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If you ask me to tell you what's wrong with India and how we should reform our country,
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I could give you a big laundry list.
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After writing about this subject for over 20 years, after reading so many books, absorbing
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so many papers, speaking to so many experts, writing so many op-eds and columns, I can
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fill you in at the level of policy.
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Spoiler alert, some of it will involve the state getting out of the way, some of it will
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involve the state doing the few things it should do properly.
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However, that doesn't do much to actually solve our problems.
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I can tell you that for ABC problem we should implement XYZ solution, but there is still
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the messy job of who's going to get it done.
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Politicians have their own set of incentives, bureaucrats have theirs, and change at the
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level of a state can often happen at glacial pace.
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As the saying goes, paradigms change one funeral at a time.
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That is why we should cherish those among us who actually dive into this hardest layer
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of problem solving, getting change implemented.
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And when it involves a state, there is a meta aspect to this.
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You can get the state to agree to go in a particular direction, but what if it simply
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doesn't have the capacity to do so?
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Don't we need to build that first?
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Since we know from experience that just throwing money at the problems isn't enough.
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It's a wicked problem, but we need to try to solve it.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is Kartik Moolidharan, who first came on the show for episode 185, which
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was a cult episode on education, and for some time my most popular.
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He then did two further episodes on healthcare and state capacity.
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And all of it was part of writing this gigantic book called Accelerating India's Development,
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which is out on the stands now.
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This is a comprehensive masterclass on how to reform India from the point of view of
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someone who has not just dabbled in theory, but has done a lot of fieldwork and now works
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with a bunch of governments to make things happen at the level of states.
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Each of our first three episodes together were on one chapter of his book.
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And in this episode, we will tackle two chapters.
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We will tackle the difficult subject of the bureaucracy and personnel management.
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Now while this book is an 800 page book, so big that you can actually write Moolidharan
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horizontally on the spine, it is not heavy reading at all.
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The actual text is 600 pages, the font size is large, it's easy to read, and the content
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is masterfully broken up into essay size chunks that are easy to digest.
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It is an essential book to understand economics and policy in India.
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I recommend you pick it up.
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You can dip into it once in a while, though I suspect that once you start reading it,
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you won't be able to stop.
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But before you start that, listen to our latest conversation after a quick commercial break.
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we care about, from the profound to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
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youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Karthik, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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Self-publishers start coming.
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No, we're not going to cut it.
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I'm going to say it again, but we're not going to cut this.
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Welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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Good to see you in person.
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I think this is the first time we're recording in person, right?
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Yeah, but we've met once before and I must tell my listeners that Karthik just sauntered
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into the house and he said, I don't want to record.
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I want to chill with you.
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Let's have a good time.
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This doesn't feel like work.
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And I completely buy that.
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And therefore, I am going to go beyond work and I'm going to reveal an important truth
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about you to my listeners.
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Are you ready for this?
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It's not very flattering for you, which is that, you know, many people would think that
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Karthik Moolidharan is one of the smartest men in India.
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I would like to inform them he's not even the smartest man in his own home because I've
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had the pleasure of meeting Karthik's son, this remarkable man about three foot taller
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than Karthik and incredibly, incredibly precocious.
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And I was super impressed and still a teenager, if I recall correctly.
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And I want to actually start by asking you that in the course of your life, how did parenthood
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change your incentives and the way you looked at the world and your mental ecosystem?
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You know, did it did it have a big impact on you?
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Because when one is young, it's you're going from short term gratification to short term
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But I am guessing with no personal experience in this matter that becoming a parent kind
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of gives you a longer horizon and might make you more more open to playing a long game.
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I mean, so first I must say this is a complete curveball.
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You know, there's the question.
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So this is kind of off the cuff.
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No, see, I think, I mean, to be completely honest in terms of parenthood, I know it was
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not over deliberate in the sense that it just felt like there was a time and was right.
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I mean, so it's a good time to tell a joke, actually, you know.
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So the joke is, so we had our son six years after we married, we married a couple of years
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So three years later, in good, you know, Indian uncle fashion, like, you know, one of my uncle
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calls and says, you know, but it's been three years, like, you know, I mean, so where are
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And I'm like, you know, don't worry, everything's good.
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Like, you know, let me finish this PhD.
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I've got one more year and then, you know, we'll we'll take care of it.
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And then he says to me, like, Tamil, you know, using the same words I used with you in the
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first one, which is like, which is like dumb, dumb, dumb wit.
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You must be the only idiot in the world who thinks you need a PhD to have a baby.
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So anyway, like, you know, I mean, I don't think it was over deliberate in any way.
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Like, it just felt like a right of just a right of passage in some ways, you know.
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So I don't think we overthought it.
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But, you know, it's been wonderful, like, you know, with all of the all of the minor
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irritations and the grand joys.
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Right. So right now, I would say the most important thing my son does for me is he forces
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me to get out of the house. So we have moved back to India.
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Right. As you know. And so the most frustrating part of being back in India right now is that
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normally I like to be out, but I've been in a cave writing.
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Right. I mean, just finishing this book.
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But he's so into Indian history and culture that he's the one who makes all the travel
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plans. Let's go here. Let's go here.
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And, you know, he had a school trip to Himachal two weeks ago and he said, we're flying to
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Chandigarh. So it's like, folks, why don't you come to Chandigarh?
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We'll go to Amritsar. And so I'd never been.
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And thanks to my son, we were at the Golden Temple two weeks ago.
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So that was that was wonderful.
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Amazing. And let's talk about the cave now.
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You know, the previous times that I've met you, the book was just a glimmer in the eye,
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which kind of got more and more concrete as the episodes rolled by.
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And I remember in episode 290, you actually promised me, you said, for you, Amit, I will
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write the book. And I'm just I'm going to pretend it's just for me.
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So I want to know about this process of writing, because it feels like this must be almost
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like having another baby in the sense that is completely different from all the other
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writing that you've done. So give me a sense of the contrast and what that transition took
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for you, because you're used to writing these really rigorous papers.
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They have their own methodology. They have their own flow.
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They have their own voice. And suddenly there is this book project that you're taking on,
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which, as you like to say, it's not it's like almost two books in one.
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And I would go further and say that it's actually many books in one because each of the chapters
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is incredibly detailed and the density is incredible in a good way, not in a bad way of
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dense prose, but in terms of the insight is dense, the ideas are dense.
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So it's almost like you're taking a lifetime's work of worth and then you're putting it into
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the structure. And then because you're writing the book, you're going deeper into each of
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those subjects and so on and so forth.
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So tell me about what that process was like of coming to the book and, you know, giving
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I mean, so again, I think I said this in the very first episode, right?
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I think the closest analogy to this process is of a sculptor, right?
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I mean that you start with a block of marble and you have some broad idea of what this is going
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to look like, right? I mean, but then you kind of you carve, you chisel, you kind of say
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this is not quite working. You do this, you do that.
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So I think that's I think standard for most writers.
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I think what's different about this book is it doesn't easily fit any genre.
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Okay, so it's not like I modeled it on any particular book.
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I just sat and said, listen, I have things that I feel are worth sharing, right?
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I mean, and like because these papers, you generate so much insight and learning from
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the time in the field, from the time talking to counterparts is like and all of that is
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tacit knowledge that doesn't show up in the paper that you feel that there is a case for
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putting this together. And like I said, the papers are written for peers of academics
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So even my papers are usually pretty accessible, like, you know, the core, they're not super
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technical. They're not super mathy. They're written pretty clearly.
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So I think the goal that way was to just I think it's threefold.
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And I say this in the preface, right, that there is part of the there's part of the book
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that's a conversation within academic economics and development economics in particular.
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And so that is I think a contribution there academically, but which is more of a synthesis
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rather than kind of primary stuff.
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And we can talk about what I think the academic contribution of the book is.
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But the second is really about public education.
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I mean, this really is written for the non-technical reader, maybe not a high school
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student, maybe precocious high school students, but any college graduate or student in any
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subject, right, should be able to pick it up and basically understand it.
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And then the last is policy, right?
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I mean, that I think there are there is no shortage of kind of people who say this is a problem.
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That is a problem. You know, this is not working.
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That is not working. I think the really hard part is saying how do you then make progress
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given all of the constraints we face, right?
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We've got political constraints, bureaucratic constraints, judicial constraints, social
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constraints, fiscal constraints.
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And, you know, it's just it's a wicked problem.
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Many of these things of building a more effective state.
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So I think what I'm particularly, you know, happy about and what I think government
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counterparts who read the book have also appreciated is the fact that each chapter is
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really two halves, right?
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I mean, there's there is a first half, which I call the science, which is, you know,
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synthesizing the research.
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And so it's interesting, right? There's so many similarities with I think how Ajay's
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approach this is art and science and I'm calling it science and engineering, right?
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I mean, though there is an art which I'll come to, which is the sieges part of the story.
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But I think the science is here.
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Here are the facts. Here is the research.
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Here are some principles, right?
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I mean, that help us understand these complex issues.
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And then given all of this, right, the second part is what I call systems engineering, right?
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I mean, which is how do you then design better systems to make the state function more effectively?
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And then I do that in every chapter.
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I mean, so every chapter has that flavor.
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So it's been fun in the sense that because it's not just regurgitating.
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If all I was doing was summarizing papers for a non-technical audience, that's not fun, right?
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This is a new intellectual creation because the synthesis is its own kind of new intellectual product,
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but it's a different kind of product, okay?
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I think when I first came on the show and talked about the book, I think the original proposal
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was in the range of 120,000 words over about three years.
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And then, you know, as you like to say, and I hold you partly responsible, right?
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It expanded. It expanded for the final product.
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Like, you know, that's about 800 pages.
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But again, to your listeners, that shouldn't scare you.
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It's a 600-page book and about 200 pages of notes and references.
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So it's designed again to be both accessible to any citizen who's interested,
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but also be available as a long-term reference.
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So the hope is it's a book with a shelf life of about 10 years, right, where you can keep going back to it.
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So yeah, I think, you know, that's the process.
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It's not even the process. It's more kind of what I set out to do.
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And then the actual process is not that different.
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I guess, you know, you just have to kind of shut out distractions.
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And the way I've used my sabbatical, essentially, right?
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I mean, so and I say this in the preface, I'm grateful that I'm an academic because my job, this is the job.
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Now, that's not the full job because the normal academic job is you write research papers, not books.
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But that's why you have sabbaticals, right?
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So the sabbatical, so my routines are usually, you know, mornings 8 to 1 is kind of my just deep work time, right?
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I mean, so no calls typically, like, you know, just that's when I'm putting if I get four good hours a day,
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that means you're putting runs on the board, right?
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And then the afternoons is usually when I would do calls and just, you know, other.
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I mean, there are other commitments I have, right?
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I mean, orgs and meetings and stuff.
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And then evenings, a couple of hours is when I do my calls with the US, right?
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Whether my PhD students or my co-authors and stuff like that.
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So, yeah, that's kind of roughly the roughly the rhythm and the routine.
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It helps that I have no commute, right?
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I mean, commutes would just drive me nuts and I just shut out anything in that's non-essential to be focusing on this.
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So I think when we last spoke in August 2022, I thought we were six months away, right?
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But it ended up, it was true that we were six months away in terms of I completed the draft and I turned into Penguin in March.
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And they were actually quite happy to go with it.
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But I think mulling over the whole thing, I needed to come back and do another full round of editing
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because till then, I had only edited individual chapters.
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I had not reloaded the entire book into working memory, right?
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And re-optimized things across and that took me another six months, right?
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So that was the process from July to December last year.
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And then we went into production and here we are.
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You spoke about, you know, commute driving you nuts.
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At this point, I must again tell our gentle listeners a story that in Chennai,
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Kartik has a driver whose name is Natarajan and when he gets into the car, he says, drive me nuts.
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It's not true. It should be true, right?
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In Chennai, I don't go anywhere. I just sit at home and write.
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Okay, so you drive yourself nuts as it were.
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And I must also sincerely hope that when you spoke about expanding, you made a joke about my book expanded because of Amit.
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I hope you were referring to the length of my episodes and you weren't flat shaming me.
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No, you talked about the phases of the episodes.
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And I think and to your listeners, you know, this is a book that in the acknowledgement has an entire paragraph, right?
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Like I mean, thanking not just Amit Verma, but his listeners and partly because, you know,
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I think the positive reactions to the first and second podcast, I think really helped because single authored book writing is an incredibly lonely process.
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Okay, so I think the biggest doubt in this whole thing is like you're doing all of this work, like, you know, who's going to read it.
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And so, yeah, that was very helpful. So thank you.
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Thank you, gentle listeners.
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I mean, I and my listeners, I'm sure, are glad to play a part, however small, because it's an incredible book and a service to the nation.
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In your book, you've quoted Einstein, where he says everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
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Right. And I love that. It's a great sort of a manifesto for how you write a book and how you keep the language elsewhere.
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I think you quoted from someone from one of my episodes at a launch yesterday.
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And you said that, hey, it should be the approach should be so simple that a 10 standard student can understand it.
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But no expert should find something wrong in it.
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And you've achieved those magnificently.
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But tell me about, you know, how the process of that was.
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And did you have any did you have any role models in terms of people who can write about complex subjects in simple language, which everyone can understand?
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No, I think I'm so I'll tell you the honest answer is there was no role model.
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Right. I mean, I just kind of so the good news is I am a good writer and I'm a clear communicator.
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Right. So the writing still takes I'm a slow writer.
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But I'm a clear communicator.
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So and I've written at least 25 op-eds.
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Right. I mean, before starting this.
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So at one level, it's almost like every subsection of the book is like an op-ed.
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Right. I mean, so it's like 200 op-eds now.
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And so in that sense, the basic structure of how I write, right, which is to say, here is the issue.
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Here are the fundamental principles.
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Here are the tensions that go both ways.
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This is why Empirics matters.
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Here is what the evidence says.
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Given what the evidence says, like, I mean, how should we lean in these kind of, you know,
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two conceptually equally viable directions?
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Right. I mean, so I think all of that is just part of how I've, you know, how I've approached just not just research,
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but communication in general or teaching.
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I think like, you know, being a teacher then really helps because a big part of that is simplifying
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and getting the essence of these ideas out to students.
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Now in the writing process, I think most important part of the process I did.
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So I've had an outstanding team.
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Okay. So again, at the end of this process, I feel like a bit like, you know, like you have a movie
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and then you give all the credit to like, you know, one or two people, but it's a team.
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Okay. It's a team and this is a team effort.
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There have been research assistants like who helped with different chapters.
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There's, you know, I have a research director who's been with me for over six years.
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Okay. So this is like just absolutely top talent.
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Like, I mean, who's been willing to kind of, you know, work along this project.
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I had an outstanding kind of editorial support.
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And this was from somebody who actually worked with Pramit at Mint, right?
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Like, I mean, on the data journalism page.
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So this is Vishnu who now writes for The Economist.
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So, you know, he spent time with me.
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But again, what we were doing was just kind of with this team, Burak, who's my research director in Vishnu.
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You know, in the early stages, I would outline.
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I would outline, we would brainstorm, you know.
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So those first eight or ten things is here are the ideas.
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Here's what I'm trying to say.
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How is it landing for you?
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Like, I mean, as a reader and then that's the team aspect of this.
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And then I would go into the cave and say, okay, like, you know, here's the structure.
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So I think that process, we must have done about eight or ten rounds, right?
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I mean, to get to a draft.
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And then I think the most important part of the process was just sharing chapters, like, you know, with few trusted people in different walks of life, right?
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So it's been read by IAS officers.
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It's been read by academics.
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It's been read by a couple of civil society people.
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It's been read by, you know, people who are in the tech world, right?
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Like, I mean, so the whole idea is that, am I writing in a way that is reaching these audiences?
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And if there's any jargon, anything that, oh, this is not quite making sense, then there would be that feedback, right?
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I mean, so that's then the process of kind of iterating.
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And I would send more and more polished drafts to kind of more and more, I would say, senior people, right?
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Like, you know, so people like Devesh Kapoor and Lan Pritchett, who are probably the two great world gurus on state capacity, saw that N minus one draft, right?
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Like, I mean, when I was almost ready to get it done.
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So, yeah, so that's the process.
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So I think, and again, sorry, being an academic just means that you have, you know, access to networks of people who are experts, like, I mean, who will be willing to read like a chapter.
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I mean, very few people read the entire book and they are thanked separately, like, I mean, with as special a thing.
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But a lot of people would read individual chapters, right?
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And then come back with comments.
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Yeah, I mean, I did go through your acknowledgments where you thank all these people, but I must confess that I couldn't get past one para, which I read a few times.
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So, and you know, this reminds me of that phrase standing on the shoulders of giants.
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And I just remembered this joke someone told me the other day.
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I don't even know if it's a joke.
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I mean, it's a great quip by somebody and I forget who and what the context was.
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But there was this guy complaining that I couldn't get far in life at all because giants were standing on my shoulder.
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It reminds me of the joke we did last time, right?
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About normally you say the early bird gets the worm, but the early worm gets eaten.
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Yeah, don't wake up early people.
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Yeah, why am I saying that?
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I'm trying to wake up early these days.
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So my next question is that there are two aspects from what I can see in which you're not the typical academic.
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One of them is a multidisciplinary approach you take.
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Like early in your book, you speak about how you've got insights and perspectives from ethics, politics, sociology, psychology, management.
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And these are visible in the book if you look closely enough, they're not in an overt way.
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And that's great because many economists just get stuck in silos or they get stuck in their own specialization.
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And that is the only frame through which they look at the world.
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And you have this you have these various other frames and, you know, that brings something to the work.
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And the second thing is that and this is a phrase I learned from my friend Vasanthar.
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You're a pracademic. You're both in a sense a practitioner and an academic where you're not only studying economics,
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but you're actually working and perhaps I'll ask you to talk about sieges after this as well.
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But you're actually working actively with state governments, especially,
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but you know, with any government that will listen to you to actually,
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you know, implement some of these and understand problems on the ground,
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which to me gives your writing a whole new flavor because frankly,
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by now after 20 years of reading such stuff and thinking about it,
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if you know, I could write a book about what's wrong with the country across each of these chapters, right?
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That's not the big deal.
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Though you've done it far better than most people have read in the past.
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But what is truly valuable is A, the depth of your analysis on why things are the way they are
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and B, the solutions that you're proposing which come from the work that you've done on the ground.
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So I want to sort of ask you to think about these two aspects.
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One is a multidisciplinary aspect where all these other fields inform
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and two, how much of depth to your thinking was brought in by your work as a pracademic
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because like you said earlier,
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you know, this is not just a regurgitation of different ideas.
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There's synthesis and there are new ideas.
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For example, something I'll ask you to speak about briefly later is what you call your third way.
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You know, there is a traditional way that development economists look at state capacity.
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There is a Jogaru way that tries to deal with the shortfalls of that
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and then there is your third way and your third way,
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it felt to me from whatever I've read is completely original
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and is obviously completely coming from experience, right?
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The angles that you've taken are just completely you.
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So tell me a little bit about, you know, all of this about how different disciplines
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and being on the ground shaped your thinking.
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Is it a process that you observed in yourself?
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Do you look back 20 years later on a younger Karthik and say,
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you know, give me a sense of that.
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No, again, you know, I think there's a lot to unpack.
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So one of the things which I value the most from what I think a couple of my colleagues read the book
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and this was I think, yeah, it actually was Paul Lienhaus,
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like, you know, the founder of GiveDirectly and he read the intro and he said,
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you know, the best thing is this is you, that it's just an authenticity, right?
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Like I mean, and that I think is in the end, I think the most important thing, right?
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You can't be everything to everything.
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You have to be who you are and I think you picked on exactly, you know,
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I don't want to say unique, I mean, because I'm sure there are other people with similar motivations,
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but I think you can't fake it, right?
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Let's put it that way and I've said this in the first episode that I got into economics at the age of 16, right?
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Partly studying, you know, a little bit, seeing the economic reforms going to Singapore
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and these things just have deep, both conscious and subconscious, you know, impacts, right?
#
Which is this is old joke about India and China, right?
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Which is that India has developed an economist and China has development, okay?
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And so, I mean, and I think, I mean, and some of that, frankly,
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like, I mean, reflects, I think, an overly ivory tower, like, you know,
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I mean, sense of economics.
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It's not to say that people were not motivated by real world stuff, right?
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But it is that the skill set required to do cutting edge research is very different
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from the skill set required to roll up your sleeves and change things
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and they're all very different temperaments, right?
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Like, it's what I was saying yesterday, you know, in the event is that the skills required to win elections
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are very different from the skills required to govern,
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very different from the skills required to design a state, right?
#
So, I think sometimes it's unfair to ask academics.
#
So, you know, before we kind of put even more pressure on young academics to say,
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oh, you need to not just do good research, you need to go and change the world.
#
You know, I think there was a book, I can't, there was an article in the Washington Post many years ago,
#
I think, about people critiquing Harper Lee to kill a mockingbird,
#
like, you know, for saying that it was not enough to just write,
#
okay, that you also had to go do something about it, right?
#
But I think part of the response was that good writing, good literature is incredibly hard, okay?
#
And so, and so is good research, right?
#
So, I think sometimes it's not productive to kind of add the burden,
#
like of saying, okay, now you also go change the world, right?
#
Like I mean to the researcher.
#
I think I have been fortunate in the sense that the motivation for the research has always been the real world, right?
#
So, it's not in kind of, so people come up with research questions sometimes internally from the literature,
#
okay, saying I've studied a bunch of stuff in this model, this assumption, if I tweak this, what will happen, okay?
#
So, but that is a class of coming up with research ideas that are very internally self-referential
#
to where the profession is, okay?
#
But if the motivation for your research is coming from, it's always been, right?
#
I mean, you go to Singapore, you say, okay, what can a country do in terms of better governance and better policy, right?
#
I mean, that can accelerate the transformation of people's lives, right?
#
So, that's kind of, and then, but the other thing, like I said, that came from Singapore was this very healthy respect for pragmatism, right?
#
I mean, and so, and for just getting things done, and so this respect for the private sector.
