,
#
you have to fix this. One of the reasons we were standing in lines for too long is because for some
#
reason in the airport, they keep checking your ticket about 25 times. And once you became digital
#
and all the tickets are on our phones, you have to pinch them open, kissy ka phone band ho jata hai,
#
then you have to open it, it takes ages and ages. And with COVID, there were all those screens.
#
We never got to that problem. We just said, let's do Diriji Yatra. You know, what are we saying,
#
you know, you have to get to the structural issues. And if you keep shying away from them,
#
you actually atrophy the state completely. And that's what I worry about.
#
So you've spoken at length in the talk and elsewhere, and you've written about this how,
#
you know, many of the commonly cited issues with what is wrong with the state can, you know,
#
turn out to be simplistic. Like you've spoken about, you know, one bucket of problems is what
#
you call the policy problems where, you know, good people will say, hey, the policy may be good,
#
but the implementation is bad, land budgets, formulation of a failing state and so on.
#
People speak about incentives, accounting as accountability, as you just said, then there's
#
a political economy problem, or what one could call, I guess, a public choice problems, you know,
#
so there is the interest and the incentives of politicians and ditto of bureaucrats and so on
#
and so forth, where the politicians will complain that, hey, the bureaucrats don't do it, what can
#
I do? I'm only Modi, I have no power, and so on and so forth. And then, of course, the fiscal
#
constraints, a poverty problem. And you've also spoken about how some of the solutions don't work,
#
like the three buckets you've spoken about are outsourcing, where the state will get people from
#
outside, whether it's consulting firms or NGO wallahs like you guys, and not build its own
#
capacity. You've spoken about technology, how it tends to have a centralizing impulse anyway,
#
and you can then use that as an excuse for saying that, hey, we've got this, this solves
#
a problem, engineering mindset, we don't need to do anything else. And the recent rhetoric of what
#
you call the citizen as Lal Bharti, where the bureaucrat is a problem and you can conveniently
#
pass it off there. I mean, this was so fascinating, the way you've defined the scope of the problem,
#
and it seems that in the whole body of the state, it's just so sclerotic and there are just so many
#
problems of paralysis along the way and all that. What are the kind of solutions that you think we
#
should work towards and how likely are those to be accepted and actually happen? So I think,
#
you know, the politics issue is something we should tackle head on. I think that politics
#
will always bring with it a set of skewed incentives or its own set of incentives,
#
not skewed, its own set of incentives. And in some ways, they reflect social choice,
#
they reflect the dynamics of power, and they reflect the nature of our institutions. All
#
those things come together. But when we sort of say what is good for politics is not always good
#
for economics, or what is good for politics is not good for policy, I think we are being really
#
lame. It's an easy excuse. There is no perfect world. And so any kind of policy has to recognize
#
and engage with the politics. And in fact, often the politics is not completely off, you know,
#
there are always going to be winners and losers and politics is about negotiating between those
#
winners and losers and arriving at, you know, in an ideal world, a political settlement that works
#
but, you know, in the real world, where there will be a few marginalized voices, marginalized
#
voices who lose and the dominant voices who win. And then, you know, you have to keep rising or
#
democracy allows you to keep rising open some of those spaces and keeping them alive so that the
#
marginalized voices don't get lost in the din. But, you know, engaging with that politics and
#
working with that politics is really important. The job of those of us who think about the state
#
is not to have answers to politics, but it's certainly not to dismiss politics. But it's to
#
say, how can the state be able to be agile, flexible and responsive in ways that are able
#
to absorb what the politics wants it to do whilst also being able to hold on to its core purpose?
#
There are no easy and good answers to any of these things. But I think there are some useful
#
starting points. So because the Indian state is so deeply atrophied, perhaps the first starting
#
point is just for the state to believe in itself. Like, you know, that these things can, you know,
#
this sounds silly, but there are very good examples in India. When state, market, elites, public come
#
together to build a consensus, lots of things can happen. One example of that, by the way, is this
#
digital story. Like, you know, what India's digital story, whatever challenges it may have, if we just
#
put those on the hold for a moment. But if you look at what it has in such a short period of time
#
been able to do, it has done it on account of the fact that there was a broad consensus across all
#
parts of the key stakeholders or parts of the policy and political and corporate elite that
#
came together to say, we can do this and we will find a way to do it. And there will be tensions,
#
there will be negotiations, but the state will have to come and enable things, exit out to let
#
other things go. And, you know, it sort of created that. So to me, like, we should be looking at that
#
and going, heck, if we can do that, we can do education. Sure, education is more complicated,
#
but we can bloody do it. And we have, you know, it's the same thing of the state, you know,
#
we were able to make some big headway in reimagining our economic pathways in the 1990s.