#
So, that way, I think what's been different about my academic journey is having those two years in the private sector,
#
but with a very clear understanding that I am there, that the problem with the private sector beyond the point,
#
not the, it's not a problem with the private sector, the problem for me in the private sector is at the end of the day,
#
you're still kind of a mercenary fire if you're a consultant or whatever, right?
#
But what I cared about was learning how private capital thinks,
#
learning to respect kind of the implementation capacities of the private sector and saying how do you use that in the public interest, okay?
#
So, that journey, I think, is just kind of, that's where the academic comes from, right?
#
That the academic part is motivated by saying, if I was to advise a minister on what to do, do I know what to tell him or her to do?
#
And if I don't, then that tells me what kind of research I need to do, right?
#
I mean, so, and then, I think when you do the research, I mean, that is still who I am, right?
#
I mean, I'm not kind of a think tanker or a policy analyst who's just kind of synthesizing and writing notes.
#
The point about just doing good literature is hard, doing good research is hard.
#
So, that is the core, right?
#
Where do you spend your time and cut your teeth is the methodological stuff,
#
just the rigor of the experimental design, the measurement, the analysis, the interpretations, the mechanisms, you know, pressure testing.
#
I'll give you an example of how this plays out in the book, right?
#
So, that chapter on federalism, for example, you know, there's a discussion in different ways about how we are over centralized.
#
And then, when I go from there to kind of the reform ideas, right?
#
Where I talk about, you know, we should be thinking about smaller units of governance in multiple levels, okay?
#
Saying whether it's states, whether it's blocks or whether it's even GPs.
#
And what's interesting is there are research papers on each of these things, right?
#
I mean, so, you're able to say, okay, here are studies that looked at what happened, right?
#
Like, after the bifurcation of these states, here is what happened.
#
You know, there's this very nice and important reform in Andhra Pradesh that N.T. Ramarao did in the mid-80s,
#
where essentially, as a part of kind of bringing government closer to people, they went from blocks to mandals, okay?
#
So, the average block in most Indian states has about 250,000 people.
#
Mandals have about 60,000 to 75,000.
#
So, there's about four times as many.
#
And that reduces, it brings government closer to people.
#
And there's a PhD student of mine, like Amin, who did her dissertation on actually documenting kind of the impact of that
#
by looking at there'll be villages near the border of these things that have now, because of the change,
#
come much closer to their block headquarters and finds, like, a significant improvement over time in the provision of public goods, right?
#
And then, there's this other beautiful paper very recently.
#
In fact, it's, I think, revised and resubmitted, the American Economic Review, looking at similar reform in UP,
#
where it was not a reform, but I think they had this idea that said that GP, if it's less than 1,000 people will be,
#
if a village is less than 1,000, it'll be clubbed with other villages to form a larger GP.
#
But if you're just above 1,000, you get your own GP, okay?
#
So, you therefore get this kind of regression discontinuity as a way of saying what happens to governance outcomes
#
when you have a smaller GP that's closer to 1,000 as opposed to 3,000 or 4,000.
#
And it's amazing, right?
#
The paper finds that governance improves on, like, every measure, right?
#
I mean, you get better implementation of schemes, you get less corrupt politicians, you get more citizen engagement.
#
And so, that's kind of how you take, okay, there is research, but this is why it matters, right?
#
So, that's, in a way, I think, encapsulates the value of the book,
#
which is there's outstanding research that's happened in the past 20 years, right?
#
So, I think it's very easy, and I've heard many of your episodes where you do worry about academia being a circle juggler.
#
Every profession has its pathologies, like, you know, but in the grand scheme of things, like I said,
#
and this is Ajay said this too, right?
#
Most human progress, right, I mean, comes from the creation of new knowledge,
#
the transmission of that knowledge, and the action of that knowledge, right?
#
So, if you then think about the arc of my own career, there's, like, about 20 years as a co-researcher, right?
#
I mean, that is overweight, spending most of your time creating new knowledge.
#
The book is kind of the attempt to do, like, a broader synthesis,
#
and then what we're doing with Sieges is then kind of the downstream part of saying,
#
okay, how do you actually help make some of these things happen?
#
But yeah, so that's the pro-academic, and, you know, that's what I do.
#
So, Ajay and I had a great episode of Everything is Everything called Fixing the Knowledge Society on Justice.
#
I linked that from the show notes.
#
And for us, and obviously, I know he'd agree with me,
#
he's right, you are an outlier for all the reasons we mentioned, and it's fairly obvious to everyone.
#
And I also want to ask sort of one more general question about, you know, you as an economist,
#
in the sense that as we grow older, you realize that there is a scarcity of time,
#
you cannot do 50 things at the same time, and it seems to me that you were juggling two roles,
#
but now you've added a third one to that.
#
And your first role is rather being an academic, and you're driven by curiosity and intellectual passion.
#
Second is you become a practitioner, where you say, let me really make a difference,
#
and then that shapes your academic research into what is relevant and can actually make a difference.
#
And the third today is that you're a public intellectual, whether you like it or not,
#
it is what you are, and I think it's something that you should take seriously.
#
And I think in a sense, it's the duty of people like you to, you know, if you're able to,
#
and that's exactly what you've done with this great book.
#
How does one think about the balance between these?
#
Because the danger is that if you privilege one over the other, you lose a little bit of the edge.
#
If you spend too much time, for example, with sieges, working with state governments and all that,
#
the cutting edge of your knowledge might be affected.
#
And equally, if the balance goes in favor of the academic work, then, you know,
#
that feedback loop with what's happening on the ground may be affected as well.
#
And plus, if you're a public intellectual, that comes with its own set of necessities,
#
such as always trying to simplify without being simplistic, number one.
#
And number two, I think public intellectuals, to a certain extent, have to figure out the things
#
that they really want people to know and repeat that ad infinitum,
#
which as an academic would be anathema to you, because why would you repeat anything, right?
#
You want to enter new territory.
#
So how do you sort of think about this evolving balance?
#
And have you thought about it before I just asked you this question?
#
So, you know, I must say, like, you know, I think, again, for your listeners,
#
we came in, in previous episodes, we said, okay, we're talking education, talking health.
#
I think this time it was, you know, we finished this book and then let's take stock.
#
No, see, I think these are obviously key questions, right?
#
I think, so leave aside the public intellectual for a moment,
#
because I still maintain that the only place I'm a public intellectual is on your show.
#
Okay, so I don't have, say, a weekly column, okay, like, I mean, or something in a paper
#
where I feel the pressure to constantly pontificate on things, right?
#
I think the once a year come on Amit Parma shows to me, like, you know, the right frequency of saying,
#
okay, there's enough new stuff, right, I mean, to synthesize and share and that I'm happy to do.
#
But I think even the term public intellectual, I mean, it comes with unnecessary pressure.
#
Okay, let's put it that way, right?
#
Because the thing then is you are expected to opine on everything, right?
#
And then, because if you are a public intellectual, then even your silences are interpreted as endorsement, right?
#
So, and I think it's just unfair to put that kind of expectation or burden on any person.
#
So, I think the term itself is a little counterproductive in the traditional term, okay?
#
I think if what you mean is a public intellectual in the sense of somebody who's primarily an intellectual,
#
who does deep research, but is also committed to sharing that with the public,
#
then I think I'm happy with that definition.
#
But there is another expanded definition of the public intellectual who pontificates on kind of the larger polity
#
and where is the country going, where is the world going, where is society going.
#
I don't mean the gyani gurus and the talking heads on TV, I don't mean that at all.
#
Yeah, I mean, and so that's not me, okay?
#
But if the level of public intellectualness implied by coming on your show once a year is, I think, just about right, okay?
#
And again, there's a reason you're the first interview I'm doing with this book, frankly, you've spoiled me, right?
#
I have no idea how to do a 30-minute interview on this book.
#
So, given that each chapter takes like a five-hour episode, okay?
#
But no, so I think going back to your first question, okay?
#
So, let's leave the public intellectual side aside, okay?
#
Because I don't want that to add more burden to my already overburdened life.
#
I think that this business of, so I would say there's three buckets, right?
#
There is the life as a scholar where you're kind of creating new research.
#
There is life as kind of policy practitioner, advisor of saying, okay, how do you take this advice?
#
And there is a third one which is, I think, important going forward, which is institution building, okay?
#
Because, and it goes back to that hourglass I was talking about, right?
#
I mean, and so there are definitely institutional investments I want to make that, you know, create structures for younger people, right?
#
I mean, to just kind of, you know, do more work, right?
#
Ajay, again, keeps saying that, you know, we need more health economists.
#
We need more labor economists.
#
We know, you know, the U.S. maybe has a community of a few hundred health economists.
#
I mean, in India, we probably will struggle to find 20, right?
#
I mean, who kind of is a community, an intellectual community, right?
#
I mean, that's both doing research and talking and stuff like that.
#
So I think I want to think hard about how I can help kind of catalyze some of those intellectual institutional spaces.
#
I think the way I balance kind of Sieges and academia is very simple.
#
So the way I cheat, how do I make my time add up to more than 100% is that I do things that count for both, okay?
#
So at Sieges, there is a full-time CEO, the full-time operational team.
#
So I am the founder and scientific director.
#
So as scientific director, I have two primary three, but really two primary responsibilities, right?
#
So one is really kind of and this is also quasi semi-public intellectual, right?
#
Like I mean, but it's really disseminate the ideas in the book.
#
Okay. So what I'm planning to do next.
#
So because I think I told you, right?
#
I'm now in this phase where I'm doing nine months in India, three months in the U.S.
#
I go back for my teaching April to June and then I'll be back in July.
#
Okay. So the next nine months, my hope is ideally to almost visit every state in India.
#
Okay. And this is a book on state-led governance.
#
And ideally, like, you know, if this all works out right, I will travel on a Friday with family.
#
Like, you know, I mean, do a little bit of culture and history and stuff and then they'll head back on a Sunday.
#
And then the Monday to Wednesday, like I'll spend days, you know, with public lectures with a few universities, right?
#
Maybe some workshops and seminars for government, like, you know, a few such things.
#
So that way what I'm doing is a core academic job, which is the dissemination of ideas and the research.
#
But that also speaks to the because see, see, just in some ways is not a professional, a standard professional services kind of org, right?
#
What it is, is more a vehicle for saying that these governance reforms are not just kind of conceptual ideas, but that these are practical, they are doable.
#
And so it's there is a so there's a learning aspect and research aspect and see just as well.
#
So I think that's the important part. I want to say where there isn't a conflict where so I don't get involved in the delivery.
#
I get involved in abstracting the general insights that we learn from each project, right?
#
Like I mean, so the second thing that we do there is that I do is we have now hired our first PhD economist.
#
OK, like I mean, so is kind of building the technical capacities of Sieges and therefore, like I mean, also being able to support government.
#
So I can see every government wants kind of good technical capacity, but they don't know how to find it, right?
#
So part of what we're doing is now working out models whereby, you know,
#
we co-create these units that do more budget analysis, fiscal analysis, and these are kind of teams seconded from the government,
#
but then also have like, you know, a couple of our technical people.
#
So that's how you really build capacity, not by kind of you don't solve the do a project and build capacity.
#
You don't do a training workshop.
#
Most of the capacity gets built when you co-create and when you do it together.
#
So, yeah, I think so the broad answer is I I try to pick.
#
Yes, it is true. I try to do too much.
#
But the way I try to make it work is by picking activities that kind of double count in kind of both aspects of my life.
#
Makes a lot of sense. Before we get to the book itself or rather the two chapters of the book,
#
we're going to discuss today, you know, does that count as double counting?
#
We're going to do two chapters, but a couple of questions and one, you know,
#
I love that quip about China has development and development economists and what I and you know,
#
actually Ajay and I were planning to do an episode of the everything is everything blasting development economics
#
and you know, drawing on easterly and so on and so forth.
#
And you of course are a development economist, but you are our friend, right?
#
In intellectually as well as in real life.
#
And what I found fascinating was in your 10th chapter, which is about the Preston Curve and we'll talk more about that later.
#
It sounds like a fancy American car from the 1960s, the Preston Curve, you know,
#
I can just imagine the, you know, the ad in Playboy in my head red car.
#
I'm imagining the Preston Curve.
#
So in that you spoke about how traditional approaches to development economics failed.
#
You also mention a Jogaru way in which development economists fumbling around desperately then try to tackle that.
#
And then you come up with what you refer to as your third approach.
#
And when I read that, it felt like that third approach really gets to the crux of the central insight of the book in a sense.
#
So I wanted to tell me a little bit about that.
#
So I think so chapter 10.
#
So like I said, you know, the book is really two books in one.
#
It's 18 chapters chapter one and chapter 10 are both like introductions to the two halves of the book.
#
And so, you know, just to give your readers listeners, right.
#
Yeah, we've already done some kind of synthesis.
#
But I think the core point of the book is the reason it's in two halves is that it is this notion that the binding
#
constraint to most of our development challenges is the effectiveness of the state itself.
#
So what you zeroed in on exactly the key point, right, which is for the longest time academic development economics.
#
So let's see before we blast the whole field.
#
Let's again go back and think about I think one very important thing that makes development economics.
#
I think much more exciting than other parts is intellectually not practically right is that if you look at public finance,
#
okay, it is considered almost axiomatic that there is a trade-off between equity and efficiency.
#
So this is treated as one of the 10 iron laws of economics.
#
Tom Sargent to the Nobel Prize winner gave a graduation speech at Berkeley where he said I think 12 laws of economics.
#
And one of them is there is a trade-off between equity and efficiency.
#
And the reason we believe that is that any redistribution requires taxation that hurts incentives.
#
It requires kind of, you know, giving out resources that can hurt incentives and phasing out.
#
So and so just to elaborate on the phasing out point is suppose I say that if you earn less than a certain amount you get this benefit.
#
But if you earn above you lose it.
#
That means that acts as a very high tax rate even for the poor.
#
So the poor don't pay income tax.
#
But if you're losing a benefit as you earn more money that is a tax.
#
So so all of these things hurt efficiency.
#
Now what's different about development economics intellectually what makes development economics different from other kinds of economics?
#
Is that is the idea of a poverty trap.
#
And so the idea that both individuals and countries can be stuck in a low level equilibrium where if you are, you know,
#
if you're malnourished if you're educated and your parents don't have the resources to invest in that you're never going to be productive.
#
I mean and so be at a low level of productivity.
#
So what makes I think the field the core I think intellectual and moral right.
#
Like I mean attraction about development economics when done right.
#
Let's you know, there are different ways it loses the plot.
#
But what is to me at the core of the discipline that attracts me is that when you're close to subsistence either at the individual level or at the national level
#
there is no trade-off between equity and efficiency.
#
So a well designed government intervention and well designed and well implemented can not only promote equity but also promote efficiency.
#
Which is something I talk about in Chapter 6 as well.
#
But we'll come to that.
#
But so that's kind of what makes development economics exciting.
#
So what happened was the first wave of development economics when the field really took off in the early 1950s post World War II.
#
You have this kind of a whole bunch of newly independent nations and people are looking for advice.
#
They're like, okay, what should we do?
#
And a lot of that early thinking kind of was almost downstream of Soviet planning.
#
And the reason for that was in kind of living memory of 30 40 years the only example of rapid industrialization and development was the Soviet Union.
#
And people then didn't know kind of the costs that it was that were buried.
#
Like I mean that broke that.
#
So it was very statist.
#
It was very what should the government do?
#
But this sector that sector what should you prioritize and some of that thinking still permeates.
#
When you think about jobs, okay, which sector should be prioritized for incentives?
#
So that what sector thinking like I mean has a long history.
#
But the problem is that never ask the question.
#
How will the government do it or can they even do it?
#
So and that's what gives you this long laundry list of well-designed but failed projects.
#
But then gives you books like the least Elise white man's burden and like, you know, elusive quest for growth.
#
And the basic point there was that foreign aid is never ever driven growth.
#
So this cannot be driven by foreign aid and that is essentially castigating kind of, you know, the the donor industrial complex.
#
That, you know, you want to you want to feel good.
#
You want to do some stuff as a bunch of consultants like I mean, so there's a little ecosystem of aid funded projects.
#
I mean that lives in a self-referential way.
#
Then I think what happened was like, you know, people started recognizing that.
#
A lot of these projects were failing.
#
And then so it was not jugado again.
#
I think see there are a lot of very thoughtful people.
#
They can mean very thoughtful people who are trying their best.
#
But the problem is that state capacity is not something that can be done from the outside.
#
It has to be done from the inside.
#
So if you're a well-intentioned donor who wants to come and help a developing country,
#
you say that listen all of my well-designed first I was giving you advice on what to do that failed because you could not do.
#
I am not able to come and build your public systems.
#
I say, okay, let me figure out what are the few really important things.
#
So it could be vaccinations.
#
It could be a polio campaign.
#
It could be certain, you know, stuff on but and then around those programs around those programmatic priorities.
#
What the donors would do is then put project management units.
#
So you put PM use because you say government will not implement well, but let me put my people here or kind of consultants to make sure that at least my project gets implemented.
#
Well, okay, so and this is better than the previous one.
#
So this is again not a not a knock on it at all.
#
Because again, everybody's evolving rationally responding to the constraints they face.
#
And so it reflects essentially a thinking that says, okay, if I can get the vaccines, if I can get the shots in arms, that's going to save lives.
#
And so that is tangible.
#
It is doable and I don't need to take on this complex labyrinth.
#
That's the entire state.
#
And so and even big foundations.
#
So I think the only global development agency that has an element of state capacity building in their programs is usually the World Bank.
#
And that's because they have much bigger scale.
#
So the reason the bank has a much, much, much bigger scale than any other entities and other entities are typically making grants.
#
The bank is making loans.
#
So if you're getting the loans back, then the ticket size is much bigger.
#
And then as part of that, then you've got a ticket size.
#
And today, if you look at some of our management information systems, EMIS and things like that in education, they came as part of World Bank funded projects that happened in the 80s and 90s.
#
So the World Bank has usually had a bit of that.
#
But most other donors are too small.
#
They can mean to even function on that scale.
#
But the problem now and part of what I'm kind of seeing in the book is that and so this is where I kind of am both part of the RCT revolution, but I'm kind of moving beyond that.
#
Because the RCT revolution, I think, was a bit of a complement to this phase two of development.
#
But the phase two is I need to find the things that will work and be highly effective.
#
So if in a small scale efficacy trial, I find that deworming tablets work or chlorine dispensers at source help reduce infection rates and can save lives.
#
These are important findings.
#
And then we say this is simple.
#
So all I need is a small PMU around it and I can deliver massive welfare.
#
So I think, you know, in a model of development where the way you proceed is by kind of finding things that are worth putting PMUs around and implementing in a modular way, then the experimental research actually is a huge complement to that because it tells you what do I want to do.
#
But the criticism of the experiments has always been that, you know, and part of the concern of the old style big picture development thinkers about where they feel RCTs lost the plot is to say you kind of answer increasingly small questions.
#
Well, they can mean and losing the big picture.
#
So I think but but this is my point about, you know, that I value that the micro precision of an individual study.
#
But what I'm doing in the book is then I bring back from all of these micro studies to say now what does this tell us about the truly big picture.
#
And the truly big picture that I'm coming back to now is saying that this was good.
#
But this approach does not give you development.
#
And that development is in the end about kind of see all the aid funded projects at the end are less than 1% of a country's budget.
#
If even if you're a small really poor kind of war-torn country, it might be 10 percent.
#
But so the core of development then is how do you how do you use your public resources?
#
How are you using your domestic tax money better?
#
And so then the whole book in a way, if I was to synthesize in one sentence, it's essentially about how do you improve the quality of expenditure?
#
Because, you know, we we keep saying we have things to do, but we don't have money.
#
We don't have money for this, don't have money for this.
#
But the point is that and I think I said this last time that you get a lot of ideological fights about should I be prioritizing growth or should I be prioritizing social sector?
#
Should I spend on infrastructure?
#
Should I spend on education?
#
And that is where all of our public discourse is because the budget allocation is what is visible.
#
What is unseen like is how that budget allocation then translates into kind of impact on the ground.
#
And what 20 years of my research has been about is kind of in sector after sector and of tracing those fund flows like mean and measuring impact on the ground
#
and then identifying this common pattern across all of these studies that says that the return to improving governance and state capacity is often 10 times more than just spending more on the top line of the program.
#
So if we apply our mind to this, where do you think about state capacity broadly as the thinking of the state as an organization?
#
What are the processes by which like I mean a government takes budgets and converts those into outcomes?
#
There is so much low hanging fruit there that if you focus and improve that that that's going to be kind of where the biggest bang on development is going to be.
#
And I call that the third approach because the first wave kind of ignored implementation.
#
The second wave kind of sidestep the state didn't ignore it but said taking it on outside the realm of my donor funded project is too much.
#
So let me do it for my project.
#
And now I'm saying as part of the third wave, which hopefully this book is then the catalyst for is to say that let's come back to the core of development, which is kind of building a more effective state.
#
So let me you didn't ask me this question, but let me say something that's triggered by this.
#
But so the interesting thing is a lot of kind of Indian academics who write in the US and then write in India, their books will first be published globally.
#
Like I mean, and then be published in India.
#
But as I'm doing the opposite, right, which is this is first and foremost written for India, but then there will most likely be an academic press.
#
That publish something and that will take a year.
#
But that will have a slightly different title.
#
So this is called accelerating India's development.
#
That'll be called accelerating development, a roadmap for and from India.
#
So why am I going into this detour is that the reason I can write this book the way I do is I'm an Indian citizen.
#
Because the process of building an effective state is at the end of the day, something that is a domestic project.
#
It cannot be imposed from outside.
#
And so which means that in a way and it reflects even my teaching journey.
#
So for about eight years, I used to teach development economics from about 2008 to 16.
#
And then 2016, I switched to teaching a course on the Indian economy.
#
And my mother was sitting in Chennai saying why are kids in California interested in a course in the Indian economy?
#
I mean, but that class was so popular and even more popular than the development class.
#
So my ratings in the Indian economy class were even higher.
#
And I think the reason is I was not teaching it as a boring set of facts or a second plan set, the third plan set.