#
There were very real, practical, pragmatic reasons as to why that was necessitated,
#
but there were also other elements of, you know, push that built up a social, a political and
#
economic consensus around what we wanted to do. And we went ahead and we did it. And I've often
#
asked many of those who led that moment, so why did we not do the other? It's pretty self-evident
#
that you need to build human capital, education, health. These are all things you have to do.
#
And I never got a good answer except to say, well, that's complicated. Why should we be okay with
#
that? Why should we not say, well, let's put our heads together and try and solve this problem? So
#
I do think the believing matters, but to get to the believing, it's not just like a romantic idea.
#
It's that actually it needs us to constantly be infusing these little, little missions into
#
the lowest levels of the state all the way up to the highest levels of the state to be able to see
#
how it can be done and build a consensus within the state of what is possible. So some of my work
#
on education, for instance, began out of this puzzle of conversations with various bureaucrats
#
about education reforms that always said, we can do the summer camp, we can do the little pilot,
#
but when it comes to routinizing it into the everyday functioning of the state, it just gets
#
lost. It doesn't happen. The Indian state can do missions. It's not able to do anything else.
#
And in fact, that was my puzzle. That was my starting point. I wanted to understand why this
#
routinization always fails. There's an IS officer who described it very nicely saying, the Indian
#
state is like this burial ground of pirates. Everywhere you'll find one district that did it,
#
one change agent there that managed to create one institution. Then they go and it all just
#
disappears and we bury it and we move on to the next thing. So I wanted to understand the
#
routinization problem, but I came full circle back to saying actually constantly multiple missions
#
keeping at it may well be the way in which you build that consensus around the possibilities
#
of what you can do. So I've seen it in classrooms. The teachers are saying there is no way that you
#
can convert a child that is so far away from the curriculum into becoming at least a little bit
#
closer despite all their all sorts of problems with the curriculum is over ambitious. It has all
#
sorts of issues, but you know that the child can progress. It's impossible. And then you say,
#
okay, let's do it in mission mode for six months. They do it. They try it. They actually see it's
#
possible. Now they don't believe it can those methods of teaching can come back into the
#
classroom, but they've seen it once. Now, if you keep doing it again and again and again,
#
slowly you will build consensus. It's like building social consensus on many issues.
#
It requires constant infusions of possibility. And that to me is an approach. I certainly think
#
loosening up the centralized control both at the government of India and the state level is
#
important. It may lead to a little bit of chaos, but that little chaos eventually will create
#
organic pockets of innovation that will help in building up the possibilities of again,
#
capacity and capability and belief in what the state can achieve at the grassroots level. It
#
has to be a bottom-up effort. It can't be done by stealth by anybody. So it's no surprise that
#
even a prime minister like ours, who is known to be somebody who can quote unquote get things done,
#
complains all the time about the bureaucracy. I read a chapter by James Manor in a book that
#
was written in the early 1990s about prime ministers and their bureaucracy. And from
#
Nehru onwards, we've had the same complaints with Indian bureaucracy. It's too elite. It's
#
too distant. It's colonial in its approach, et cetera, et cetera. None of them have ever been
#
able to reform it, perhaps actively chosen not to or been unable to. This is the instrument we have
#
in our hands. We need to start moving it and maneuvering it in ways that actually get things
#
done. And that will only happen, I believe, from the bottom up. You know, at one point, you lay
#
out four propositions for change. And I'm intrigued by one of them, which is the second one where you
#
speak about systems that fix their own pipes. And it's almost like, you know, making an arm
#
of the state follow its own kind of machine learning, in a sense. Can you illustrate that
#
for me? What do you mean by a system that can fix its own pipe? And how would you bring something
#
like that about? So it's almost an inversion of what had become the norm of how people thought
#
about the problem of state capacity, which was it's a leaky pipe and we need to plug the holes
#
constantly. So you're actually not looking at the whole set of holes. You're saying, I see a hole
#
here, I'm going to plug it. And then, you know, the water will come out from the next hole and
#
I'm going to plug that. And that's what we keep doing. We don't actually have this sort of broader
#
system-wide imagination. So the idea really was, so what I've been pushing is, you know,
#
the plugging the hole will give you a short-term relief at best. It's not going to solve the long
#
term problem. So let's do the hard work. Let's actually be able to see the pipe all through.