#
I was teaching it as an applied development economics class, but thought through the lens of the Indian experience.
#
So what happens in normal development class is that you will have examples from Latin America, examples from Southeast Asia, from South Asia, from Africa.
#
So those become useful empirical illustrations of certain principles, but they don't give you the satisfaction of understanding development
#
because that happens in the context of a country with a certain political, cultural, historical context.
#
So similarly, this book is a book, is an, like my teaching is applied development economics, thought through the lens of the Indian experience.
#
The book is an applied book on how do you build an effective state, thought through the lens of the Indian experience.
#
But that is, should be relevant globally.
#
But I will not ever pretend that I can go tell the government of Nigeria, okay, how to do this.
#
The hope is that there will be young Nigerians like Khamenei who will read that and then they will be the change makers, right, who will have the agency to do what they do over there.
#
Well, I love the difference in titles that you illustrated because I think the title of the international version is exactly what I would find extremely attractive
#
if I was a development economist somewhere else in the world because it's giving me a frame to look at my own country, not a roadmap, but a frame.
#
And I can apply those principles just to kind of for my listeners quickly, you know, sum up the three approaches.
#
The traditional development economics approach you're saying is you go to a country and you say, hey, the state should do X, Y, Z.
#
And you don't care about how they will do it, whether they even have the capacity to do it.
#
It's just that from on high, you never pay enough attention.
#
Correct, correct. So these are the things that you do.
#
The second approach is more pragmatic, which perhaps I call Jugaar and you got offended.
#
You're like, yeah, the podcaster is calling names.
#
This is our field. But the second approach really is that you accept that there are state capacity issues.
#
So what you say is I will find a project that I feel works and RCTs are an aid in that.
#
And then I will, you know, build a unit around that.
#
I'll call consultants. I'll do what it takes.
#
And then I called it Jugaar because it seems to be a way to get around the absence of state capacity.
#
What you are saying is dramatically different.
#
And it's not even that let's make state capacity better.
#
It is make state capacity better.
#
Not by throwing money at the problem, but by increasing efficiency and by using data to figure out what works and what doesn't work.
#
And there's a great example of that you gave in your talk yesterday, which is from which is about judicial capacity,
#
where you speak about how, you know, making the system, the state slightly more efficient has massive knock on effects on society and markets.
#
So I'd ask you to, you know, repeat that example because it really struck me.
#
Yeah, so this is a paper by Manaswini Rao who got her PhD at Berkeley.
#
And then she was a postdoc with me at UCSD for three years and is now a faculty member at the University of Delaware.
#
And it's very simple, but it's just so powerful because what she's doing is just studying judicial capacity.
#
I mean, and looking at the fact that district judges in India,
#
like the typical district court has maybe about four to five judges or four to six judges and has a caseload of 1000 to 1500 cases.
#
Right. So what happens when judges get transferred out?
#
Often there's a fall in capacity or when they come in, there's an increase in capacity.
#
So the numbers are small enough that every even one extra judge is increasing capacity by 20 to 25 percent.
#
Right. And so all she's doing is using those kind of changes,
#
these discontinuities that come from the capacity from the judges getting transferred in and out to them.
#
Look at what is the downstream effect on the number of cases that get disposed.
#
And then kind of is finding that every kind of extra district judge who's appointed kind of clears an extra 200 cases a year.
#
But then there's also a significant increase in kind of total credit and total economic activity.
#
And partly that's because about 60 to 70 percent of the cases are land and credit.
#
OK, so these are then factors of production that are locked up that are not productive.
#
And so, yeah, you know, so that's an example of just core state effectiveness.
#
So we keep talking about, you know, 30 million cases and then we, you know,
#
break our head and then, you know, there'll be there'll be enough conferences, enough meetings,
#
but nothing actually happened. Something will happen or something will happen.
#
But the underlying problem is growing at a faster rate.
#
So you're not even solving a flow problem. So how are you going to solve your stock problem?
#
Right. So I think, again, if I can take a step back and talk about, you know, the six chapters, the six sectoral chapters.
#
Again, the structure of the book is, like you said, the intellectual contribution is not just to say state capacity because it's obvious.
#
And then the problem in a lot of the academic research is state capacity is often defined tautologically.
#
OK, people say, I want to study the state capacity, so let me study how you perform.
#
OK, but that is kind of saying outcome bad, capacity low.
#
But capacity, that is kind of is not usually covered.
#
Right. So and that's the part that really comes from management.
#
It doesn't come from economics, which really then it's termed the Divish Kapoor coin.
#
Right. Which is and he said he said economists need to study the state as an organization and not as an institution.
#
When you study it as an institution, you kind of study its performance.
#
When you study an organization, you say, let's look at the innards of why the performance is high or low.
#
And that's what you need to do to then saying this is how you fix it.
#
Right. So so that's why there's this first half of the book, which is saying here are six key pillars of effective kind of organizations and states.
#
Where is data and outcome measurement?
#
There is personnel. There is public finance, expenditure, revenue.
#
There is this whole chapter on federalism.
#
And then the second half has these six sectoral chapters, which are education and skills, which we've talked about, health and nutrition.
#
Then there's police and public safety, courts and justice and the welfare and jobs.
#
Right. So what's good about each of these six sectors?
#
And the other thing I'm trying to do in the book, which hopefully comes through, is saying that we spend so much of our discourse kind of arguing.
#
Right. What Sen calls the argumentative Indian.
#
Like, you know, but if you would spend a little less time arguing, a little more time doing like, you know, so we would be better off.
#
So this is not to say we shut down debate. That should happen.
#
Okay. People should debate. People should do that.
#
But, you know, create a broad consensus that these are areas that matter for both intrinsic human welfare and matter for instrumental national development.
#
So once we agree, can we just kind of do it?
#
So, which is why I think the nicest end, I mean, lots of very nice endorsements, but I like very much what Dr. Kilkar said.
#
Like, you know, he said, I hope people will just do it.
#
So that's, you know, yeah, that's where we are.
#
No, no, I love it. And you just give great advice to Twitter.
#
Stop arguing and start doing.
#
Because the whole Twitter will be shut down if people take you seriously.
#
Yeah, that's not, yeah, the words is.
#
So here's a question about the subtitle of your book.
#
A state led roadmap for effective governance.
#
Right. And I want to double click on the statelet bit.
#
Like you've already pointed out and we'll talk in much more detail with many more illustrations of why just increasing state capacity makes sense.
#
No matter what your ideology is, it helps markets.
#
It helps prosperity in every sense.
#
Helps growth, helps equity, etc, etc.
#
So, but I again want to kind of double click there because what often happens is that in the realm of ideas,
#
there is a worry I sometimes have that they can be a crowding out effect.
#
And that if you because our default policy as Indian, our default mindset as Indians is that for everything you look look to the state for the solution.
#
And it's sort of you look at my Bab Sarkar for solution.
#
And my sense is that a solution that is not an either or a solution has to be two pronged.
#
You know, Montaigne speaks in the blurb that he gave to your book that in 91 what the state does is it gets out of the way and then you have the spurt of growth.
#
And now what the state needs to do is function better.
#
And they are both important.
#
And frankly, there is still a lot of getting out of the way that is required.
#
Even today, a lot of economic policy is about inserting the government in the way and reducing freedom in that sense.
#
So my worry is that, you know, a brilliant book like this is laying out what you need to play the long game effectively and fix this part of the puzzle.
#
But the other part of the puzzle actually in terms of durability and results seems to me to be a lower hanging fruit that in much of the areas,
#
if you just get out of the way and there's still so much of that left to do, you achieve immediate results at scale.
#
So what is sort of your sense of this?
#
And again, I'm not coming from a purist libertarian perspective ki state ka naam kyu liya.
#
I agree with your entire book.
#
There's nothing in it I disagree with.
#
But I'm saying that I worry about that crowding out because, you know, when you go to a bureaucrat,
#
it is extremely appealing to them with their top down mindset to say that let's make the state work.
#
And I don't think that's a hard sell.
#
But when you tell them that, hey, get the state out of the way and all of these too much rent seeking, blah, blah, blah, that can be an issue.
#
Yeah, fantastic questions.
#
And it's something I've struggled with myself.
#
See, there are two there are two dimensions where one wants to worry about kind of blindly saying we need state capacity.
#
Right. So one is, I think what happens when you put more capacity in the hands of malevolent actors.
#
OK, like I mean, so that is and, you know, and I talk about that in the intro chapter and I think the part of the so,
#
you know, there are people who distrust the state and saying that actually a weak state is better because then it can't get away.
#
Now, the reason I find that little self-limiting is the following.
#
Right. But you see, the journey we have followed as humanity is kind of from a rule of the jungle.
#
I can mean to kind of a rule of laws. Right.
#
And so and our broad faith is that and then there's a question of how legitimate are the laws themselves.
#
Right. I mean, and who makes the laws. Right.
#
But then what we forget is that the laws have to be implemented.
#
So the way the modern project of kind of civilization is has been structured and this is true regardless of whether it's democracy or what the form is.
#
Right. I mean, is that there is rule of law.
#
OK, that there are laws that are followed.
#
Now, what we've tried to do as kind of reducing the arbitrary power of the state is to say that the coercive powers are circumscribed by certain processes.
#
Right. But what happens is those processes themselves require capacity.
#
OK. And so that is why this approach of saying that I will have a weak state so that it doesn't kind of encroach on my liberties is very, very self-limiting.
#
You see, because the pathway to get to that liberal utopia, right, which is a functional state that kind of is an enabler of citizens rather than kind of a controller of citizens,
#
which I think is, you know, broadly where we all want to go.
#
Correct. And we are in this incomplete journey from a colonial state designed to rule us.
#
Right. I mean, to a democratic state meant to serve us.
#
But my I think the key point here, and this is another line I use, I mean, in chapter two, which, you know, is that the great challenge of Indian democracy is, you know, others have talked about that India's early democracy.
#
Right. I mean, so which is a great moral triumph, right, because it allowed us to represent the interests of the poor and marginalized in the public voice.
#
But it is an incomplete success because you have increased the power of the poor to make a claim in the state without the state having the capacity to serve those claims.
#
Right. So that's the scope and strength.
#
But there's a deeper point. The deeper point is that everything in our society is for the most part driven by ability to pay.
#
OK. But as the state is the one entity that every citizen is supposed to have an equal claim on.
#
So if you want and Ambedkar said this famously in his 49, you know, constituent assembly address, right, that we are entering into an age of contradictions, that in the age of in the era of democracy and politics, we follow the principle of one man, one vote in the prince.
#
But is it everything else? We have huge inequality.
#
Right. So then this is why I argue that the project of building a more effective state is the great unfinished task of Indian democracy itself.
#
That for Indian democracy to deliver on the promise of democracy to the marginalized, the state is, in fact, the effective.
#
Now, but then let's get to your second point, right, which is how does that not get overinterpreted as saying, oh, state needs to do everything.
#
OK, I have a capable state. So I will do this and do that.
#
And so that I think is an incredibly important problem.
#
And I think there are two ways I'm addressing that, both indirectly rather than directly.
#
OK, so the first indirect way I'm addressing that is by the focus of the six sectors that I'm talking about.
#
Right. I think because these are six sectors that nobody will argue.
#
Right. I mean, that the state has a core role and will do well.
#
OK. And then there are kind of two even more subtle ways in which I think that message is conveyed.
#
I think Chapter 16 on jobs and productivity in some ways was the most difficult chapter to write because it's like I'm writing all of economics in 30 pages.
#
Right. And it's also that's where I make very clear that most of the dynamism in the economy happens in the private sector.
#
Right. And the role of the state is to kind of provide these enablers that allows private sector dynamism.
#
OK, so that's one place where that message is put.
#
The other place, which is even more subtle, is really in Chapter six, when I'm talking about improving the quality of budgetary analysis about the quality of expenditure,
#
where you say any I mean, again, this is why there is so much low hanging fruit.
#
Right. If you look at how budget proposals of 100 crores of crores get kind of signed off on the very, very rudimentary analysis.
#
Right. Bringing that discipline of saying, let's look at every budget item over 500 crores in a year or start with a thousand and then work your way as you build the capacity and saying,
#
can I estimate an ROI even with some basic assumptions?
#
Right. Not rocket science. Pressure testers.
#
Can I then look at the equity impact of the spending?
#
So when you bring that kind of discipline into the budgeting process, then a lot of these state excesses, right, at least in spending.
#
Now, that may not be fully true for regulation.
#
That's in Chapter 14, like I mean, which is kind of going and looking at empirical analysis of the consequences of the laws.
#
Right. But eventually again, that's why this is a 25 year project.
#
Right. I mean, it's not the goal here is that high income countries took a hundred years to build an effective state.
#
My optimistic hope is that based on what we know, and that's then the shifting of the present curve,
#
the knowledge we have, the principles we have, if we can compress that cycle to 25 years, that is then the core of accelerating India's development.
#
And so, yeah, so the long way of answering.
#
So I hope I answered it because what I'm doing here is because if I start making a laundry list of states should not do this, should not do this,
#
then you're litigating like specific examples as opposed to illustrating principles.
#
Right. So the book is not about getting into every nitty gritty of what the state is doing.
#
But in Chapter 16, there is this clear sense of this is the core of the state and that markets need to do the rest.
#
And the public finance chapter and even the chapter on laws,
#
I think is the one that indirectly speak to kind of analyzing and gently kind of,
#
if not phasing out, at least stopping the increase of spending can mean on areas that are not productive and to,
#
you know, and hopefully that again bends the curve in the right direction.
#
So, you know, there's a frame that I find very useful to think of the state and you mentioned it in your book and written about it.
#
I first learned about it from Fukuyama, which is the scope and strength of the state.
#
In fact, one of the things I feel bad is like normally I would have wanted to put Fukuyama put all of that in the text,
#
but the reference is all in the footnotes because if I put everything in the text,
#
then it starts feeling okay, like, I mean, he's doing a textbook text.
#
This thing with Fukuyama is there, it's there in the references.
#
No, absolutely. And just to quickly sort of enlighten the listeners on that,
#
you know, you can look at a state in terms of strength, how well it can do what it does and in terms of scope,
#
what are all the things that it chooses to do.
#
And I think most sensible people would agree that the Indian state is big in terms of scope.
#
It does too many things and shouldn't do all of them and it is weak in terms of strength.
#
It can't do any of them properly.
#
So instead of being a lab, instead of doing a lot of things badly,
#
we want the state to be one that does a few things very well.
#
And what your book does brilliantly and I can't almost imagine it being done better is talk about how you can increase the strength.
#
I think how you can reduce the scope is also important to think about.
#
And, you know, those frameworks of what the state should or should not do is tackled by our, you know,
#
Amitabh Bachinian heroes, Ajay Vijay in their book in service of the Republic, Ajay Shah and Vijay Kelkar.
#
And we've also had episodes of Everything is Everything, we'll link that from the show notes.
#
And, you know, like I said, I agree with everything in your book,
#
but I think I may have mentioned this to you last time before the last episode when you sent me a draft.
#
There were a couple of paras that I complain about where I think you're attacking a straw man,
#
where you say that there are some who will say that because India has, you know, privatized in telecom and airlines,
#
and it worked out, you know, we should do that to the rest of the whatever.
#
And that is a simplistic view.
#
Now, telecom and airlines are examples I tend to give.
#
So maybe you had me in mind then.
#
No, no, no, I didn't have you in mind, but I think.
#
And my overall thought is that's a straw man.
#
What people like me are saying, and we discussed it at length in the education episode,
#
is not that the state should not do it.
#
It is that the state should do everything that you're writing about in your great chapter on education,
#
but it should also free up the civil society and markets to do it.
#
So chapter 9 is taken market and like, you know, but it's exactly.
#
That was a limited point I'm making, but I have no doubt that, you know,
#
overall our listeners will kind of get the full picture.
#
Let's, you know, before we dive into the two areas we're going to talk about,
#
really the bureaucracy and personnel and so on, sort of one,
#
I'll ask you some foundational questions about what we mean by state capacity.
#
But before that, a quick question, a recent guest on my show mentioned
#
and he's someone who works a lot with government.
#
And at one point when I ribbed him about that playfully and this was off the record,
#
he sort of mentioned that, you know what, Amit Boss, you know,
#
90 percent of the things that happen in government, if not more,
#
those decisions have nothing to do with the politician in charge.
#
The politician will carry out like one big thing.
#
They have their heart set on like a demonetization or whatever.
#
But 90 percent of the work is done by the deep state.
#
And it's a deep state that as, you know,
#
KP Krishnan spoke about in his episode and you get such a vivid picture of it.
#
The deep state is really this group of technocrats and bureaucrats
#
who work for decades behind the scenes starting from the late 1970s
#
where Manmohan, where Montaigne comes to Delhi at Manmohan's urging
#
and then they work silently for 10 years till the optimal crisis,
#
you know, presents itself and so on and so forth.
#
And it kind of continues.
#
And that, one, do you agree with that frame from your experience?
#
And two, does that frame make bureaucrats incredibly important,
#
much more important than what the lay public may think?
#
The lay public will think that, oh, politicians have to implement whatever has to happen
#
and you've got a great chapter on politicians as well.
#
All your chapters are alliterating, which is nice.
#
So what's sort of your sense on that?
#
That on the one hand, you can look at the bureaucracy,
#
which is so moribund in different ways and the incentives are all messed up
#
and it often seems so utterly dysfunctional.
#
But at the same time, as both you and I know,
#
there are outstanding people in the civil services who know all of this,
#
to whom none of this is new, who would agree with every word of your book.
#
And, you know, so what's your kind of take on it?
#
Yes, I think so. The one thing is, I mean, the deep state has a little bit of a pejorative term.
#
Yeah, but I think it is true that, you know,
#
the state as kind of a faceless organization that has its own rhythms
#
and kind of functions like for its own internal logic, right?
#
See, it's sometimes you criticize academia.
#
Okay, like I mean, saying you're internally self-referential,
#
but that every kind of walk of life has that, right?
#
And I can't remember if I've discussed this with you,
#
but I remember one of my this and maybe when KPS said this at some point, right?
#
Like I remember in one of my early work in education in one of the states,
#
normally there are two positions.
#
There's kind of a, there's a commissioner of education
#
and they used to be a director of SSA, service of Chabyam, okay?
#
And one of them was an election duty.
#
So the other person was officiating holding both charges.
#
And this cartoonish example, but you see it has great logic.
#
The cartoonish example is this gentleman writes a letter to himself.
#
Okay, like I mean, so in one office writes to himself in the other office, right?
#
Like, I mean, asking for the release of certain funds and money.
#
And then that same afternoon, that same gentleman writes back, rejecting the request.
#
Okay, and the whole point is like,
#
why would you put yourself through this process of kind of like,
#
you know, writing a letter to yourself that you're then going to reject, right?
#
Why? And he's like, no, you don't get it.
#
Like, I mean, because the record has to show that my job in this place is to ask for the money.
#
My job in that place is to turn it down.
#
And the file should be clear that the request was made because it's not about the person.
#
Okay, that made that request.
#
Okay, so government lives in files, right?
#
It lives in accumulation, like I mean, and a very, very key part of this, you know,
#
If it's not in file, it didn't happen.
#
And so then you've got to kind of document.
#
I think the but the broader point that 90 percent, right?
#
Like, I mean, happens in the innards of the state is 100 percent, right?
#
Without the sinister kind of like connotation of the...
#
I should have said invisible communities rather than deep space.
#
Anyway, so but I think the and yes, I mean, and in there, there are I think, you know,
#
the outstanding thinking champions of change who are not only clear in their thinking,
#
but are able to then build the coalitions, like I mean, needed to make things happen.
#
You know, so Vijay, who's the CEO of CJEST, like I don't know if you met him yesterday,
#
but you know, he says he says the problem is very people think that you go talk to a minister
#
and you get approval and the project will happen.
#
No, there are 15 levels at which a project can be killed.
#
Okay, like I mean, and killed not nobody will actively kill it, right?
#
It is killed just by not not even by malice.
#
Okay, and I heard a very interesting comment recently from a young official I met.
#
He said, you know, in government, if it's not a hell, yes, it's a no.
#
Okay, and that's just because the yes is not because they're trying to be disingenuous.
#
The yes is they agree with you.
#
But then once you leave that room, the burdens of their life take over.
#
Okay, like I mean, and then there is just no time to get it done.
#
And so it's not even malice that kills an idea, right?
#
I mean, it is then this chronically understaffed state, the chronically misstaffed in terms of the both
#
the resourcing in terms of the numbers and the technical skills and which is then what the core of
#
chapter 3 and 4 is about and that's probably why you said this is a setup.
#
But yeah, I think, you know, when we think about state capacity, that is what we're talking about.
#
We're talking about these invisible systems and processes that govern how the daily business of government functions.
#
And that's that's what the core of the first half of the book is about.
#
There is nothing I like to talk about more than bureaucrats.
#
My dad was also in the area, so why not?
#
Let's let's kind of talk about them.
#
But before that, just to sort of double click on state capacity one more time.
#
So all the listeners are completely clear on what it means.
#
I absolutely love the metaphor that you made of the Indian state as a 1950s car that you know,
#
you can the political parties are basically fighting for who gets to drive the car.
#
What is expenditure? Expenditure is a petrol you put in the car.
#
You can put more and more petrol.
#
But ultimately a 1950s car is a 1950s car and by which you're talking about the design of the state,
#
which literally was kind of designed in the 1950s.
#
So it makes a lot of sense.
#
I want you to take me through very quickly before we get to the subject at hand.
#
What do you consider the six key systemic elements of state capacity?
#
Like when we say state capacity, it seems like a very vague nebulous term.
#
Let's break it down. What do you mean by that?
#
Yeah, so that's a great question.
#
So I think the first three are kind of concepts that apply to any organization.
#
Okay, and I learned this, in fact, from talking to an odd theory person.
#
But and those so those first three pillars, right?
#
So is to leave the state aside for a moment.
#
Okay, is any of your listeners in a private sector job?
#
What are the things that drive the culture of an organization, right?
#
And the three things are outcomes, which is what are you measured on your quarterly targets?
#
What are your quarterly targets, right?
#
That's where the buck stops, right?
#
So that is what drives the culture of the org,
#
which is what am I trying to what is measured and what am I held accountable for?
#
Second piece is a downstream of that is personnel.
#
Okay, which is who is hired, who is paid more, who is promoted, who is posted where
#
and what determines your professional success in your trajectory within the org.
#
And that's why kind of HR matters so much because it what shapes the entire
#
these amorphous incentives that you talk about is shaped by your personnel policies, right?
#
I mean, so I think maybe it was Rumsfeld who said personnel is policy, right?
#
Like I mean that, yeah, so if it but I think that was meant more in the form of the leader
#
that who that person is will shape it.
#
But I think that applies more deeply that personnel is the state.
#
Okay, because the people are who you track with.
#
And then the third pillar of organizational culture is budgets, right?
#
Which are the units that are getting increasing funding?
#
Because that's where the excitement is, right?
#
I mean, and which are the places that are getting contracting funding?
#
And so those three principles apply to the government as well, which is, you know, what you measure.
#
So why do you get all of this obsessive focus on paperwork and compliance?
#
Because it's not that there's no accountability in the government.
#
The account is this that the accountability is all for compliance and not for outcomes.
#
Okay, so that's what drives that culture.
#
So those three things apply to government as well, right?
#
So data and outcomes, that's chapter four.
#
Personnel management, that's chapter five.
#
And public finance expenditure.
#
I think the three other things, the three other chapters apply only to the state and not to organizations in general.
#
And that is revenue because I mean, obviously others care about revenue, but that's sales.
#
Whereas this is tax revenue, which is only the state can do.
#
Okay, so but that is a core component of state capacity, right?
#
But again, I think the important insights in that chapter, which again build off Ajay and Vijay, like, you know,
#
I mean, which is that the most government officials, tax department officials have targets.
#
Okay, so we have to hit this revenue target, right?
#
But they are not thinking or even measuring about measuring or even thinking about maybe the thinking,
#
but certainly not measuring about what are the downstream consequences to economic activity from the nature of the tax regime.
#
Okay, so and because every tax is actually every rupee of tax revenue has more than a rupee of other costs in the economy.
#
You have to think not just about the quantity of revenue, but the quality of revenue, right?
#
I mean, so what I'm doing in this chapter is kind of really sharpening the focus on the quality of revenue
#
and saying how do you kind of increase revenue instruments in a way that also don't distort or promote economic activity, right?
#
So that's chapter seven.
#
And then there is this other core chapter that matters for governance, which is about federalism and decentralization,
#
which we talked a little bit about and I think maybe not enough because we ended up taking that episode,
#
half of it on the intro chapter.
#
But anyway, there's a lot there.
#
And then there's this chapter in the state in the market,
#
okay, which is saying that again, something that again,
#
it applies to companies in terms of companies also have to constantly wrestle with this make versus do debate, right?
#
I mean, so this goes back to course 37, the boundaries of the firm, right?
#
I mean, which is when should I do something in-house?
#
When should I outsource?
#
And the basic insight is that you the benefit of outsourcing and procurement is that entity has specialization and scale and quality
#
and can do that better than you trying to do everything yourself.
#
But the friction is you have to negotiate every contract you can't so that is these incomplete contracts, right?
#
So thinking about the boundaries of the firm is where kind of the one piece of the conceptual machinery comes from.
#
But that same thing applies to the boundaries of the state.
#
But it's more than that, right?
#
Because the state is also making the rules within which the market functions.
#
So like I've said, the government functions as a policymaker, as a regulator, as a provider.
#
And the way you think about the private sector is different in those three roles, right?
#
So that's then kind of those are the six pillars of kind of saying and where in each of these places,
#
the point of doing this is not just to say this is a conceptual taxonomy.
#
It's a conceptual taxonomy, which is then followed by showing how dysfunctional we are, right?
#
Like meaning each of these things and then saying like, you know, this is this is the low-hanging fruit, right?
#
I mean of things that you can do to improve state effectiveness on each of these dimensions.
#
And then you bring that together.
#
And then saying this makes this whole entity that if you think about the state as a black box,
#
I'm putting a budget and I'm getting an output, right?
#
This whole thing is let's open up this black box.
#
And saying what are the systems and processes by which this beast that is the government functions
#
and how can we make that more effective?
#
So as we get to the bureaucracy chapter, I want to read out a couple of lines from your federalism chapter instead.
#
Because even though we did half an episode on that,
#
I think these two sentences should make every Indian sit up and take notice because it is truly mind-blowing.
#
And I'm quoting you now.
#
India spends only 3% of its budget at the local government level compared to over 50% in China.
#
While outsiders often think of China as highly centralized in practice,
#
its budgets are nearly 17 times more decentralized than India's.
#
And we could speak for another five or six hours if we just speak about decentralization now.
#
But I just want to use these sentences to kind of plug the book and say everybody's got to go out and read it.
#
It's only 600 pages not 800 because 200 of those pages are notes and all of that.
#
So though you should read the notes as well.
#
I mean, that's what I love to do, you know, just go dive into the footnotes and yeah,
#
maybe some people will discover Fukuyama that way.
#
Imagine your book being the gateway to Fukuyama's work.
#
Another remarkable public service.
#
Now again something that I because you know of the shortage of time,
#
I won't ask you to elaborate upon,
#
but you also give eight different reasons on why the Indian state is ineffective at core service delivery.
#
And we're going to dive into the fourth of them, which is an ineffective bureaucracy.
#
So we'll go sort of straight to your chapter three, which and by the way,
#
gentle listeners would be glad to know that Karthik has promised me many more episodes.
#
So we'll probably do one episode per chapter and we'll just do random fun episodes in between also.
#
And by the time you'll have written this next book.
#
Now, let's talk about like before I begin talking about the content of the chapter.
#
I want to know what your journey was in understanding the bureaucracy.
#
Like as an academic from abroad in the sense you're an Indian,
#
but you did your academics abroad as an academic from abroad
#
when you begin that journey towards being a pro-academic and you know,
#
dealing with the bureaucrats, what was your initial impression of what it will be like?
#
And you know, how did that evolve as time went by?
#
No, again, it's a great yeah, you know, in a way you're making me reflect and articulate things
#
which have just kind of happened implicitly over a lifetime.
#
I mean, and no, I think the first kind of direct encounter
#
with the frontline of the Indian state happened in my you know,
#
my first major research project that was the study this nationwide study
#
on teacher and doctor absence in the public sector, right?
#
So this was my first field project.
#
I was there kind of that's when I've been to like dozens of villages,
#
seen schools in like at least five, six states, schools, clinics.
#
You go there and then you just kind of talk to people, right?
#
You talk to people and then like figure out, okay, what does your life look like, right?
#
I mean, and you just then start seeing, okay,
#
because even if you go to a government office and meet a secretary at the very top,
#
you have just no idea right about the layers and layers then under that.
#
So part of this then came from that level of frontline conversation.
#
Then I would also go often in that as part of that.
#
I would end up meeting block and district level officers often
#
because you needed permission letters.
#
Okay, it can mean so eventually for the study we got formal permission letters.
#
But for my pilots before the study had been approved by the government
#
even at that time to go like I mean and get some of these interviews.
#
It was considered prudent to go talk to the DEO like I mean
#
the district education officer who would give you a letter and saying so and so
#
as I've authorized to go and you know, talk to all the school.
#
So in the process of needing the permissions down in this hierarchy,
#
I would have spent time in district education officer offices, right?
#
Like I mean, so and then you get talking like, okay, what shall I?
#
And then you say, okay, this is a guy who's in charge of like 1200 schools.
#
Okay, it can mean, you know, this is a serious, serious job.
#
Okay, and then you start thinking, okay, what kind of capacity is there in that office, right?
#
I mean, do they have do they have a computer?
#
Do they have this is 2001 to so many of them didn't, right?
#
I mean, and so I think just the field work, right?
#
And as part of the the bureaucratic process of getting those permissions,
#
you get those encounters.
#
And so I've not done like deep qualitative studies of those things, right?
#
But those impressions kind of were the first ones.
#
Then I think when I started doing my next wave of more detailed work
#
in Andhra Pradesh, right?
#
Where we would do these large-scale RCTs.
#
So there I would have spent time like, you know, again with multiple levels of the bureaucracy, right?
#
So and that again goes back to my colleague Vijay, not Kilkar, this is Vijay Pingley.
#
Like, you know, I mean, think about that there are 15 layers, okay,
#
at which things need to kind of pass for it to happen.
#
And so, yeah, same with, you know, principal secretary can agree.
#
The commissioner has signed.
#
Then you kind of we had one workshop with the five district collectors in the five districts.
#
We were working then the district education officers.
#
Then we did something with the mandal education officers to socialize them about the project.
#
Like, you know, what is it that we're trying to do?
#
So in doing that, obviously, I'm addressing them.
#
But then you also at lunch at chai at coffee, like, you know, you're talking, you know, just kind of and that is my,
#
you know, you obviously do a little bit of casual anthropology,
#
but the core thing is just asking what is a day in your life look like?
#
So my typical question when I meet like a government functionary, not at the senior level when you're talking policy,
#
but when I go to the field is to ask what does a day in your life look like, right?
#
That means so, yeah, so that's kind of how.
#
So I think what's been fun about the book is none of these things are written in my academic papers,
#
okay, because you don't end up writing an academic economics paper saying,
#
okay, this is the day in the life of a block education officer, right?
#
But but there's been a lot of other good work, right?
#
So Yamini and Shriyana, like I mean, so Shriyana is like, you know, I would say the best before she became a Shah Rukh Khan kind of like,
#
you know, legend, her best cited paper, at least the one that was known best in the circles is the paper with Yamini, right?
#
I mean, on kind of the post office state, right?
#
And so they've got, I think in the context of education, this very, very nice kind of characterization that just says, listen,
#
you know, most of these mid-level officials are no longer kind of functioning as empowered managers with agency to kind of manage their systems,
#
but they're really functioning as post offices, right?
#
I mean, where you transfer orders down and you take data and reports up, okay?
#
So and over time, that's kind of, you know, what's happened.
#
So but going back to my journey of learning.
#
So there's the field and then the reading, right?
#
The selective reading of the high quality works.
#
Devesh Kapoor has and Aditya Dasgupta had this very nice paper recently just looking at the impact of workload, right?
#
I mean, and so they look at NREGA implementation and they look at the staffing level in a block development officer's office, right?
#
I mean, and then, you know, they're just like such stark and clear correlations between the staffing and the capacity in that office,
#
like, I mean, to your quality of service delivery, right?
#
So I think at some point we have this.
#
Anyway, that's kind of then the insight which I'll come to.
#
And then there's also these other very nice books about which I kind of, you know, not read end to end, but at least skimmed and cited,
#
which are books by anthropologists, right?
#
Like, so there's this Akhil Gupta's, you know, this I think the whole book is, I think it's called Red Tape, right?
#
Like, I mean, but that's where I think this quote of somebody telling an official,
#
matlab, life mein gadi chalna ro, kagas pe toh dikhado, okay, it's running, right?
#
So there are anthropologists like who have then done like, you know, deeper, thicker descriptions, right?
#
I mean, through kind of specific case studies, I think there is what is this called?
#
I'm blanking, Paper Tiger, Paper Tiger, right?
#
Like, I mean, is the one also by an anthropologist, right?
#
I'm blanking on a name, but Naina Kamathur, I think, right?
#
But yeah, so there's been like, good work.
#
I think some of these thicker descriptions of the state have not come from economists, right?
#
Like, I mean, so this then goes back to, I don't think I've answered your first question about kind of the intellectual eclecticism, right?
#
And, but I think intellectual eclecticism comes when you are motivated for research by problems and not by methods, okay?
#
So when you say that what I care about is the problem, then you obviously have to understand all sides of it.
#
I think I love being an economist because I still find it probably and I've obviously I'm biased,
#
but I find it the most parsimonious framework.
#
See, every discipline adds its own kind of important lens to a problem.
#
But I think in terms of the core of kind of resource constraints and constrained optimization,
#
and how are you going to sing, I find the conceptual toolkit of economics and the empirical richness, right?
#
I mean, to be kind of that's why the core of the book is economics.
#
But the reason it is ring-fenced and kind of, you know,
#
embellished with all of these other fields is because I'm motivated by the problem and the question and not the method.
#
So, you know, that line you came up with for Shriyana before she became a Shah Rukh Khan legend.
#
What a great line. So I'm going to give you a quiz question.
#
I'm going to give you another line and you will have to tell me within five seconds who it is about.
#
And the other line is before she became an Amul Hoding.
#
Oh, Ashwin Nidesh Pandey.
#
Your Antakshari partner, your Antakshari partner to be.
#
You know, the thing is, now my throat is bad again.
#
But you know, the funny thing is she came on the show and sang Chupalu Yudhi, right?
#
Like, you know, I mean, and I was literally completing the lines.
#
I was like, arey, like, you know, so there's this virtual Antakshari me listening to Ashwini,
#
like, you know, and kind of completing the lines.
#
I got to get both of you in this room and recording together and we'll actually do an Antakshari.
#
A singing economist is what, you know, the discipline needs.
#
That is the last sort of piece of the puzzle.
#
No, but not bad, huh? Like you put me on the spot.
#
And you won, you won, though I knew you would win, of course.
#
No, no, I haven't heard all episodes.
#
Like, you know, okay, shocking.
#
I feel betrayed, but yeah.
#
Oh, you know, and I found your book actually fabulously, not just light to read,
#
but entertaining in some parts, like, you know, you tell this beautiful story.
#
I'll just read your lines out where you say, quote,
#
the status quo is well described by the tragicomic story of two people discussing the food in a restaurant.
#
The first one says the food here is terrible.
#
And the second one says and the portions are too small.
#
Similarly, a bureaucracy is both too small and highly inefficient.
#
Thus, we need to increase staffing and capacity,
#
but we also need to do so in cost-effective ways alongside reforms to improve bureaucratic efficiency.
#
And never has that point been made in such an entertaining way.
#
It's just one of the most brilliant kind of metaphors I've seen.
#
And sorry, and that goes to Woody Allen.
#
It's not from me, but that's again in the footnote, right?
#
Like, I mean, so, you know, see, I think one of the journeys in these 15 drafts is my first draft was written very academically
#
because see, the cardinal academic sin is to say something and pass it off as your own without kind of attributing it, right?
#
It can mean so and like I'm saying, this is a work of synthesis, right?
#
It's a work of reading broadly and kind of synthesizing insights from many, many, many, many people, right?
#
And bring it together, right?
#
So the original contribution that was the synthesis and not kind of many of the underlying things.
#
But when I start writing and attributing in every sentence and bring people, then the feedback was the reading doesn't flow, right?
#
So the one compromise I've had to make in which kind of pains me as an academic is I would have wanted you to not attribute that to me.
#
I would have wanted you to look at the footnote and saying this is coming from Annie Hall, which is Woody Allen movie.
#
But that is so therefore, you know, gentle reader, don't credit me with everything you read in the text.
#
Credit me with finding the things that mattered and putting it together, right?
#
It can mean in this mosaic to help you, the reader, kind of put together this vast kind of.
#
I think what's fun about this is there is so much good research, right?
#
I mean, we again see it's so easy.
#
You know, part of my job here is to kind of make the plug for the academic enterprise, right?
#
I mean, for all its flaws, OK, for all its flaws, again, it's got no question.
#
OK, there are things that need to be fixed, right?
#
But the honest truth is that early stage funding of like public funding of research is like early stage venture capital, right?
#
Which is that, you know, 90 percent of research will fail or is crap.
#
OK, I mean, a lot of it is negative value add.
#
OK, because I would. So there are there are all kinds of negative incentives that come from creating incentives to publish garbage.
#
You know, I mean, so that's negative incentives because it just crowds the space with kind.
#
It's negative output. OK.
#
And then there's about, you know, another eight percent of research that is useful, right?
#
I mean, that is meaningfully moving the thing forward.
#
And then there's one percent of like the truly innovative blockbuster things that makes the whole enterprise pay for itself, right?
#
So that's exactly like early stage funding of venture capital.
#
So which is why it's easy to find a lot of crappy research, easy to find a lot of crappy papers, right?
#
But don't think about that in the 90 percent or like of the failed startups, right?
#
But because startups fail, we would not say that therefore we should not fund innovation.
#
OK, so what I'm trying to do here is kind of collect those nuggets of one percent.
#
Right. I mean, over the last 20 years and package this in a way of saying gentle reader or, you know,
#
and this is almost like what it's what I said yesterday.
#
Right. It's it's I feel it's a public service and an obligation partly because the entire academic enterprise
#
is directly or indirectly subsidized by the taxpayer.
#
OK, so that's right. I'm in a publicly funded university.
#
There's taxpayer funded incentives for research and there is therefore an obligation to kind of then think back.
#
Now, but where the mistake comes, the mistake comes.
#
So I'm going to say things that seem contradictory, but there's no contradiction, right?
#
I'm going to say both that there's an obligation of the Academy to serve the public,
#
but it's a mistake to insist on practical relevance for any given research project.
#
Right. And that's because the way you make the second happen is not at the level of an individual project.
#
You make it happen at the level of a portfolio. Right.
#
I can mean saying that when there's a body of work, it needs to serve a broader public interest.
#
When there's an individual project, the job is to just figure out the truth in that narrow little piece,
#
even if it doesn't speak to direct policy impact.
#
Right. So and this is a problem that donors often kind of, you know, impose on researchers saying,
#
OK, show me the policy relevance of this project.
#
I said, boss, this is a 20 year process.
#
OK. And so which is why I have to read out like, you know, I think there is this paragraph I have in the.
#
That's why the acknowledgments is almost eight pages.
#
It's one percent of the book. OK.
#
Like, you know, because it is a lifelong journey.
#
But I think part of what I'm saying is also thanking all the funders.
#
Right. Like Kamino funded the work.
#
But this is a long term journey.
#
And part of what I'm doing here is going back to that.
#
You know, this is the thing again, I think many things in parallel.
#
Like he said it. I've said it now.
#
But the academic part of me, I can't say it without also attributing it because I've heard him say it.
#
Right. But it's that thing which I've said for many years.
#
Right. When I'm talking to donors about kind of the value of funding research.
#
It is this right that all human progress has or most human progress.
#
Right. I mean, sometimes it comes just from like not doing dumb stuff like fighting wars.
#
But most human progress has come from new knowledge, transmitting that knowledge, acting on that knowledge.
#
Right. And so the point is the reason research in the academic enterprise can often appear from the outside
#
as this incredibly pointless kind of bunch of resources that go to produce crappy research is because if you publish everything,
#
which things often do, you look at the bottom 90 percent and saying it's a classic.
#
Right. But that is not the way to think about the enterprise.
#
The whole enterprise is saying that you invest in kind of promising ideas and then the ones that are insightful.
#
So then the value of the book like this is to say, let's take the insightful nuggets that have come from the work
#
of so many scholars, so many practitioners, so many people and package that for the non-academic reader.
#
And, you know, that is hopefully the service here.
#
I love your impassioned defense of Academy.
#
And I will say that while I agree with all the micro things you said at the macro level,
#
I disagree in the sense, of course, I agree that donors should not only look at the immediate applicability of a particular study.
#
I'm not defending academia, I'm defending research. There's a big difference.
#
So there's a problem with academia in terms of the incentive structures it creates with regard to research.
#
OK, so I did not defend academia.
#
I see. OK, that's a great clarification.
#
So my point is this, I agree with your defense of research in that it does not always have to show an immediate applicability key.
#
OK, this is a science, where is the tech that will emerge from it?
#
You can't do that, right?
#
However, I think where, you know, the venture capital sort of analogy doesn't work is that the incentives in the marketplace are awesome.
#
There is creative destruction.
#
You know, everybody is taking part voluntarily.
#
There's no taxpayers money being coerced from people like me.
#
Whereas in academia, the incentives are deeply, deeply, deeply fucked up.
#
People are performing to a different set of incentives.
#
The next journal article, getting tenure, etc, etc, getting driven into narrower and narrower silos.
#
But you get what I'm saying.
#
I mean, none of this is something you disagree with me.
#
You're shaking. You're nodding vigorously.
#
But yeah, I think it's important to close the loop here, right?
#
Which is what I said is I was making the case for research.
#
And I also agree with you that academia is one institutional form that we have created to encourage research.
#
But it's by no means the only one.
#
And in fact, you know, in many areas like the cutting edge of research is inside companies.
#
And it's not kind of in universities because there is a market test for the new ideas, right?
#
I mean, that you can apply them.
#
So I think the problems with academia and academic incentives, I think, are well known.
#
I think the part which I would like to fix somehow, right, I mean, is the is the premium on being novel over being correct.
#
Okay, so it's not even about so.
#
So but let me qualify that a bit more, right?
#
So you get a study that shows something in one part of the world.
#
But if you're the first study on that, you get a huge publication premium.
#
But the second and the third and the fourth, which are often as or more important in terms of solidifying our confidence that this is true,
#
have a very sharp fall off in terms of the academic payoff.
#
Okay, so that's a problem.
#
Then, you know, in my own work, you'll see that you can do you can do small scale experiments, right?
#
I mean, that are fine found to be effective.
#
Okay. And then everybody gets excited because they say, oh, this works like, you know, let's put donor money.
#
But then nobody asked the question about does it work at a larger scale where you hit into the state capacity constraint?
#
So that's another way by which this enterprise is kind of almost hiding, like, you know, from that state capacity constraint because small scale me the idea big scale me evaluating it like,
#
you know, so part of what I'm doing is also evaluating at scale.
#
Okay, which is what often opens my eyes to the centrality of the state capacity constraint.
#
So that's coming back to, you know, something you said.
#
So I think, listen, there is there are problems with every walk of life.
#
There's problems in law, in the legal profession, in the bar, in the bench.
#
Like, I mean, there's problems and problems everywhere and academia is no different.
#
But I think each of these functions, each of these roles has broader social consequences beyond what they're doing within the field.
#
Right. And that's why just like judges should be and courts should be open to the scrutiny of people like me and Ajay who are looking at the data.