#
When I see the pipe all through, the thing that I see the most is an extremely centralized rule
#
bound system that takes its rules to the logical conclusion of making the rule the purpose. And
#
breaking that requires you then to start thinking about the broader purpose of this pipe. Why was
#
the pipe laid here in the first place? And it's interesting when, you know, I never converted it
#
into a paper because it was just a set of experimental questions, but we started asking
#
around BDOs, you know, what is your idea? Because when you say, you know, why do you want to be a
#
government servant? Everyone will give you one standard answer of service, seva. It always comes
#
up. But what is seva? So we would push what does service mean, you know, and then it would be scheme
#
implementation. But this broader sense of, you know, do we have a collective imagination of what
#
welfare of people are, what well-being is, what role of state is. Actually, so much of that is not
#
even taught or engaged with. So you become a government bureaucrat. Where do you actually
#
talk about and learn about these issues? So in a completely separate set of thinking, this question
#
of why so many engineers are now coming into the IAS. And I got pilloried for raising this question
#
because I don't have any empirical basis on which to answer. But intuitively, I feel like when you
#
have only one discipline that is dominating a particular profession, it brings the orthodoxies
#
and dogmas of that discipline along with the advantages of that discipline. So it's not able
#
to ask it, you know, what does well-being mean when you're thinking like an engineer, you're
#
thinking about the holes. But when you think about it from a social as a social scientist,
#
or when you're thinking about it from the point of view of, you know, of education or a larger
#
philosophical question of the type of society you want to bring, then you start developing
#
a much more holistic understanding of well-being. And when we are doing training or building all of
#
this up, these things don't even come up. So, you know, in one of the, in our state capacity
#
initiative at CPR, we started working on training for the state cadre officers. And that's where
#
we started experimenting with, you know, many of them are engineers or STEM students that are
#
coming in. Some have, you know, been given education that is not one that anyone can write
#
too much, write home about. But, you know, you initiate these more robust, rounded conversations,
#
anchoring it in norms and purpose. And you actually do see a much more, you know, people want to talk
#
about this stuff. After all, they're living it. Who is coming into the IAS today or into the state
#
civil services or actually who is becoming the state today? It is aspirational people who are
#
living through, you know, the heartland of India, the heart of India, and then finding their way
#
into urban context and getting these permanent jobs. That's why they all die. That's why this
#
craze for government jobs. So, they have an intuitive understanding of it, but it needs to
#
be articulated and brought into this larger framing of purpose. And again, that's another aspect of
#
the system's orientation, that you need to think of the system from the ground up. Where does it
#
begin? It begins with its people when they enter into the service. Are we actually building that
#
imagination from the bottom up all the way to the top? So, again, like, you know, the holes may
#
administratively in the interim while you do all these big things need to consistently be plugged.
#
But you must plug the holes with this larger imagination of the system. And that is something
#
where, and for me, that is about building in a core sense of public purpose and linking and
#
concomitantly with that, more empowerment and decentralization so that the state at the local
#
level can genuinely represent the people that it works for. The CPR and merchandise. I have a
#
t-shirt line for you. If you don't want holes, be holistic. My next fundraising branding,
#
I'm coming to you. Yeah, for sure. I'll give you as many lines as you kind of want. You know,
#
you have so many insights on this subject and you've spoken about so many other subjects,
#
which I have here in my notes that, you know, we take another few hours to cover them. So
#
you know, perhaps we'll have another conversation, but I'll put a lot of links in the show notes for
#
listeners to go to. Since I've taken so much of your time today, a couple of final questions
#
to kind of end with. If young people interested in solving problems. So I won't even say people
#
interested in policy or people interested in the state or what. If young people interested
#
in solving these kind of big important problems are listening to this, what would your advice be
#
for them? And not just in terms of career advice or whatever, but just in terms of what should their
#
approach be? What should their, you know, philosophy towards learning be, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I get asked this question a lot and I always disappoint everybody with my answer,
#
but that answer comes from my own experience. I think that anybody who wants to engage with
#
questions of policy needs to A, just go down to where it's at. And it does, you might be interested
#
in, you know, ultimately you may become a macro economist and you will be thinking about currency
#
exchange and so on. But if you don't actually know what a market transaction looks like,
#
not in the mall, but actually in the local heart, your perspective on it is always going to be
#
different. And of course you imbibe it just as in your person. After all, we all have exposure
#
in different ways to different things. But when you go at it from the point of view of
#
knowledge building, then your observations are different. You're not actually there as the person
#
that is making the transaction or, you know, both as a buyer or a seller, you're there really to
#
actually try and understand those dynamics. So I think spending a little bit of time in whatever
#
way and form you choose, because everybody's own personal proclivities are different,
#
actually being in the heart of where the action is in your capacity as a doer and an observer,
#
it really eventually fine tunes your mind. And I think that that's so, you know, whenever people,
#
you know, on the kind of policy issues that I work on, when people come and ask me about career
#
advice, it's always like, please don't come and work at CPR. Although I really love people to
#
come to work at CPR, and we thrive on young people, both on their capacities and their
#
imaginations and their ideas. But I actually don't think you should start working in a place like
#
that. Unless you're working on a project that is sending you into the middle of nowhere and
#
really giving you what we call the ragra, you just have to go out there and learn and experience and
#
observe. And that's where it all has to begin. And from there, there is no path. And of course,
#
the other thing that you need to think about a lot is what does it mean to be in this profession?