#
And so one of the things I say in Chapter 14 in court is saying part of the problem that's been so difficult to make progress in courts is that any attempt to kind of do this is by the executive, seen as encroaching on the judiciary.
#
But we need to be able to separate very clearly that the content of justice is in the domain of the judiciary.
#
But the process of justice is something that all arms of government and citizens like me have kind of a legitimate claim on and a certain amount of transparency analysis and kind of, you know, saying, okay, these are your rules.
#
But to what extent is it serving the public purpose?
#
And therefore, using that to have a back and forth is needed with many institutions that once kind of served a social purpose.
#
But over time, evolve in ways that become more about protecting the turf of the privileged within that particular institution and every aspect of life.
#
This is true for medicine. Right. I mean that why do we let doctors run most of our health policy given that, you know, doctors know how to cure patients.
#
They don't know how to think of systems for the most part. That's not how they're trained.
#
That's something that it takes a different. So same thing for academia.
#
So we need like, I mean, our own kind of almost kind of external review, right, like a mean of the process to say this is the social function of academia.
#
And these are the parts that are broken. And these are the, you know, these are some ideas.
#
So one interesting piece of movement that's happening is what's called meta science.
#
OK, so meta science is my colleague, Paul Niehaus, is involved with this is just thinking about the process of doing science.
#
OK, like, I mean, and how can we improve that process? How do you improve?
#
So some interesting ideas. And this is where randomization can be good is, you know, if you think about see the problem in, say, research or even college admissions or any of these very high stakes things is that it's become a bit of a rat race.
#
Right. Like, I mean, to get the next grant, to get the next admission.
#
So suppose you change the rules and saying, listen, we will check whether you are above a certain threshold.
#
OK, that can you is the project viable and sensible.
#
And then we will randomize whether you get the grant.
#
So that will increase kind of the likelihood of newer scholars, OK, coming into the pipeline.
#
And even like going back to what I was talking about education back in the thing, right, this sorting system.
#
OK, and you'll see how that comes back to even aspects of personnel is that you almost want to make it less high stakes.
#
OK, so that you focus more on the substance.
#
Right. And it's a deeper conversation.
#
But all I want to say is that there are thoughtful people thinking about these issues and kind of working on what is now called meta science.
#
Fantastic points. I agree with all of that.
#
And I must tell you that when I, you know, when I ran against academia, generally, I have the humanities in mind,
#
which are completely disconnected from the real world and in this parallel space of their own.
#
And though, you know, everything that you said about the sort of incentives towards novelty and so on and so on.
#
You know, when I think of the replication issues in behavioral economics, that is surely a problem meta science could solve.
#
Or should. Yeah, I mean, let's that is the problem that meta science is motivated by.
#
OK, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
#
And OK, Heather, before we go in for a break, a quick question for you.
#
Right. And this is about yourself. If you were to start a bar, what would you call it?
#
See, I think you once asked me about who would play or what role would I play?
#
I'm very bad in these creative.
#
You would call it footnotes. Do you want to know why?
#
Because then you could start a joke by saying Francis Fukujama and Woody Allen walked into a bar.
#
Because they are on your footnotes. Time for a break.
#
So I think what I've done is like, you know, again, because this draft is written for an Indian audience,
#
like, you know, when the scholar is Indian, they're in the text mode.
#
But when they're global, they tend to be in the in the footnotes.
#
I agree. I agree. You know, I absolutely love it.
#
And somebody like me will go in both places.
#
There is a danger I will get lost in footnotes.
#
Like before we just started this, I was making a joke that one day I will be found dead in my room.
#
Just wrapped up in wires because my cable management is so bad.
#
I'll be trying to get up from the table and they'll strangle me.
#
But if I go missing, if I go missing, Karthik, I could be found in somebody's footnotes, maybe even yours.
#
On that note, let's finally take the break.
#
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Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent,
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just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with my good friend, the brilliant scholar, Karthik Moolidharan,
#
about his fantastic book, Accelerating India's Development,
#
and let's go back to talking about the bureaucracy.
#
Like one of the TILs, which till late in life, even I did not know,
#
is what exactly is the composition of our bureaucracy?
#
Because most people, when they think bureaucracy, they think,
#
yes, Minister, yes, Prime Minister, they think IAS wale baithi hai and one rang below that.
#
But actually, IAS and similarly senior people are, as you pointed out in your book,
#
just one percent of the whole lot.
#
When we talk about state capacity, when we talk about the bureaucracy,
#
what is this bureaucracy?
#
It's not men in safari suits who, you know, come from Missouri.
#
It's a whole different beast.
#
Yeah, so I think, you know, so very broadly, there are three levels, right?
#
Like, you know, there is kind of the apex, which is the IAS and kind of group A officers broadly,
#
like, I mean, who come through the most competitive exams and are in the positions of kind of actually making policy.
#
Or if you're in a field level role in the district, then effectively,
#
you are the entire district administration reports to you.
#
Okay, so that's the apex.
#
Then you've got another kind of maybe 8 to 10 percent of what we would broadly call the middle management.
#
I mean, so these are officials at the district and the block level, not IAS.
#
But, you know, and then there's also kind of middle management in the secretariat,
#
which is the headquarters.
#
But then the vast majority of the government, at least in kind of the key service delivery sectors,
#
right, I mean, is frontline service delivery, right?
#
So the teachers, the health workers, the police, the agriculture extension officers, you know,
#
so those people are the bulk of the state.
#
So when you say bureaucracy, again, there's the upper bureaucracy and people sometimes just go play the two.
#
But the bureaucracy in terms of everybody who is a public employee,
#
right, paid by public funds is kind of this almost 10 million people, like across, like, you know, state and center.
#
And yeah, the vast majority of them are frontline staff.
#
I love the streaming and I also love the way you build the chapter by, you know,
#
it's almost like there are three parts, like you spoke of science and engineering earlier.
#
And, you know, in the beginning, you lay out things the way they are and you talk about,
#
you know, seven problems with the state.
#
After that, you understand why do these problems exist and you come up with these eight different reasons.
#
And after that, you talk about how do we ease the burden and you come out with,
#
you know, six different ways.
#
And when I say six is obviously not only six, there are, you know, wheels within wheels.
#
And there's a lot else going on out there.
#
And I want you to take us through this process because, you know, a lot of it was so enlightening for me in the sense
#
we think of the state in like really broad terms, even think of the bureaucracy in really broad terms,
#
but you've really sort of broken it down.
#
So I'd like you to talk about firstly, what is, you know, wrong with it,
#
starting with, you know, the startling fact that the Indian state actually is really understaffed.
#
You point out that India has 16 public employees per thousand people.
#
What are they doing in Norway?
#
And even the U.S. has 77.
#
So give me a sense of this and what it implies.
#
Yeah, so again, you know, I think that these simple facts, right, sometimes are just not only obscured.
#
Most people don't even think of them or know them, right?
#
So you think government is not working.
#
Okay, government is not delivering what I want.
#
Government is and you also seem often kind of, you know, officious risk of us folks like I mean,
#
and so you think government is overstaffed with people who are not working enough.
#
Okay, like I mean, but what the data shows is that the Indian state is remarkably understaffed,
#
okay, relative to kind of and so this is against scale and scope and strength, right?
#
We just don't have the strength.
#
And then it turns out that the key reason for this means so there's multiple reasons.
#
But one key reason is that the salaries are in fact too high,
#
okay, which is actually counterintuitive because again, most people think,
#
okay, you go to the private sector for money.
#
But at the very, very top of the government, you are massively underpaid.
#
So the talent that sits in the office of a principal secretary like I mean,
#
and the scale and scope of what they're doing, that would be compensated 10x in the private sector,
#
okay, like if not more.
#
So in the public sector, you have what's called wage compression,
#
okay, where the private sector, the paid distributions are much more unequal,
#
but they end up kind of being closer to market value.
#
Okay, but is the government because there's this pay compression,
#
at the very top end, you're massively underpaying relative market.
#
At the bottom end, like I mean, you're paying many multiples,
#
so this is why we're doing chapter 3 and 5 in hybrid because some of this is there.
#
But you know, the teacher salaries in government schools are often like 4 to 5 or 10 times higher,
#
okay, like I mean, than what your typical private school pays, okay.
#
So that gives you kind of one macro part of the puzzle,
#
which is that we just don't have enough employees.
#
But one of the reasons we don't have enough is because we pay incumbents too much.
#
So most of the budget every year goes into unconditional pay commission type increases
#
and you don't have enough money to hire more people, okay.
#
So that's I think one simple insight because again,
#
people who interact with top civil servants think oh, government people are underpaid,
#
but that is true in the peer group of the people we interact with.
#
That is not true for the vast majority of the government, okay.
#
So and then, I mean, and this point of the correlation between,
#
so it's not just to say staff shortages, right.
#
So again, then this is where the research plus fact comes in.
#
So the fact that I mentioned is actually from a Hindu op-ed by Jayate Ghosh and others,
#
but then there's this very nice paper by Aditya Das Gupta and Devesh Kapoor
#
that actually show how much the staffing matters, okay,
#
like I mean for the quality of the service delivery.
#
And then it's not surprising that there's so much variation in service delivery quality within India, okay.
#
So Bihar has only like three public employees per thousand,
#
UP has about six and Tamil Nadu is about 13, okay.
#
So there's a 4x difference over there and it's not therefore surprising
#
that Tamil Nadu effectively has much much better basic service delivery, okay.
#
So that's like fact number one.
#
Fact number two is this goes back to the Woody Allen thing, right.
#
It is too small, but it is also inefficient, right.
#
Like I mean, so A, you don't have enough people,
#
B, the ones you have are not kind of accountable enough for the right things, okay.
#
So and this is kind of exemplified by my own work on Teacher and Doctor Absence,
#
which was really the origin story of a lot of this work
#
and how I kind of like I said encountered the frontline of the state, right.
#
So and so one kind of again, these points are well known.
#
I think again if I can, you know, one way to think about the book for the reader
#
is that it can seem very intimidating because it's like this big thing,
#
but each chapter is like 35, 25 concise pages and each two page section
#
there is like a crisp op-ed that says here's the point,
#
here is the research, here is the facts, right.
#
So even here it'll be like, okay, here is kind of research studies now showing
#
documenting the challenges of accountability and quantifying for example
#
that in the private sector, you're 175 times more likely to take action
#
against a teacher who is absent, okay.
#
Whereas in that public sector effectively you there is no accountability.
#
Now, but then you get to the third point.
#
It's not that there is no accountability.
#
It is the accountability is for compliance and not for performance.
#
Okay, so if the paperwork doesn't work, you're held accountable.
#
And I think I gave that example last time also, right.
#
I mean, which is how I've been to schools where you will see a computer lab.
#
Okay, but the computer lab is locked in the keys with the teacher
#
because they are not nobody cares about whether the computer was used or not.
#
But if the computer was stolen, then you are in deep trouble, right.
#
Like I mean, so you see so at a policy level,
#
this is where kind of why you need to think about these 15 levels
#
at the policy level, what is the kind of Secretary Minister says?
#
Okay, so private school kids, elite kids are studying in computers.
#
So our government school kids should also study in computers.
#
So like, you know, then they'll say then all of the action goes to sanction the budget,
#
sanction the lab, do the procurement, get it.
#
So things can fail in many of these levels.
#
But suppose miraculously at the end of all of this,
#
like you get this up and functioning computer lab,
#
it turns out that in many cases it will just not be used.
#
And that's because the frontline incentives
#
like I mean are completely misaligned, right.
#
Like I mean with what the social goal of procuring that hardware was, right.
#
So it's just a simple but such a powerful example of kind of the gap
#
between intent and kind of why things kind of don't work that way on the ground
#
because the incentives at every different level in the chain are different.
#
And it's not that they are bad people, right.
#
It's just that they respond to what they are held accountable for.
#
And again, the history of this bureaucracy,
#
you know, we talk about the colonial origins,
#
but one point in fact, I don't even expand as much
#
is that see, it is not just a colonial,
#
the colonial aspect of the bureaucracy matters
#
not only for the fact that it was meant to rule and not to serve.
#
It matters for the deep hierarchies within the bureaucracy, right.
#
So the fact that the country was governed by this one percent,
#
there's always this thing about how did the few thousand Britishers
#
kind of control the whole country.
#
It's because that one percent then was supported by this 99 percent,
#
but because that they didn't ever want the natives getting too close.
#
So there was very little autonomy and everything in terms of the accountability
#
within the bureaucracy was built for compliance.
#
That kind of was over centralized, right.
#
Because and that legacy is kind of still deeply permeating, right.
#
Like I mean the functioning of the bureaucracy.
#
So it's not first you don't have enough people.
#
The ones you have are not accountable enough.
#
And then the ones who want to work are not given enough autonomy.
#
In fact, this is this computer lab is such a great example of this frame
#
that I learned from your talk yesterday
#
where you spoke about how in a decentralized system,
#
you know, your frontline worker would have more autonomy on process
#
and he would have accountability for outcomes.
#
And what instead happens in a centralized system like this
#
is that he has no accountability on process
#
because it's a central process is going to follow
#
and the accountability is for compliance to the process and not to the outcome.
#
Therefore his thing is that I want to make sure the computer isn't stolen
#
and whether there are outcomes coming from the students using the computers
#
and learning something.
#
He doesn't give a shit about that.
#
Whereas you could turn the whole thing around
#
and you know, just make the whole thing work.
#
So but but but that's I think again.
#
So if I was to summarize the book in one sentence,
#
okay, the one sentence of what the book is about is that
#
we keep thinking that our problems are that we don't have enough money.
#
But the biggest problem is that the translation of that money
#
into impact is incredibly weak, right.
#
So if you focus on kind of quality of expenditure value for money,
#
you will do in like orders of magnitude better.
#
But that's the easy part. The difficult part is how.
#
Okay, and that's why it's a 600 page book is then saying you can't do this, right.
#
Because all we're saying is we see this black box called the state.
#
You put money on top and then only a small amount comes in terms of outcomes.
#
So where does this get lost in this black box?
#
So but there is another subtle point.
#
The important point is that the common public perception
#
of why public money is wasted is corruption.
#
Okay, so everybody say, you know,
#
there's this kickback or that kickback.
#
But there's this very, very nice study in the American Economic Review.
#
It's set in Italy, but it's again highly relevant for us.
#
That shows that when you look at the total waste within government, right,
#
only about 15% is corruption or 17%, one sixth.
#
The remaining is all inefficiency.
#
Okay, so and that is the point about getting into the black box.
#
And then this is then one example.
#
Where does this inefficiency come from?
#
It comes from this kind of misaligned chain of incentives
#
and because it is such a vast and complex problem,
#
part of the contribution of the book is to take something complex,
#
but make it tractable, right?
#
That's then this point about simplify, but no for as much as possible,
#
And but one of those pillars is then understanding each of these pieces
#
of the bureaucratic incentive structure, right?
#
So yeah, so we don't have enough.
#
The ones you have are not accountable enough.
#
The ones who are accountable and want to work don't have enough autonomy,
#
like need to be able to function effectively.
#
And then so, you know, another problem is that and again,
#
this is partly like a colonial legacy, right?
#
So the problem is a lack of local embeddedness of most government employees,
#
right? Because most government employees don't live in the communities
#
So teachers will often live 10-15 kilometers away and kind of do up-down
#
Now, but what is again the logic of this?
#
And this also then speaks to the other problem of frequent transfers.
#
Okay, so both the transfers and the lack of embeddedness,
#
I mean, that's the second is a consequence of the first,
#
comes from the fact that the colonial administration did not want employees
#
Because the whole point of transferring you and not keeping you connected
#
was so that you didn't feel bad about being an extractive agent rather
#
than an agent that will, you know, support.
#
So the movie analogy I use for this is if you think of Lagaan, right?
#
So Captain Russell is your classic colonial administrator playing cricket,
#
doing shikar, like I mean, and minimal interaction with the locals
#
except to basul the tax, right?
#
But when Elizabeth goes out and mingles among the people, right?
#
Like, you know, then you actually start empathizing with them
#
and then you kind of, you know, you're no longer an effective,
#
extractive agent of the state, right?
#
I mean, and so, but that legacy is where these frequent transfers come from
#
and we continue that though there is like absolutely no good governance reason, right?
#
Like you need to have that kind of frequent transfers, okay?
#
So, but these are then, yeah, these are then the legacies that we're still stuck with.
#
And then I think the other side going back to the motivated bureaucrat
#
is that there is just so little opportunities for structured learning,
#
training, professional development, okay?
#
So, because training programs, it's difficult to get leave for training
#
because the government is so understaffed, it won't let you go.
#
And then even if you get the training, how do you make sure that it's of high quality?
#
Training itself is seen as a bit of a punishment posting
#
where like, you know, senior people in training are not really into it.
#
So again, over time, you just kind of have not invested in building the capacity.
#
And then I think the structural problem which I talked about earlier,
#
which is again worth highlighting, is just the nature of the paperwork state, okay?
#
That you have, going back to the story of the restaurant, right?
#
You don't have enough people.
#
And then the people you have are kind of, A, not accountable.
#
B, you're making them do things that are relatively second order to effective service delivery.
#
And what you're making them do is just a ton of paperwork, okay?
#
So, and then, yeah, the transfers kind of one part of this is at the frontline level.
#
But then it also happens at the managerial level, at the policy level.
#
So, all of these things just kind of make the system itself
#
like a main function almost less than the sum of the parts.
#
And so, yeah, those are some of kind of these issues we're dealing with in the innards of the bureaucracy.
#
And also, you know, one point that you, again, a data point that you gave about the paperwork state
#
is that you looked at Anganwadi workers and they have to maintain up to 14 paper registers.
#
And sometimes 20 to 30% of their time is spent on administrative nonsense
#
rather than, you know, doing the kind of stuff that they should do.
#
And, you know, compliance becomes the only focus and everything becomes a facade.
#
You're just like showing compliance on paper and you don't kind of give a shit.
#
And tenure is also a problem, right?
#
That, you know, officers aren't, you know, posted in one post for too much.
#
If they're being shifted every one and a half years, then they have to be generalists.
#
By the time, you know, I think you quoted an IAS officer is talking about how all he does is firefighting.
#
Because by the time he's gotten used to a particular posting and understand the subject,
#
it's time for him to be moved on.
#
So they're constantly in firefighting mode.
#
And that absolutely doesn't help because then even the subordinates know
#
ki yeh bhai toh jaega dead saal mein.
#
So they also don't have to.
#
It creates three levels of problems, right?
#
I mean, the frequent transfers.
#
So the first is that while you have generalist skills in administration, right?
#
Understanding policy in any department requires understanding those sectoral issues.
#
Second is even if you have good technical advice,
#
your short horizon means you don't want to start anything serious
#
because you're not going to be able to see it through.
#
Third, despite this, if you say, OK, this really enthu reforming officer
#
which is mein samajta hu, merko karna hai and I want to get this done,
#
your subordinates will often try to slow pedal the thing
#
because they're just waiting for this overenthusiastic guy to get transferred.
#
OK, because they know that the next guy will probably not show the same amount of interest, right?
#
So these transfers and short durations again, which came partly as a colonial legacy is,
#
I mean, there are many parts that are dysfunctional.
#
OK, but this is probably the lowest hanging fruit, right?
#
In terms of something that can be fixed so easily, right?
#
I mean, by just having a certain minimum tenure of three years, you know, would go a very long way.
#
But that's a good example of how the existing resources we have within the bureaucracy
#
are not if you want to say when I have this headline,
#
they say we have good people stuck in a bad system, right?
#
I mean, that's an exemplar of the systemic kind of,
#
you know, features that really don't serve any deep functional purpose at all
#
and are an outdated legacy.
#
Yeah, and you mentioned colonial factors.
#
And by the way, I mean, a lot of listeners who take the term for granted may not realize
#
that the term collector comes about because the job of the collector under the British
#
was to fucking collect, right?
#
That is where the term comes from.
#
That, you know, the British built the bureaucracy they did because what were they doing?
#
They were maintaining law and collecting revenues.
#
And then when we took over the colonial state apparatus,
#
we've kind of ended up keeping that same framework with the same incentives in play.
#
And, you know, as we can see, it's not going well.
#
What are some of the other factors which can help us understand why things are this way?
#
You know, I think, listen, you know, again, it's easy to criticize, right?
#
But there are so many structural challenges.
#
OK, so like I said, there's the colonial origins.
#
And again, see, it's not like we haven't tried to change it.
#
But over time, the so the collector's role, for example, now is like much more developmental.
#
There's no doubt, right?
#
But that mindset, it means of control and the mindset.
#
So like I said, the transfers is then a colonial legacy that doesn't serve a current purpose now.
#
But there's also a lot of other systematic factors which I talk about in the chapter, right?
#
So the first is just political factors.
#
OK, so the key issue is that the nature of politics and this is something I talk about in Chapter 2.
#
The nature of politics has become that politicians for a long time wanted to direct the resources of the state to their kind of preferred groups.
#
OK, so it could be a program for your group.
#
It could be a kind of a favor for a funder.
#
And so essentially, the political class has wanted a pliable bureaucracy.
#
OK, and so that has been done through multiple ways, right?
#
So the UPSC, like I mean, hiring is clean, but you can harass people to transfers, right?
#
So that's why they value the transfers because it's kind of a tool of control, right?
#
Even though it doesn't serve much of a purpose of governance.
#
OK, and again, so it's the problem is this doesn't mean the politician is evil.
#
It just means the politician is responding to the incentive that they have.
#
But the politicians who have figured out and that's why Chapter 2 comes before Chapter 3, right?
#
That's kind of in a way that's talking about the political incentives and saying that why is it that even with all of our political constraints,
#
actually politicians today are under pressure to deliver.
#
OK, so I'll just give the one thirty second synthesis of the previous chapter before this because why is there hope in all of this?
#
Because the way the approach in this whole book, right, is to be kind of not sugarcoat realities,
#
but to then use that to say, OK, here is the reason to be optimistic and how do you go forward?
#
OK, so it isn't false optimism.
#
It is kind of practically grounded optimism.
#
And the case for optimism on the political side is very simple is that with education,
#
with information, governance and delivery increasingly matters, OK, for elections.
#
Now, this is not to say that there is a traditional politics of identity and polarization and there is a modern politics of governance and service delivery.
#
OK, and if you look at the election data in general, it's clear that the identity access will give you about 20 percent.
#
OK, but that doesn't win you the election.
#
You need the next 20 percent to win and that next 20 percent essentially comes from delivery.
#
So the effective politicians have understood that to get the bureaucracy to deliver, they need to provide stable tenure.
#
They need to provide certain, so at least in their flagship schemes.
#
OK, so if they say this is the scheme I'm going to go back to the voters with, OK, then they will put good people, give them stability, give them the autonomy.
#
So they will do they get this.
#
OK, so none of this is rocket science.
#
Right. The problem is that they do it intuitively in the areas that they matter.
#
But this have not become a system level reforms in terms of how the system itself functions.
#
OK, but but part of the political challenges, which are very real, right.
#
I mean, is that, you know, you care about having a pliable bureaucracy and therefore you kind of have over time kind of created instruments of control,
#
whereby the integrity or kind of the ability of the bureaucracy to resist short term asks has been compromised.
#
Like I mean, you know, in other ways.
#
And and sometimes, you know, I think there was this really interesting example I heard of an I.S.
#
officer told me once that there was a position at a district level position for which, you know,
#
there was a politician of a particular caste and he clearly wanted somebody of the same caste.
#
And so this officer knew fully well that the politician wants only people in that caste.
#
So he said, OK, let me search and find like a really good person within your identity boundaries.
#
OK, like I mean, and he found like a really good person in that caste category who is well qualified, would do the good job.
#
But as part of the process, you need a short list.
#
OK, so there was another candidate.
#
But it turned out the politician chose the less qualified candidate, even though they were both of the same caste.
#
OK, and and that just didn't make any sense.
#
And so then he said, no, no, no, even if he's of my caste, if I appoint the competent guy,
#
he may start thinking that he deserves the job.
#
That is, when I appoint the guy who's there only because I have appointed him, then he will do what I say.
#
OK, so that is kind of then the thinking process that over time atrophies the innards of the bureaucracy, right?
#
Which, again, public doesn't see how these decisions are happening.
#
But then you got at level of the level when you kind of replace competency with loyalty, right?
#
Like, I mean, that then has like a downstream effect.
#
OK, so again, I'm not saying everybody does this.
#
All right. Maybe this is five percent.
#
Maybe this is 10 percent.
#
But each of these pieces together, right, like I mean, kind of weakens this structure.
#
OK, so then again, but now leave the politics aside and just think about pure economics.
#
OK, the pure economics is that in the end, there is no bottom line.
#
OK, so there is very little accountability for cost efficiency.
#
Now, in one way to see the amount of inefficiency is the fact that if I look at the same company in the PSU versus in the private sector,
#
right, they can mean generally the PSU will be more bloated and more inefficient.
#
OK, and but in government departments, it's even worse.
#
OK, because you can hide so much inefficiency because there is essentially no bottom line.
#
Then there's this what Janusz Kornay famously called the soft budget constraint.
#
Right. So this is a famous Hungarian economist, one of the best scholars of the socialist economic system.
#
So you've got these economic factors that drive kind of inefficiency in the bureaucracy that there is isn't that incentive for cost effectiveness.
#
OK, and this is true. I think I said this in education that in fact, departments will often ask that they are not interested in cost effectiveness,
#
like we said, because they'll say they'll use it to cut my budget and they'll often ask for more money.
#
They know fully well finance will not give it to them.
#
OK, but then they say, OK, finance didn't give me money, so I didn't work.
#
Right. So there is if you had the incentives to say I have to get it done with what resources I have,
#
then you will apply your mind to be innovative on cost effectiveness, which is something that for the most part doesn't exist in the system.
#
Again, there are individual officers, individual pockets of innovation.
#
But the problem is this is the key problem.
#
I've met so many wonderful officers of the years who will find incredible people.
#
Right. These are smart, they're motivated, they're on the ground.
#
But the innovations are often kind of restricted to the initiative of that person.
#
OK, so what doesn't happen is how do you then take and institutionalize that in a way that it will survive the next person
#
and that this becomes the way of functioning.
#
So too much of it is kind of personalized in the personality of the individual as opposed to saying, you know, let's kind of institutionalize these things.
#
And then the other thing that's kind of underappreciated, OK, is how much of the bureaucratic dysfunction is because of the judiciary.
#
OK, and this is because one of the largest cases of sources of litigation is personal litigation.
#
OK, but like, I mean, people keep filing cases like, you know, for different issues of postings and transfers and promotions.
#
And our courts kind of, you know, in theory, this is supposed to be provide some check and balance over some administrative procedure violation.
#
In practice, the courts accept everything and they have no capacity.
#
So like, I mean, so that further clogs up the system.
#
So I'll give you an example, right. So in our data on teacher absence, OK,
#
it's very clear that one of the strong predictors of teacher absence is whether you've been regularly monitored.
#
And that is a function of does your block education officer exist?
#
And the vacancy rates for blocking for these BEOs is often 40 percent or 50 percent.
#
60 percent, over 60 percent. 60 percent in one state, 60 percent in one state, because I don't have data for all states, OK, but one state.
#
And then it turns out the reason, the reason for these vacancies is there has been a pending court case for many years where teachers hired through different strata.
#
Some are hired in the center, some in the district, some are hired locally.
#
So each strata, like I mean, is still fighting over their integrated seniority list because that seniority list is what then determines the promotion.
#
And the courts have been sitting on this for five years, which basically means like, I mean, there's no decision.
#
OK, so that's the case then of we talked about value of expediting judiciary in terms of freeing up capital and land.
#
But it's also true for freeing up like talent because the case is sitting there and therefore you're not filled the position for five years.
#
So, again, in fact, Dr. T.V. Somanathan, who's the finance secretary of India and Gulzar Natarajan, the finance secretary in Andhra Pradesh,
#
they have this very nice book on state capability.
#
And these are people inside the government. And they have this lovely phrase, which I use and highlight, which is they say,
#
the personal litigation is like a tapeworm within the system, OK, that it kind of innervates you day by day and nobody's aware of it.
#
Right. But it just weakens the system. And again, the judiciary thinks it's doing its job.
#
Everybody means well. OK. And everybody does their job the way they think without seeing how they're tying other parts of the system in knots.
#
OK. So and again, I think, frankly, the best way to handle these things is just data.
#
Right. So like this says, sunlight is the best disinfectant at some point.
#
Part of the point of a book like this, these are the systemic issues.
#
And hopefully, younger researchers, younger scholars, like, OK, good, let's quantify this.
#
Let's quantify this. Let's put some data. How many personal litigations?
#
How many promotions have been unfilled because of these court cases?
#
You know, so I have a few examples here and there, but these are huge factors that the public doesn't see.
#
Most people are not aware. But why this dysfunction inside?
#
OK. Now, the other thing which is underappreciated in the bureaucracy is just what I just call institutionalized risk aversion.
#
Right. Which is that it's the upside of something goes right is very low because your pay cannot rise with that.
#
At best, you get a slightly better posting. You might get a little bit.
#
But the downside, if something goes wrong, is so high.
#
Right. I mean, that you end up with essentially it's like murder in the Orient Express.
#
Right. I mean, so you want to file with 100 signatures, so nobody can be held responsible.
#
So it's like just like in that case, you're like, OK, no one person is responsible.
#
So there's distributed responsibility, no accountability.
#
Right. I mean, and that risk aversion just permeates the life.
#
And again, it's not the fault of the individual officer. Right. Because you can make honest mistakes.
#
The whole point of making an investment or making a business decision is things can go wrong.
#
OK. But if any time things go wrong, a CIG or CBI can haul you up and saying, like, you know, listen, like, I mean, you have defrauded the exchequer as opposed to, you know, giving you the space to make those honest mistakes.
#
Again, it is very, very difficult. Right. Like you need to function.
#
So, in fact, IDFC Institute, then when they were IDFC Institute, I think, you know, they had this study.
#
OK. Like, I mean, where they literally, I think.
#
Yeah. So this is the quote from that abstract. Right. I can't find it anyway.
#
So I think, you know, I mean, I cite this somewhere. Right. Like, you know, where they just document this systematically.
#
So, yeah. In fact, the analogy I use, which is independent of that, is something I heard from the British goalkeeper Peter Shilton in the 1980s, where he said goalkeeping is such a difficult job because few few remember the many goals you save, few forget the one you let go.
#
OK. So similarly, the bureaucrats are juggling, juggling so many things.
#
Nobody gives them credit for the balls they're keeping in the air.
#
You drop one and then, you know, the force, the force of the state is on you.
#
So it is a difficult, difficult kind of situation.
#
And so what you need is you need kind of strikers who are going forward, moving the ball forward like a mean and trying to score.
#
But we are all playing like goalkeepers.
#
Now, you can be you can play defense if you're leading by six goals.
#
OK. Like, you know, that's fine.
#
But when you're a poor developing country, like, you know, who needs to be firing in all cylinders, you need a much more kind of entrepreneurial bureaucracy, right?
#
It can mean which we just absolutely haven't built.
#
And again, it's not the fault of the people.
#
It's the fault of the system.
#
OK. Now, but before sometimes it's very tempting to say that private sector principles are privatized, right?
#
Like, you know, the saying, I know I pointed you, but the other point which is important for the public to appreciate is that the bureaucracy's work is inherently more challenging.
#
OK. And that's because the private sector can refuse to serve you.
#
Right. I mean, so private sector does well because they focus on one thing and do it well.
#
They say, here is my paying customer.
#
And it's a old rule in private sector that you make 80 percent of your profits from 20 percent of your customers.
#
OK. So they don't want to serve you if you're poor.
#
If you're a private school, you're screening people.
#
You don't want special needs kids.
#
You don't want like, I mean, anybody who's going to kind of be a complicated case.
#
And most of private schools admissions is about kind of again, filtration on a different dimension.
#
OK. But is a public school by definition like, I mean, has to cater to everyone.
#
OK. So which means that and you have to cater in the most remote place.
#
You have to cater to places where there's no market incentive to do so.
#
So there is an element of what the government does, the bureaucracy does, that is inherently more difficult because of its universal service kind of obligation.
#
Now, but to flip the thing on the other way, that by itself does not mean that that that sometimes becomes an alibi for inefficiency.
#
OK. Because you'll say my my costs are higher because I'm doing all of this.
#
But even there, you'll see that it can be done more efficiently.
#
OK. But it's just a way of kind of saying that, listen, overall, it can mean that there are these deep institutional challenges.
#
OK. And I think the last thing I like to talk about is just the this issue of I'm blanking bureaucratic self-interest.
#
Yes, exactly. Right. So and this is the fact that while all of these are external factors,
#
OK, there is within the bureaucracy itself, like I mean, a kind of many decisions are taken to protect the insiders.
#
OK. So Nancy Saxena, who's this famous IAS officer distinguished, he wrote this whole book called Why What Ails the IAS.
#
And he said it's like the whole system exists just to serve itself.
#
OK. So I think that's a little unfair because of all of these other factors outside.
#
But I think it's also true that many decisions are taken that kind of benefit insiders.
#
Right. I mean, at the cost of the broader public interest.
#
And I think the biggest example of that is the amount of lobbying for the unconditional pay increases that happen.
#
So Indian government employees are among the highest paid in the world, holding GDP, adjusting for GDP and qualifications.
#
And that happens because every time there is more money, the insiders lobby for improvement of their terms.
#
And the outsiders are not part of that.
#
But it would improve public welfare so much by kind of slowing down the pay increases and hiring more people.
#
And that will, you know, contribute more to service delivery.
#
But it just puts together and saying if you want an agenda, bureaucratic reforms, right.
#
I mean, saying how does this whole how do we kind of tweak the rules of the game to make this enterprise more effective?
#
That would be kind of the set of issues I would focus on.
#
Brilliant. And now let me ask you our next quiz question for the day.
#
I'm scared. I'll begin with the factoid.
#
You can guess this is intelligent guesswork required because, you know, otherwise, how would you know it?
#
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was five feet, five inches tall.
#
Shorter. That's five foot four.
#
How tall was Nikita Khrushchev?
#
Five three. Five three.
#
So immediately, you know, when you told that story about the politician who's hiring the second best person for the job,
#
I instantly thought of this because, you know, this same kind of insecurities and all that, you know,
#
and the thing with the book is that there are so many little memorable factoids to illustrate all of this.
#
I just want to say two things to people listening to this that number one,
#
the chapters are arranged brilliantly with headings and subheadings almost like nested entries in Rome research,
#
which make it so easy to browse.
#
And there is one table of contents at the start, which is just, you know, the basic chapters and what they are.
#
But there is a much more detailed one with nested subheaders and all at the end of the book, which is masterful.
#
I wish everyone did that.
#
And like some of the anecdotes, I remember just from, you know, this particular chapter,
#
like, you know, in when you speak of the judicial factors,
#
you speak of how so many state education secretaries have told you that they spend 20 to 40 percent of their time fucking litigating
#
and that instead they'd rather focus on education.
#
When you speak of institutionalized risk aversion,
#
the example that really strikes me is on how tenders are given.
#
Now, first of all, I want to take a minor digression and say tender is such a lovely word.
#
You can imagine a bureaucrat goes home after a hard day's work and his wife tells him,
#
kya aaj tum tender laye ho?
#
You know, it's beautiful. I love it.
#
You know, Basu Chatterjee films are now bubbling in my head.
#
I can imagine Amol Palekar going home.
#
Anyway, the thing is a tendency, therefore, among bureaucrats is that for some purchase or some task,
#
they'll be a tender out and they'll take the lowest price.
#
That's the safest thing to do.
#
They can justify that rather than use their discretion and take a higher price and then they can be sort of accused of corruption.
#
So, you know, the whole book is full of all of these wonderful great examples.
#
And, you know, just to sort of quickly summarize for the listeners that why is the status quo the way it is?
#
Reason one, there's a colonial legacy, collector vigara.
#
Reason two, political factors, which you just described.
#
Reason three, economic factors, everything to do with incentives and, you know, a market functions the way it does for certain reasons.
#
Number four, judicial factors, which till I read your book, Kartik Muralidharan, I did not know.
#
This is like completely bizarre that, you know, 60% of the posts of inner state are left vacant
#
because people are fighting over seniority in the courts.
#
Then institutionalized risk aversion, then the...
#
I forgot, the premature load bearing.
#
The premature load bearing, which...
#
Which I'll mention. In fact, I should quickly talk about that.
#
I'll ask you to quickly talk about that to some of the others.
#
Government is inherently more challenging because it has to serve everyone.
#
You can't do product market fit if the market isn't everyone, right?
#
And you quote Abhijit Banerjee's classic paper, a theory of misgovernance, which kind of talks about that, which is quite delightful.
#
And bureaucratic self-interest, you know, in terms of the generous pay, the short tenure,
#
not senior officers like to bat for over-centralization because like, obviously, Parkinson's law as well.
#
Premature load bearing.
#
Yeah, so this is a term that was coined by Land Pritchett and Michael Andrews and Willcock.
#
And the basic idea, and I think I mentioned this in a previous episode as well, maybe I skipped it,
#
but the idea that weightlifters, okay, like when you want to build muscles, you lift a little bit above your capacity, right?
#
I mean, so that tears your muscle a little bit, but rebuilds.
#
But if you try to lift like 30 kilos or 100 kilos more, you will collapse and die, okay?
#
So basically, similarly, like this is what happens that when you expand the scope without the strength,
#
you weaken the existing strength, you see, like I mean by overloading it.
#
And the reason that overloading further weaken state capacity is that if I'm putting more demands on you than you have resources for,
#
then you have to spend time allocating your limited resources.
#
So the process of deciding who gets a benefit is time that you're not actually providing the benefit.
#
Then why the court cases partly come from then the litigation and contestation that happens after you made a decision, okay?
#
So that further kind of contributes to this paralysis.
#
And so coming back to the courts, I think this is a nice point, which is in the footnote.
#
I mean, there's a main point and then there's a much deeper footnote.
#
See, the main point is, and this is also a quote I've said before, is that sometimes I describe our system as, you know,
#
because of this democracy before development, that's therefore expanded the scope before the strength, right?
#
But the demands are there, you do this.
#
So the government is legislature, then passes entitlements that are beyond the capacity of government as executive.
#
And then government is judiciary, holds government as executive in contempt of government as legislature,
#
saying that you as in your executive capacity have not done what you've said you're going to do in your legislative capacity, okay?
#
But that's because we pass our laws without the resource allocation needed to actually get it done.
#
So, but this, so every actor is doing what they think is kind of rational, but they're tying the system further and not, okay?
#
And there's another subtle point here about judiciary, which is that, see, the way the judiciary thinks about justice is,
#
now, ideally, Supreme Court and higher cases should think, higher courts should think more about principles rather than individual cases, okay?
#
But the temperament in the law is often to focus on the individual case, okay?
#
Am I getting you justice, okay?
#
But to get you justice, if somebody complains against the state, I might be able to get you justice,
#
but I'm not observing what other resources have been diverted away, where it's been diverted away from to solve your case, okay?
#
So that's like the proverbial moving the deck chairs in the Titanic.
#
Like, I fix this, but there is something else that is now not getting fixed because my attention is taken away, okay?
#
That is what systems thinking does, is it's saying let's not take the limited resources of the state to get justice here at the cost of weaker performance elsewhere,
#
but how do you improve the overall system?
#
And there, again, I think a lot of our public discourse kind of assumes that it's lack of intention,
#
whereas it's lack of capacity because we have passed laws that we have not given the resources to actually meet those entitlements,
#
and that then becomes the core issue.
#
You speak of systems thinking just a digressive question.
#
You've also written in the book elsewhere that what you are trying to do here is look at the state not as an institution,
#
but as an organization, right?
#
Is this a new frame that economists haven't brought to bear that much because I haven't really read much of this kind of thinking?
#
Yeah, and I think, I mean, and again, so to be honest, I think it reflects,
#
see, there are many things I'm doing in the book that are not original to me, okay?
#
But what I'm doing is a synthesis from parts of, and this thing that people don't normally talk to each other, right?
#
So this framing of organization instead of institutions comes from Devesh Kapoor, right?
#
Like I mean, and, but again, it speaks to my eclectic intellectual history that I went and took courses, right?
#
I mean, so even though I'm a development economist, my core courses in PhD were public finance and political economy, right?
#
Which is kind of the essence of chapter two is then connecting the politics to the economics comes through those two lenses.
#
Then I had taken a class on organizations with Bob Gibbons at MIT and, you know, he had this because organizations are messy, right?
#
So it was at least an exposure to thinking about organizations even though they are not so easily analytically tractable.
#
So there is a reason why organizational issues are often taught in business schools through case studies
#
because in a case study, you can tell a story and illustrate the concept because
#
whereas academic research and economics is often about controlling one variable at a time and saying how did this change?
#
And that is very difficult in organizational research.
#
So in organization research, things end to be more descriptive.
#
So again, what I have here is a sense of the sensibilities of how these different fields approach it.
#
And yeah, and a synthesis of, you know, some of those ideas.
#
Sense and sensibility. You could be the Jane Austen of political economy.
#
Actually, at some point, we should talk about the pride and prejudice would also fit.
#
We should talk about the book cover at some point, but you know, the cover, the first draft came with this oval.
#
And my wife said, no, no, no, this looks like a Jane Austen novel.
#
So, yeah, this is how we do it here.
#
All right, let's now, you know, we've we've laid out the problems like what's wrong with it.
#
We've laid out the why, you know, in all of these eight factors that you've gone through.
#
But what makes this book special is that you're not stopping here.
#
In every chapter, you're also going into, OK, so what do we do about it now?
#
So I'd like you to take me through, you know, some of your solutions.
#
Yeah, so I think so what I've done here is so this is a case of the book expanding, right?
#
The book and the proposal was 14 chapters became 18.
#
Partly this chapter was too big. And so it got split into bureaucracy and personnel.
#
OK, so what I've done is in the bureaucracy, that's why I'm saying, you know, we're doing chapter three and five,
#
where three is bureaucracy and five is personnel.
#
But in three, what I'm doing is just focusing on what are the political decisions
#
that have to be taken to enable strengthening state capacity in personnel.
#
These are ideas that the bureaucratic leadership themselves can do,
#
because that's more about personnel management within the department.
#
OK, which frankly, you don't need the politician involved in.
#
The politician just needs to think about the high level issues.
#
OK, so I mean, and some of these things are just I think the first is just make it a political priority.
#
And because the thing is, now I have talked to political leaders across parties who are all frustrated.
#
OK, they all blame the bureaucracy. So they blame them.
#
OK, and they say, listen, we are accountable to the voters.
#
These guys are sitting here. And I think the prime minister himself once said,
#
he said, like, you know, that these officers are going to ruin my prime ministership.
#
OK, like, I mean, and so the politicians who have a connect with the voters,
#
like deeply feel this pain, OK, that the system is not able to deliver because they are accountable and they are not.
#
OK, but the reason it's unfair to the bureaucracy is the bureaucracy is not able to deliver
#
because of 50 years of political neglect. OK, so you can't then come in.
#
The politician says, wait, I have under invested in you for 50 years now today.
#
But see, the ambassador analogy we use is just like the ambassador was the metaphor for the pre liberalization Indian economy.
#
The 1950s ambassador is the metaphor for the Indian state.
#
You should clarify you're referring to the car.
#
Most of our listeners are born after 95.
#
They won't even know what you know about what I'm talking about.
#
That is right. That is right. That is right.
#
This is the 1950s car people that we mentioned the 1950s ambassador.
#
So anyway, you know, so I think the point, therefore, is that at any given point in time, right, the political see what what what are the pressures on a politician?
#
OK, the great strength of the politician in a democracy is this is the person who is interacting with citizens the most.
#
OK, and they are hearing requests.
#
OK, so what does a politician do?
#
Because you want to please your citizens when people ask you for something, then you will come back and you will add some scheme.
#
You will add something. You will tell your officers, can you look into this?