#
So I really push this idea that you have to unrecognize this, that you are actually engaging
#
in something that is public. The instinct of private is grabbing market share. That's perfectly
#
good. It has a particular logic and you operate in that way. But the instinct of public is different.
#
It sometimes misses the excellence that the market share hunger gives you, but it is different.
#
And you may apply the tools that you acquire from other places, but you have to understand
#
that and engage in your own mind with what that means. It'll mean different things for different
#
people. But I feel like centering that is really important. And then building up from there,
#
at this point in time, there is no particular path. As a jack of all trades, I think that
#
mastering one and then acquiring the skills to be the jack of all trades is probably a good thing.
#
My career has been an accident of many things. All careers are accidents of many things.
#
But in some ways, I think hopefully I was able to make up for being too much of a jack of all trades
#
by virtue of the experiences and the people I worked with and the mentoring I had. But having
#
that one disciplinary lens that gives you the rigor and then opening yourself up to different
#
ways of observing the world is really important. Being open to observation and not obsessed with
#
dogmas is another really important sensitivity that I think students of public policy or
#
practitioners of public policy must acquire. And just always being curious. So this constant
#
search for knowledge and learning, which basically means you are like a journalist,
#
they're always in conversation. You just always have to be in conversation. I think those are
#
some of the important characteristics that you must apply to this world. It's hard work. It's
#
actually deeply unglamorous. You are not going to get a quick win. In fact,
#
the wins are going to be very, very few and far between, if at all. Actually,
#
you shouldn't be hungry for wins. So this has been the impact kind of challenge, right? Because
#
after all, you're not in the system. And you may be working with a particular government,
#
a particular set of bureaucrats on a kind of project for long stretches of time and suddenly
#
they get posted out or suddenly the incentives change or something in the system stops that from
#
really seeing the end. So if you think your goal was that you were going to be able to change the
#
world, you're in for disappointment. Ideas travel. They take a long time before they find
#
fruition and before broad policy consensus is built around them. So you are just constantly
#
actually at it, sometimes saying the same thing over and over and over again. Sometimes I look
#
at my own writing and it's like, gosh, I've been writing the same thing since the day I entered
#
the profession and the only thing that's changed is that my hair is a little greyer. But that
#
patience is really important and necessary. And in fact, to me, therefore, where you should seek
#
satisfaction from is not specifically in the nuts and bolts of a particular impact, but is in being
#
able to seed an idea and build legitimacy around that idea. In whichever way you can do it through
#
practice, you can do it through research and through writing, you can do it through writing
#
that field defining book in your discipline or you can do it through engaging in a public discourse
#
on something that builds out three other institutions that begin to look at these questions,
#
whatever mode that would be. But to me, that's really where the satisfaction comes from. And
#
if you get lucky, some of those ideas will make their way into some document
#
where you know you've made an impact when you're not sighted.
#
Wise words and I'd add to that, that it is, like you said, possible, I think,
#
to be both a fox and a hedgehog, but just don't be a dog with prickly hair.
#
To be avoided and there are plenty of those. So my final question for me and for my listeners,
#
recommend books, music, films, any kind of art at all that you absolutely love and that mean
#
a lot to you and that you love so much that you want to share with everyone. So they don't have
#
to be on this serious subject or that non-serious subject, whatever you feel like, whatever you truly
#
love. Ah, gosh. OK. So I am really excited about this new sort of proliferation of books. It's
#
small, but it's becoming big that are mostly coming from historians, either trained historians or
#
or where my historian sister will say pop historians, but I don't know better,
#
who are actually writing about India, its institutions, state building,
#
ideas and politics of the 50s, 60s, 70s. And for me, that's so crucial because so much of all of
#
that is now up for grabs. It's up for grabs in WhatsApp University, but it's also up for grabs
#
in who we are as a nation, what our politics is. And it's also up for grabs in our understandings
#
of policy, of institutions. So I, you know, many, but three that stand out, one that I've
#
just started reading. So I guess I can't say much about it yet, but Abhishek Chaudhary's new book.