#
Can we create some scheme? Can we do something about this?
#
And so it is a completely rational process of responding to those demands from the citizens.
#
But then over time, you have added and added and added and added expectations.
#
Right. Like I mean, on the state without corresponding investment in the strength of the system.
#
So that adding adding is the scope. Right.
#
And so this is why I think the India at 75 moment when we are reflecting on the next 25 years.
#
And again, the the book was meant to be done on by 75th independence,
#
but it is done and coming out as we enter our 75th year as a republic.
#
OK, so we got a wiggle room there.
#
But as we think about what we need to do for the next 25 years,
#
part of the goal here is kind of to build a national consensus in the political class,
#
in the bureaucratic class, in the thinking class to say that this is the binding constraint.
#
And that goes back to Chapter 10.
#
When we say these three phases of development that you cannot develop
#
if you've not kind of built an effective state.
#
So the first part of this is make this a political priority.
#
Once that happens, there's a bunch of downstream stuff.
#
Digressive question since you mentioned the term political consensus.
#
Is that a huge problem today?
#
Like the narrative that I get when I've done my past episodes with,
#
you know, from Montaic to KP to Ajay to whoever is that there is a certain cooperation
#
that is happening between regimes that, you know,
#
Narsimha Rao tells Vajpayee samagri tayar hai, right?
#
That the NPS is beautifully passed across from Vajpayee's government to Manmohan's government.
#
That, you know, KP Krishnan and gang figure out, you know,
#
draw the inflation targeting documents under Chidambaram and Manmohan.
#
And then Arun Jaitley immediately says if those guys have said,
#
yes, it's got to be good and he goes with it.
#
And is that game now over in this extremely polarized political environment
#
where like when the farm laws happen, for example,
#
and Ajay and I have an episode on that, politically disastrous,
#
economically, obviously, they were great.
#
Many of, you know, much of what was in that law was in the Congress manifesto in the election before that.
#
And yet they oppose it because they have to.
#
Like today the opposition will oppose every single thing the government does,
#
whether it's good or bad, even when they know it's bad.
#
Like the Congress is actually supporting bringing back the OPS,
#
the old pension scheme, which even you have written in this book about what a massive disaster it is.
#
It's just harebrained and they know it is bad for the country,
#
but they're doing it because they feel it is good politics for some bizarre reason.
#
So does politics, you know, so when you use a term like political consensus,
#
I would argue today it feels impossible.
#
It is difficult. So let me say a few things.
#
OK, so one is, you know, if there's any politician listening to me here,
#
like I would say that, listen, almost every great thing we've achieved as a country has taken like,
#
you know, span 10, 15, 20 years.
#
OK, the Chandrayaan took 17 years.
#
OK, like, I mean, look at Adhaar.
#
I mean, so just the digital public infrastructure, which we are so justifiably proud of.
#
That was, you know, Nandan was appointed like, you know, in the UPA government.
#
And this government has seen the value of that and they've continued that.
#
OK, so I think truly great things have taken kind of a long term and kind of a consensus.
#
We're saying, OK, there is a margin of political contestation
#
and there is a margin of national interest where we will kind of allow things to function.
#
OK, and historically foreign policy used to be that way, right?
#
I mean, so Narsimha Rao sent Vajpayee to represent India, like at the UN, like, you know,
#
so saying that this is the opposition leader, like, I mean, who's kind of the...
#
So the nation is united, OK, when it comes to something like this.
#
Now, I think the polarization is frankly, it's a global phenomenon, right?
#
So it's not just India, right?
#
So the U.S. politics right now, like, I mean, is no better in terms of kind of the...
#
And I do think social media has contributed to that.
#
But I think the other subtle ways, like, you know, is partly when it's so virtual,
#
you're just spending less physical time together and building that connective tissue across parties, right?
#
Like, I mean, where, you know, you are kind of your politicians in the well of the house
#
and then your people, like, I mean, outside.
#
And so, you know, where one of the places I feel optimistic about is like now in some of the work
#
we're doing with states, that even when the governments change, right?
#
See, there is a margin of politics where people want their scheme, OK?
#
But this goes back to my point of saying, you let the political contestation happen about the direction of the car, OK?
#
But everybody should agree that we need a better functioning car, OK?
#
So that is kind of my modest submission to say, wherever we want to go,
#
we all want to build a prosperous, you know, advanced, developed India.
#
And it doesn't matter whether you want to drive it left or drive it right.
#
The car has to move. And that's what I want to build a consensus on.
#
Brilliant. Let's go back.
#
Sorry for the digression, but I heard those words in my, you know, the question flickered open.
#
So, yeah, the other ways to ease the burden.
#
Yeah, so I think, yeah, so coming back to there are actions at the political level, OK?
#
And then there are actions at the political level.
#
So at the political level, the most important thing is actually apply your mind, OK, to this issue.
#
And then once you do that and start saying, OK, what tends to happen today is the way the political leadership functions.
#
They will say, what are my priority areas?
#
OK, and then who are the good officers?
#
And then I will put them there to kind of make these priority projects run well, OK?
#
But that is at the level that they think about governance, right?
#
It's not then at the level of systems, at the level of saying, OK,
#
what are we doing to make this whole system function better is not something they're thinking about, OK?
#
So the first thing is just think about it.
#
That once you think about it, then like one of the basic things,
#
one of the most important things, which is difficult, right?
#
And I'll come back to why it makes sense even for the politician is to minimize or eliminate corruption in hiring and posting.
#
OK, like I mean, and of course, the reality of life right now is the and I talk about this again in chapter two,
#
which is, you know, I talk about the democracy tax, OK,
#
which is the fundraising pressures for elections are so large,
#
like it means that whether it's bonds or whether it's contracts or whether it's recruiting,
#
I mean, there's money made in every channel, OK?
#
But one of the subtle points, which is not appreciated often,
#
is that different forms of political financing have different kinds of downstream consequences.
#
OK, so what Yuan Yanang and others work of China or even Prithika mentioned
#
is that what the more careful studies of corruption in the past 30 years show is that corruption per se
#
doesn't necessarily inhibit growth.
#
But the ways in which the corruption aligns the incentives of the key actors with the public good, right,
#
like I mean, is what matters.
#
OK, now, and what happens here is that corruption in recruitment and postings and training and postings
#
is among the most pernicious forms of political financing.
#
OK, and that's because the politician is gone in five years.
#
But if you've hired somebody incompetent, they're stuck there for 35 years.
#
OK, like I mean, so this is then this long term kind of cost, right?
#
And then the other problem when you sell a government job, which happens often,
#
is then A, you're going to get negative selection about who comes into the job.
#
B, from day one, the guy is thinking about how am I recovering this investment?
#
And which is why, again, movies, right?
#
Like, I mean, so the Gangajal example, I think, is one of my favorites, right?
#
Like, I mean, this is such a powerful little vignette, right?
#
Like, I mean, where you've got this Daroga Mangni Ram, right?
#
Like, I mean, and you've got Ajay Devgan, of course, as this honest SP.
#
And he catches this guy being corrupt, right, on his first day.
#
And the guy comes back and begs for forgiveness.
#
I need the bribe to repay the loan I have taken to get this job.
#
OK, and you can see why that is then the cancer, right?
#
Like, I mean, that kind of, they're like termites, right?
#
Eating the foundation of governance, because at the very foundation,
#
you've kind of, you know, you've kind of weakened the base, right?
#
Like, I mean, with corruption and hiring and posting.
#
OK, now, the subtle question that will ask is if this is so lucrative, right?
#
Like, I mean, so why would the politicians stop this?
#
OK, and I think that's where the time is changing, right?
#
Things are changing where the, because the politicians also have to deliver.
#
OK, so another good example, which is in Chapter 2, is if you look at DBT.
#
OK, so historically, right, like the corruption that used to happen
#
with intermediaries kind of taking their cut.
#
Now, it's not like the higher level politicians didn't know that.
#
OK, but allowing that cut was the price you paid for the political support
#
from those intermediate local leaders.
#
Like, I mean, when people had to be mobilized for elections.
#
OK, so when we did this study on biometric smart cards and found that
#
doing that in Andhra Pradesh reduced the leakage, like, you know, dramatically.
#
What Dr. Santosh Mathew was then, I think, Joint Secretary of Rural Development,
#
right, one of the most brilliant IS officers has a PhD in governance,
#
like, you know, and he said something very interesting to me.
#
OK, he said, you've studied the technical aspect of the technology.
#
The miracle is not that the technology worked.
#
The miracle is that it was allowed to work.
#
OK, because the problem is that when you cut that corruption,
#
you are cutting out the sources of political support, right,
#
of your intermediary layers.
#
But the political calculation had changed to say that rather than feed
#
a few intermediaries with this bribe revenue,
#
like I'm better off kind of improving service delivery because like,
#
you know, that's going to get me greater returns.
#
OK, so in the end, the politician is also a completely rational character.
#
Right, you care about notes, you care about votes,
#
but you care about votes more than notes because you care about notes
#
primarily for the votes.
#
OK, so like if I can get the votes directly, right,
#
like I mean, by delivering better services, then that's that's
#
that's an attractive model.
#
OK, so my hope is that that same realization will happen even
#
when it comes to personnel itself.
#
OK, that when you have kind of personnel hired through a corrupt process
#
or the system that has that, then it is kind of again,
#
not going to be a structure that can deliver better services.
#
OK, so and again, I think the more effective political leaders,
#
people I talked to about who understand election financing will say
#
the more effective ones have figured this out that there is still
#
political financing that is made now in wholesale ways, right?
#
While retail corruption has been reduced because that's what the voters see.
#
OK, so you can imagine a similar transition happening with regard to personnel.
#
So these are sensitive topics, but I think sometimes in our public discourse,
#
we just need to understand that's why Chapter 2 is there,
#
which is the politicians predicament.
#
OK, which is, you know, they are living under these kind of election
#
And so my humble submission is to say given your funding constraints,
#
there are less and more efficient ways to get that.
#
And this is perhaps one of the worst.
#
So just do less of this and that will have a huge long term positive.
#
So I have a couple of skeptical points to make here.
#
One is that I think if I go one level deeper,
#
there's another problem here that the reason someone is willing
#
to pay one crore to get a sub-inspector job is because a sub-inspector has
#
too much power, which gives them a way to make that ROI.
#
You know, to make the money back.
#
And this is my fundamental point about corruption,
#
like even the anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare,
#
as I wrote at the time in columns, was utterly daft because a
#
fundamental problem from which corruption emerges is that the government
#
has too much power and they were just going to give it more power
#
with another committee which sits on top of all of these guys,
#
which would have been a complete band-aid and would have helped nothing at all.
#
So my point is that the deeper design solution is that the state should
#
have far less discretionary power because then nobody is going to
#
pay one crore to become a sub-inspector if the sub-inspector
#
does not have the power to make that money back.
#
And point two also is that where I see looking at politicians for the
#
solution to some of this is problematic to me is that if politicians
#
were to say that my voters want good governance,
#
so votes over notes, and I'm not even sure that that's necessarily
#
their order of priority, but assuming they want votes over notes
#
and that they want good governance, the good governance that will come
#
from eliminating corruptions and hirings, postings, and transfers
#
The politician has a short-term horizon.
#
So listen, I'm not saying this is easy.
#
Like you know, the point is I am laying out, see, let's think about
#
One of, I remember again when I was studying graduate, you know,
#
political economy, one of the books we read was Plunket of Tammany Hall.
#
Like I mean, which was about the amount of corruption in the US government.
#
I can mean in the 1850s.
#
So people who have a historically aware sense of this will tell you
#
that India is no different, right?
#
Like, I mean, we think that, oh, that is, no, we are no different
#
like I mean from what other countries have been at historical points.
#
So the question then to ask is what created the transition of that
#
From one of patronage in jobs to one that was able to deliver better
#
Now one view is to say that this is just a slow organic process that
#
happens through economic growth, that happens through better education
#
and then bit by bit, that's why they say building state capacity is
#
the slow boarding of hard boards that takes a hundred years.
#
So what I'm trying to do in this book is not to pretend that this is
#
some five-year solution, but the hope is to compress a hundred-year
#
cycle into a 25-year cycle.
#
And part of the way you compress that cycle is by kind of bridging
#
To say like, I mean, this is what you got to do and then which is
#
why coming back to state led one thing we didn't talk about.
#
One very important part of this book, which we haven't talked about
#
at all, is that it focuses on state level actions.
#
An action that can be taken at the state level and there's many
#
First is that most of the service delivery functions are constitutionally
#
So education, health, police, they're all state functions.
#
Second is that so correspondingly the states have the largest say in
#
terms of both budgets and personnel.
#
Which are the two pillars, but the other important thing is that gives
#
you 28 bites at the apple.
#
So different people will be willing to do reforms in different areas.
#
So that same officer I quote in the chapter two, he said like, you
#
know, politicians have vote note and bill.
#
Like I mean, everybody has like some area that is passionate to them.
#
Like I mean, and they are willing to do reforms in certain areas that
#
they have personally felt the pain about.
#
So you will get different cracks at this and then part of what you
#
need to do is kind of have this active effort to kind of, you know,
#
have all of these governance reforms going on and then that you're
#
able to rapidly replicate, right?
#
Like I mean the things that are successful.
#
So yeah, so this is you can look at that's why the politician's
#
predicament has this great quote by John Claude Yunker, right?
#
The former prime minister of Luxembourg, but he said that we all
#
We just don't know how to get reelected after doing it.
#
So the issue is not like a mean that they don't know, but the point
#
is that if the voters also know and it starts becoming common
#
knowledge, then you kind of start accelerating the progress towards
#
these reforms that we need.
#
So it's not easy, but part of this is saying these are the elephants
#
The elephant in the room like I mean is that as long as you've
#
got corruption in hiring postings and transfers that fundamentally
#
Okay, like I mean what you can do and that is something that has
#
to be prioritized because see it's all like you said, right?
#
It's all what the politician does is downstream what the citizens
#
What the citizens want is kind of, you know, is a function of
#
awareness and what you ask for.
#
So at some point if people are saying I want better service delivery
#
that has to be delivered and you say to do that, I need an
#
effective state and to have an effective state I need like,
#
you know, certain now and again everybody understands.
#
Okay, this at some intuitive level, right?
#
I mean, it's just that so going back to your point about the
#
sub-inspector with power, okay, see every human, okay, like I
#
mean has you know, there are positive instincts that are negative
#
So what we do in terms of building systems is that you make
#
it easier to do the good things and make it harder to do the
#
hard things or the bad things.
#
Now you can never in any society take away discretion from a
#
frontline police officer.
#
So it's that there is you can't right change that.
#
Okay, because the nature of being a frontline police officer
#
is you are empowered as the agent of the state with the
#
ability to exercise coercive power.
#
I mean, I took police officer as a random example, but it could
#
be any licensing authority, any rent seeking.
#
Of course, of course, right?
#
But what I'm saying is that some of this is design, right?
#
Like I mean, but some of this is also then capacity to say
#
that listen, if you've got, if you've got certain systems,
#
right, like I mean, where the data is digitized by what is
#
what, you know, where you're just reducing discretion and
#
you know, so it's a, it's an infinite, it's a slow, but it
#
goes back to what I was saying earlier, right?
#
There are skeptics of state capacity who say, why do you
#
want to make state stronger in a time when it can be misused?
#
But that is a self-limiting argument, right?
#
Like I mean, because over time you need the capacity to
#
Because otherwise you end up putting things in law that are
#
not followed and that itself takes capacity.
#
But I don't, I, I think we completely agree.
#
And the larger point here is just, yes, you have to do
#
less, but there are core things you have to do that you have
#
And this is then about that.
#
You want to tell me about the next step that you take to
#
kind of make things better.
#
So the first thing, you know, you make it a priority.
#
Now this business about the postings and transfers and
#
integrity in that, even if you move in the right direction,
#
okay, like, I mean, this is, these are all directional
#
And then the other very, very low hanging fruit is just
#
And this is something that, you know, people resist.
#
So the funny thing is the reasons politicians resist it
#
is they often say, oh, then we don't have any tool of
#
But the converse thing is that they also say I don't have
#
Like, I mean, people who do good work.
#
Now the good news is this is there are a lot of well
#
motivated people who want to do good work.
#
So why do you know, why do people take pay cuts relative
#
to the private sector to be in the government because there
#
is the genuine satisfaction, not just a public service,
#
but of problem solving, of solving difficult problems.
#
So a lot of the things that give people deep intrinsic
#
motivation in the government is that these are often
#
problems that are way harder, okay, than in the government
#
and then in the private sector.
#
So the way you draw the intrinsic motivation out of
#
Like, I mean, yeah, so whether, I mean, if you think
#
about Oppenheimer, if you think about like, you know,
#
all of these great things is that there is a problem.
#
There's a big problem that needs to be solved and we are
#
going to empower you and give you the runway needed to do
#
So having that stability that then allows and empowers
#
people to deliver, I think is one of the lowest hanging
#
Now, but this is an element that sometimes goes against
#
right, certain interests because people, sometimes people
#
like the transfers because it gives you variety, reduces
#
accountability, but this is where the politician has to
#
That's why I'm saying in chapter three, I'm saying what
#
are the things the political leadership needs to do and
#
then in chapter five, those are personal ideas that the
#
bureaucratic leadership can do, right?
#
But this in the end, in a democracy, the legitimacy to
#
do these things comes from the elected leadership.
#
So elected leadership has to prioritize the bureaucratic
#
strengthening, has to prioritize integrity, like I mean
#
in hiring and postings and the stability.
#
Now these three things are basic.
#
Now then there is one deeper point.
#
And this deeper point then goes back to this core issue of
#
autonomy and accountability.
#
Which is that effective organizations and this is perhaps
#
the most important lesson learned from China, right, is
#
that effective organizations, whether in the public sector
#
or the private sector, they function by giving autonomy on
#
how to do it with accountability for the outcomes.
#
Whereas in practice, what we do in government is exactly
#
You micromanage on process leaving no autonomy with no
#
accountability for outcomes.
#
So this kind of this point about autonomy and accountability
#
Because see a lot of people in government join because they
#
want to influence the public good and then there was this
#
civil servant survey that said that one of the biggest pain
#
points for them, right, like I mean is the lack of autonomy.
#
So and the effective parts of the government, whether it's
#
ISRO, whether it's the RBI, right, I mean, these are all
#
entities that are given autonomy, but RBI is maintained
#
is accountable for maintaining inflation.
#
ISRO has accountability eventually for the successes of
#
the missions, but you don't have kind of microprocedures
#
saying like, you know how to run it.
#
So the best parts of the Indian government.
#
So we know how to do this.
#
It's not like this is rocket science.
#
It's just that it happens only in certain pockets of the
#
government, whereas what you need is to deeply institutionalize
#
that in the regular functioning of the government with more
#
empowerment and autonomy on the front line with more accountability.
#
Now, where does that accountability come from?
#
And that gets me to the next key part, right, which is kind
#
of recognizing the power of data-driven governance.
#
So part of what I think makes me confident that we can
#
What took others hundred years that we can compress, right?
#
And the government gets it, right?
#
So the whole DPI agenda and kind of the direct benefit
#
transfers has been about leapfrogging these intermediate layers
#
So I think this is a good example that the political leadership
#
gets it, that there is value in doing this and that the
#
So what I'm now making the case for is the next level.
#
See where I think we have succeeded is in areas that can
#
go disintermediate humans.
#
But for service delivery, you can't disintermediate humans, right?
#
The education is still the teacher.
#
The health worker is still the front, the safety still.
#
So these are human intermediate, correct?
#
So there you have to provide more autonomy on the process
#
with more accountability and outcomes and that is helped
#
by kind of the investments in data.
#
So there's one subtle point about why does chapter four
#
see three is bureaucracy, five is personnel, but four is
#
So there was this organizational issue which I had because
#
should it be three and four because that's continuous,
#
but there's a reason for this break and that's because the
#
investments in data are so foundational to being able to
#
do better governance in everything, whether it's
#
personnel or budgets that comes first as the foundational
#
investment over the chapter order thing.
#
You're a bit like, you know, Amitabh Bachchan with his
#
You're kind of behaving like that.
#
You know what he does, right?
#
So he numbers every tweet every tweet is ever this thing
#
as a number, which is now in like 15,000 14,000, whatever
#
and once in a while he'll get confused and he'll do
#
something wrong and then, you know, tweet number 14,000
#
and 17 will say that actually tweet number 14,000 and 24
#
hasn't come yet and that was tweet number 14,000
#
So I'll give you an example of that.
#
This is just for gentle reader.
#
I'm just pulling your leg, but you know, you hadn't seen
#
So yeah, but anyway, so I think you know, the point is
#
that data-driven governance is kind of one of these low
#
hanging fruits and what we talk about chapter four is
#
example after example where these the right investments
#
and measurement, okay, can give you large improvements
#
in governance, but also rapid improvements, right?
#
And so the question that keeps getting asked is why will
#
the politician do this?
#
But if you get the benefit in a three-year window of a
#
four-year window, it then becomes kind of incentive compatible
#
Okay, so and I think I've said this before see politicians
#
already understand the importance of data because the Commission
#
surveys all the time for their own elections for Kisco
#
ticket, then I who's ahead who's behind.
#
So there is the logic of them using that data for governance,
#
which is then the ultimate purpose is not that difficult.
#
Once you explain it that way and again see the and that's
#
why the data chapter and take a one-minute detour.
#
It's again, it's not that these things are not known at a
#
principal level, right?
#
But it is then the next level of details of how do you do
#
it and how do you make it happen?
#
But yeah, so I think in terms of making the bureaucracy overall
#
more effective the actions of the political level are just
#
saying make it a priority integrity in hiring have kind
#
of the state of stability of tenure.
#
Okay, low-hanging fruit and then you've got the autonomy
#
and accountability and then you've got data-driven process
#
then there's a last and important thing which is communication.
#
Okay, because communicating the rationale for these changes
#
is something that the political class has to lead.
#
Why because you will often get resistance if nobody likes
#
Okay, so any change will often get resistant.
#
So if this whole thing is framed and communicated as saying
#
oh, we are trying to improve accountability.