#
There's also Nikhil Menon's Plan Democracy. It tells the history of the Planning Commission,
#
of our statistical system with, you know, our great statistician, Mahalo Binnas, as the protagonist,
#
but builds the story of state building around it. He's been on the show. It's a lovely book.
#
In fact, I had been, I must follow up with him because we were going to do a podcast together
#
and then life became complicated. And it's been on my mind, but really standards. He will only
#
do podcasts with certain people. Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough.
#
And then there's another interesting book by Taylor Sherman, which, you know, people have read
#
in different ways, but I really enjoyed it really from the point of view of the history of state
#
institutions and in the Nehruvian era and how they evolved, who these characters were and the spaces
#
they were given and their own institutional building projects, which were both successful
#
and failures at the same time. And, you know, it's, so looking at the past, look back into the present,
#
has been really meaningful. Also to understand the evolution of the sort of cultural right,
#
Vinayak Chaturvedi's book is one that I've read recently and that's been one of the most
#
insightful and also given me new ways of understanding the relationship between violence,
#
politics and Hindutva. Those are the serious things. I love reading murder mysteries and
#
fun novels. So I got into those Thursday murder clubs, which were really good fun.
#
I grew up reading Agatha Christie and loved them. That was like my, I used to run back from school
#
to read Agatha Christie's and eat chili chips. That was the thing that we used to do.
#
And now, and I find the Thursday murder clubs remind me very much of Agatha Christie,
#
that genre of writing of mystery novels. I read a really nice book also recently,
#
gosh, exactly what, it's about this chemist as the protagonist, a female chemist. It's,
#
and I've forgotten the title, but it has the word chemistry in the title. I'll send you the link.
#
But basically it's this wonderful story of a chemist, you know, a socially awkward, nerdy chemist
#
in the 1960s in the United States, who's trying to make her mark in this very difficult world.
#
And meets her soulmate in the world who dies suddenly. And then she has to, she has a baby
#
and she has to make all these difficult choices. So it's about, you know, the difficulties of women
#
in the world of science, women as mothers, as parents, the gendered nature of the professional
#
world, and basically how they also own it. So she sort of becomes a, she becomes a TV star
#
on a show about cooking, but the show about cooking is really a show about chemistry.
#
About chemistry at its heart, but also about science, about life, about purpose, about
#
what it means to be a woman in the kitchen with full control and power. It's beautifully done,
#
really nice. She's a Renaissance chemist. It's a really good book. And I cannot believe I can't
#
remember the title of it, but it'll come back to me. You made me talk for so long that now my brain
#
is shutting down. I find the title of that. So that's another one. And gosh, we can't stop
#
without talking about all the binge watching that I've done. I love the hard and I recently
#
watched Cora. I think these new, you know, they really are capturing, you know, for me,
#
I find it really exciting, both from a professional point, from my intellectual life and my tendency
#
to binge watch all nicely come together. But they, but you know, they're telling very important
#
contemporary stories about India. And I have often wondered why we don't have enough of that. Like,
#
where is the sociology? Where is the journalism? So much is changing. So much is happening.
#
Social marketeers tell me more about, I have more insights about the transformations
#
in India because they do all these surveys to sell their products than, you know, any of our,
#
than our academy does, or even our journalism does, or the stories that we tell. So,
#
you know, I'm fine. This is a new and interesting space where all of this is coming. It's just that
#
it's also very restricted and is not watched widely, which I think is important. But so the hard and
#
Cora are two favorites. I watched scoop, which was also a favorite and then crash course and romance.
#
You got to watch it. It's one of the cutest little, cutest, cutest series. It's, it's, it's long.
#
Each episode is an hour and a half and it's all subtitled. So you've got to pay attention. You
#
can't multitask while watching, but it's very cute. It's one of the cutest little romances.
#
I have watched in recent times. So much to watch. So little time, but thank you so much for your
#
time today. It's been a long conversation and I'm, and I'm glad we could make it happen.
#
Thank you. It's been really fun and really therapeutic actually, to, to talk about work and,
#
and, and, and institution building and life and gosh, you like put me on the couch and made me
#
think back to my childhood. Mostly I resist that. How is it therapeutic to talk about work? It should
#
be traumatic to talk about work. No, it is very nice to talk about the, it's traumatic to talk
#
about the experiences that we are going through, but it's really nice to be reminded of what it is
#
that one is actually passionate about and why we do what we do. There will always be the passion.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
#
production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