#
Okay, then immediately your government public sector
#
unions will kind of go on dharma.
#
Okay, like in the political kind of whatever momentum you
#
Okay, so the communication of this agenda has to be that it
#
is a grand bargain right whereby you are investing in
#
the bureaucracy see most of these ideas are things that
#
the bureaucracy themselves would want and even the front
#
time people people who want the training want the capacity
#
building want the autonomy want the ability to serve better.
#
Therefore that see good ideas can ease and this is true
#
even of say the formulas or whatever right like I mean
#
that if it is communicated as something that this is going
#
to hurt you then people will protest because people are scared
#
Okay, it's not even like I mean that they're malicious.
#
It is like I have optimized my life for the current rules
#
Okay, please don't come and change it on me.
#
Okay, and you will put this so I think getting the communication
#
of this agenda is again something the political leadership
#
So I'll give you a very good example.
#
Okay, why this is not just kind of pie in the sky, right?
#
So and this is part of the personal chapter also, but one
#
of the things that the government of Telangana did successfully
#
I mean and this is related it's related to personal management
#
is that see going back to the Woody Allen quote, right?
#
We need more employees, but we need them to be more accountable.
#
So what they managed to do was that they appointed 10,000
#
Okay, and appointed them on a three-year contract and said
#
that we will measure your performance and then we will
#
regularize you after that.
#
But when these unions started agitating to regularize there
#
was a very clear political pushback saying that no, it is
#
It is also about the services, right?
#
So there is then this communication that says that the larger
#
purpose in the problem today is public employment is often
#
seen politicians sees government jobs through the lens of
#
providing jobs not through the lens of the services delivered
#
which actually affect many more people and that's because
#
the job is a visible benefit you're providing in that real
#
time that you can take credit for if that person and their
#
That's already four votes in in the pocket that is the diffuse
#
benefit to services is you know, you can't get the credit.
#
Okay, but somewhere again, it goes back to that point about
#
the miracle is that it was allowed to function.
#
So similarly like I mean, I think see these changes are
#
Okay, we are moving right.
#
So this is just about giving a roadmap to accelerate that
#
Okay, but the political communication becomes really important
#
to say that listen, we are now doing these changes to empower
#
and strengthen the bureaucracy but also help it deliver better
#
for citizens because then even if there's pushback you've got
#
citizen support right like I mean for what you're trying to
#
So that is also something that the political class has to
#
do because otherwise many reform attempts quickly die just
#
because they get sign of sabotaged inside.
#
Okay, so that's what you need at the political level and
#
then but there is also a lot of important ideas in many ways.
#
I think the even more important reform ideas are in the personnel
#
chapter that then have to do with the specifics of how you
#
think about public sector staffing recruiting and a bunch
#
of things and we'll get there next we will get there next
#
but we will get there after what is not a short break but
#
a long break the short break for you.
#
It's a long break for us because Karthik has a flight to
#
catch so we are actually going to continue this remotely and
#
at this point Karthik I have a request for you.
#
Take a you have friends in high places, you know governments
#
and bureaucrats also right kindly make some government
#
create something called the Ministry for time and let them
#
then legislate that in a day instead of 24 hours, it should
#
be 30 hours and I think this will solve the problem because
#
we would have had six hours more today.
#
It's such a simple elegant easy solution can be implemented
#
in a top-down way and I will happily fill in the paperwork
#
So we will talk about personnel after a break but to give a
#
teaser to my gentle listeners, you know, I can't help but
#
share this incredible anecdote that a senior IS officer told
#
you where he went to the Department of personnel in his
#
state and he asked him in all innocence.
#
And the answer he got was we do people's tabadla, you know,
#
we get people transferred and you know, that's a I think
#
suitably intriguing sort of anecdote to leave the people
#
It's such a pleasure sort of, you know, recording with you
#
We have met in person and hung out of course, but our previous
#
recordings were all remote and our next recording will also
#
be remote but not too far away in time.
#
I thoroughly enjoyed this verse.
#
Yeah, I mean, I think the time up and down like war
#
If it was virtual, then like, you know, it would be like we
#
would have had that time.
#
But actually, we withdraw the thank yous because then these
#
guys will think that it's not after the break.
#
That's why I was confused because the personnel we're going
#
to make part of this episode.
#
So, Karthik and I withdraw our thank yous in triplicate.
#
But this will not go, right?
#
Karthik is shaking his head.
#
He's like, yeah, this is a podcaster.
#
This would never go in a research paper or my knees sinking.
#
Of course, it wouldn't.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because
#
of my blog India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and
#
2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to
#
think about many different things because I wrote about
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and
#
now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and
#
Once you sign up each new installment that I write will
#
land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene On The Yon Scene.
#
I'm still with Kartik Muralidharan, but though I'm still
#
with Kartik Muralidharan, two days have elapsed.
#
He is in another city far away from me.
#
And he came back on immediately to ask me what I thought
#
And you said it matters what you think.
#
I'm deeply flattered and all of that.
#
But so how was your flight?
#
Are you settled in now in Chennai?
#
It's been, you know, this back-to-back book launch event.
#
We did this thing in Mumbai on Thursday and you were there
#
and then I had a Chennai launch on Saturday.
#
So yeah, it's just, you know, sometimes these launches,
#
these launches almost feel like a bit like mini-shadis.
#
Like, you know, you have to see, okay, kisko bula nahi, kisko,
#
like, you know, and you have to get all of that done.
#
And so, I mean, frankly, I've not had even the mind space
#
But it's been, the Chennai one was good.
#
Chennai one was very good because that was the one
#
for family, really, right?
#
Like, you know, so parents were there, laws were there,
#
like, you know, extended family was there.
#
And the special chief secretary of finance from Telangana,
#
he flew down, actually.
#
So his name is Ramakrishna Rao and he gets a full paragraph
#
of thanks and the acknowledgments because he's the person
#
who's most responsible for my writing the book
#
because he had heard the entire podcast lectures
#
of my courses of the Indian economy at UCSD
#
And he said, listen, there's so much content in here.
#
The best kind of service you could do is actually
#
So yeah, so he came and it was wonderful
#
because he could talk not just about the, you know,
#
the quality of the research or the writing,
#
but the practicality and the fact that the government
#
of Telangana has in fact been implementing
#
in the past few years, a bunch of these ideas,
#
partly because we've been working together.
#
So yeah, I think when I first came on the show four years ago,
#
I talked about, see, just having been, you know,
#
nascently formed, signed an MOU.
#
And I just didn't want to say much because the truth is
#
we knew this was very difficult work and we didn't necessarily,
#
I didn't feel comfortable talking too much about it.
#
But now at the five-year point with the government fields,
#
right, it can mean that the work has added so much value
#
that he feels comfortable talking about it.
#
I feel that that's a really good place to be.
#
So that's actually a fantastic origin story, I didn't know it.
#
And the reason it's fantastic is that the person who asked you
#
an academic to write the book was a practitioner himself,
#
you know, which tells you something about what he felt
#
about the practical value of such a book.
#
And I agree with him and the book has, I think,
#
So more power to you, please accelerate our development.
#
And we shall also very slowly accelerate the development
#
of this particular episode.
#
Now the, you know, in the first part of this episode,
#
we chatted about a lot of things,
#
but in some detail about the bureaucracy's burden,
#
what the bureaucracy is like and so on and so forth.
#
And the natural next chapter after that is obviously personnel management.
#
And I want you to begin with telling me why you feel that this is important.
#
Why should this be a priority?
#
So give me some of the reasons for that,
#
that why is this something we need to think about?
#
Because one typical, you know, simplistic way of thinking
#
about the state could be that personnel doesn't really matter.
#
You fix a structure, you fix the incentives, then it doesn't matter.
#
Everything will fall into place.
#
But personnel does matter.
#
So, you know, please tell us why.
#
Yeah, no, I think, see, there are many, many reasons, right?
#
I think the first is just that for most, for the citizen,
#
for most practical purposes, the employees of the state are the state, right?
#
So the way you interact with the state is through its employees, okay?
#
So you simply cannot augment state capacity and improve service delivery
#
if you haven't kind of improved the functioning of your personnel systems, okay?
#
So, and that's kind of every part of personnel management, right?
#
Everything from recruiting to the training to the posting to the promotions
#
to, you know, the entire career life cycle of government employees.
#
And that's important, not just intrinsically again for the employees themselves
#
because the government is the largest employer in the country, right?
#
And so as an employer, you owe it to your employees
#
to kind of have a meaningful employee value proposition
#
that's intrinsic and intrinsically motivating.
#
But it's also instrumentally important because the effectiveness of the personnel
#
directly speaks to the effectiveness of the state, okay?
#
So I think that's kind of obvious.
#
I think the bigger reason, I mean, in some ways, which is less obvious to the public,
#
is that there's been, again, like I keep saying, right,
#
I keep coming back to the research, I mean, which is, you know,
#
the book in many ways is like an ode to research, right?
#
It's an ode to the value of what we've learned from high quality work
#
from so many scholars around the world.
#
And so there's this incredibly impressive body of work on management
#
that's been done by Nick Bloom at Stanford and John Van Renen,
#
who used to be at the London School of Economics and now is at MIT,
#
and a whole bunch of other co-authors including Daniel Escort and Renata,
#
with whom I've done some work.
#
But the core idea was that, you know, they started...
#
So the problem with management, okay, is that management is often very difficult to measure, okay?
#
So there is a reason why historically business schools used to teach management through case studies,
#
because it was, okay, let's look at this problem,
#
let's look at how this was solved and let's take those principles.
#
Now what Bloom and Van Renen and others did was really start measuring management systematically, right?
#
Really, really systematically and saying,
#
here are standard kind of metrics of operations management strategy, personnel management.
#
And then they started kind of implementing these, what became the world management surveys,
#
in a very systematic way across firms, across countries.
#
They use armies of MBA students as kind of, you know,
#
I think the MBA students got course credit, like I mean, for doing the interviews.
#
So that's kind of how professors were able to scale this effort up.
#
And so that's led to a series of really important papers.
#
And one kind of incredibly important insight from all of this is that,
#
see, I mean, A is that management matters,
#
but more importantly, when they look at the different components of management,
#
they basically regularly find that personnel management
#
is by far the most important component of effectiveness of organizations, okay?
#
So we often think about strategy as the glamorous thing, right?
#
I mean, and HR is, okay, that's a function, right?
#
But what it highlights is the quality of your personal management
#
is often the single most important part of your org effectiveness.
#
And that lines up with folk wisdom of people like Jack Welch,
#
you know, when he was CEO of GE, he famously said, he said,
#
you know, I spent 70% of my time on HR,
#
which is all about finding the right person,
#
putting them in the right role, giving them the right support,
#
and holding them accountable for the outcomes, okay?
#
So getting the people management of an organization right
#
is so central to the effectiveness of the organization
#
that you simply cannot build an effective state, right?
#
I mean, without, in fact, improving its personal management, okay?
#
So I think those are like two of the big reasons.
#
And then the third is not just that we know
#
that personal management is important.
#
We also have micro research on what to do, okay?
#
See, in all of these things, right,
#
the structure of the book is to first kind of use the macro research
#
to convince you why this is important,
#
why state capacity is important,
#
why is personal management important.
#
And then to get into the weeds of the next level black box,
#
okay, it's important, but what do we have to do, right?
#
Like, I mean, and so similarly, in personal management,
#
we have a body of high quality evidence
#
that allows us to significantly improve our outcomes,
#
and that's kind of the overall goal of the book, right?
#
Improve the effectiveness of the state,
#
and the key part of the black box of the state
#
is the personnel itself.
#
I love the phrase, armies of MBA students,
#
you know, this is how modern wars will be conducted by the losing side.
#
So, you know, in that amazing chapter,
#
you've shared a bunch of key facts, as it were,
#
insights about, you know, the personnel within the government.
#
And, you know, for me, all of them are worth double-clicking on.
#
And the first one that struck me, which is a bit of a nuance point,
#
is that by and large, government salaries are too high.
#
And, of course, the first nuance in that is that at the top level,
#
they are too low, but everything below that, they are too high.
#
So tell me a little bit more about this and why it matters.
#
Yeah, so I think, you know, the most basic reason it matters is that,
#
remember I told you earlier in the bureaucracy chapter,
#
we established that India has the fewest number of public employees per capita
#
relative to its comparisons, okay?
#
And it's not that we don't spend a lot on people,
#
it's just that we pay too much and we hire too few, okay?
#
That's basic economics, okay?
#
So in terms of where does your budget go,
#
most of that goes into unconditional salary increases of incumbent employees, right?
#
And you don't end up having nearly as much money
#
to kind of hire the number of people you need, okay?
#
Now, the real question is, like I mean, how do you establish that it's too high, okay?
#
So here again, there's some excellent cross-country work.
#
So there is an earlier generation where the World Bank,
#
they put out a report in 2003 where they just measured
#
government employee compensation as a ratio of GDP
#
and estimated that India has among the highest in the world.
#
But then there's a much more rigorous recent paper in 2017,
#
you know, in the handbook of personnel economics
#
that is called, you know, the personal economics of the public sector
#
and that uses micro data across countries
#
that looks at kind of household data and looks at where you're employed.
#
And then what that can do is it can control for your education,
#
for your experience, for your skills.
#
And then holding all of that constant says
#
how much higher is the public sector wage premium?
#
How much more are you paid in the public sector?
#
Holding your education constant, holding your experience constant, okay?
#
And they establish again that India has one of the highest
#
public sector pay premiums in the world, okay?
#
And so now, this by itself need not be a bad thing, okay?
#
It need not be a bad thing if somehow, like I mean,
#
if paying more allowed you to attract better talent, okay?
#
And so that's the first defense you will get, okay?
#
People will say, wait, I need to pay more.
#
There's this old joke, you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, okay?
#
Like, you know, so, and so, you know, people say you need to pay more.
#
And then again, that's where the research is so useful
#
because one of the, I think, consistent themes in both my work
#
and other people's work in the past couple of decades
#
is that how in fact excessively high pay not only doesn't help.
#
See, there's one way in which it's unproductive
#
because if it doesn't improve productivity,
#
I'll be better off using that money to hire more people, okay?
#
So that's like some of my early work.
#
So this Indonesia paper on doubling teacher salaries, okay?
#
Where we find zero impact, okay?
#
Compared to kind of hiring more teachers or hiring more staff.
#
And that's true in the Anganbadi's as well, okay?
#
But I think what is underappreciated by the public
#
is how much there are additional costs, okay?
#
Of excessively high pay.
#
So one natural supply demand cost is fixed budget.
#
I'm paying too much, I'm hiring too few.
#
But there are many deeper unseen problems, okay?
#
So the unseen part number one
#
is that when your pay is so high, okay?
#
You effectively make the government
#
the most lucrative employer in your entire economy, okay?
#
So there is a reason why you have hundreds of applicants, okay?
#
Like Kameen for every single job, okay?
#
Now again, by itself that is not a problem
#
if it gets you the best talent.
#
But when the stakes are that high,
#
it dramatically increases the incentives
#
for corruption on both sides, okay?
#
Like Kameen on the part of the person who's admins.
#
So why do you get these recruitment scams, okay?
#
Whether in state after state, right?
#
Preachers, railways, the recruitment scams
#
are among the most common scams.
#
And that's because there's just so much money to be made,
#
Like I mean, so how can you not have a scam
#
when you've created those kinds of perverse incentives,
#
Like I mean, so that's kind of problem number one, okay?
#
That you kind of are more likely to get corruption
#
in recruitment when you do that.
#
I think a second problem, which again,
#
the irony in all of this is that
#
there are also large numbers of vacancies, okay?
#
So when we say state capacity is weak,
#
that we are not filling vacancies,
#
what we don't appreciate is why are we not filling
#
It is often not because there's no budget,
#
because even sanctioned budgets are often not getting used.
#
The reason is the fixed cost of running the recruitment
#
is such a Herculean task, okay?
#
Because the risk of cheating is so high,
#
the stakes are so high, the political pressure is so high.
#
So what ends up happening is a well-functioning organization,
#
like if the government were well-functioning,
#
given the scale of what it has to do,
#
it would have annual recruitment
#
because people are retiring, you need people every year.
#
But often many departments will only recruit
#
once in four, five years,
#
and that's because the fixed cost of recruiting is so high
#
that you just do it in one go, okay?
#
And then, because the officials are also highly risk averse,
#
because this is a place where corruption can happen,
#
you don't want to get caught in a scam, okay?
#
So that's kind of then problem number two, all right?
#
So then the thing is even when, like I mean,
#
the recruitment takes place and it's not corrupt,
#
part of your problem is that the selection exam,
#
because you are obsessed about making it objective, right?
#
The selection exam can identify general smarts and ability
#
to mug up and spit out stuff on an exam,
#
but it has absolutely remarkably little predictive power,
#
okay, like a mean of your actual effectiveness on the job,
#
So, and what ends up happening is that
#
because the winning the government job lottery, right?
#
This is the ultimate lottery ticket, okay?
#
You apply, there's a chance of one in 100, one in 300,
#
but if you win it, you're set for life, okay?
#
And so it is completely rational for the candidates
#
to apply to as many jobs as possible,
#
regardless of whether they have any interest or not, okay?
#
So, and there's this quote I have from the story of saying,
#
he's applied for jobs as a forest guard, as a teacher,
#
like, you know, they all fail, he doesn't mind, okay?
#
Now, from the candidate's perspective,
#
this is completely rational,
#
but the problem from a public service delivery perspective
#
is you're now getting people into the government,
#
who have absolutely no interest in that job, okay?
#
I mean, the only reason they're there
#
is for the government job, okay?
#
So that, again, hurts the long-term quality
#
of public sector staffing, okay?
#
So it is the citizens who then pay that price, okay?
#
Then there is another unseen cost, right?
#
Which is the structure of public sector labor markets
#
is probably the single biggest driver
#
of educated unemployment in India, okay?
#
So people anecdotally have talked about this,
#
but there's now this wonderful study in Tamil Nadu
#
who graduated from Harvard a few years ago,
#
and I think in partnership with
#
Aseem Premji University did this study.
#
And, you know, it's a very systematic study
#
of the candidates applying
#
for the Public Service Commission in Tamil Nadu, okay?
#
And even in a state like Tamil Nadu,
#
he estimates that 80% of the unemployment
#
is because they're writing for government exams.
#
80%, okay, of the same.
#
So, and the phenomenon is so, you know, all pervasive.
#
there's a book by Craig Jeffrey called Time Pass, okay?
#
So the whole book is Time Pass,
#
and it's an ethnography of kind of youth in colleges
#
in Chaudhary Charan Singh College in University in Meerut.
#
And it is literally all these kids are doing,
#
is waiting and applying for exam after exam.
#
And, you know, I saw a particularly poignant version
#
of this literally a few weeks ago, okay?
#
Like, Kamheen, I, there's some context,
#
I was planning a trip to Bihar,
#
and I was looking at a LinkedIn profile of somebody there.
#
And here was somebody who, on his LinkedIn profile,
#
for 10 years of his life, okay?
#
described himself as a UPSC aspirant, okay?
#
Like, Kamheen, so 10 years of life
#
went into just taking that exam
#
again and again and again and trying,
#
and then only after that age limit is reached, right?
#
Like, Kamheen, do people then say,
#
okay, I need to find something else, okay?
#
So the opportunity cost of that time
#
in terms of our youth, both in terms of time wasted,
#
and time spent not learning real skills, okay?
#
Because then this feeds back
#
into the education crisis we have, right?
#
So why do we produce so many graduates
#
who can take exams but with no skills?
#
And that's because the most lucrative employer
#
in the economy demands exam-taking skills
#
So you just see, right, talking about seen and unseen,
#
like, I mean, how the structure
#
of the public sector labor markets
#
then like cascades into the entire economy.
#
And this is not something
#
that I think people have actually understood or articulated.
#
And, you know, the hope is that this is one, you know,
#
this is one way to do that.
#
And then there's a bunch of other costs.
#
But let me just stop there for a moment
#
and get your reactions to just this point
#
about the perverse downstream consequences
#
of having salaries and benefits that are too high,
#
which are completely unseen.
#
And so if you win the lottery and get inside,
#
and again, this reflects the political economy
#
of the fact that the incumbent government employees
#
are incredibly powerful as an interest group
#
and will lobby and lobby and keep pushing up their terms.
#
But that kind of increases the gap
#
between the insiders and the outsiders,
#
creating all of these perverse downstream effects
#
No, I think this is an incredibly, you know, important point.
#
And one of the great TILs of the book for me,
#
especially in the detail in which you've laid that out
#
and you've spoken about the downstream effects,
#
I just want to, you know, go over some of the figures
#
from your book that really struck me.
#
Of course, refer to the 2017 study of public pay
#
across 32 countries by Rohini Pandey and her colleagues,
#
which found that we have among the highest
#
public sector pay premiums in the world.
#
You refer to Amartya Sen and George Rez's 2013 book
#
where they speak about how relative to GDP per capita,
#
public school teachers in India
#
are paid three times more than in China.
#
And later you speak about the Andhra Pradesh study,
#
which shows that government teachers earn
#
about six times more on average
#
than those in the private sector.
#
And you point out, and I'm quoting you now, quote,
#
remarkably, even a top 5% earner among private school teachers
#
earns less than a bottom 5% government teachers,
#
And this is mind blowing because, you know,
#
in the context of our education episode
#
and your chapter on education in this book,
#
for example, where we see that outcomes of private schools
#
and public schools are broadly the same
#
and, you know, often private is a little better.
#
But even if you consider them broadly the same,
#
you know, the bang for the buck is way, way, way more
#
which is such a strong case for school vouchers
#
where the government essentially funds the education,
#
but not the particular school.
#
So parents go wherever they feel they're getting a better
#
quality of education and, you know,
#
that changes the incentives all around.
#
And this lottery effect was mind blowing.
#
Like again, I will quote from your book just to point out
#
the effect that this has where you write, quote,
#
a striking example was when 2.3 million applicants,
#
including over 250 with a PhD,
#
applied for 368 peon posts in Uttar Pradesh,
#
implying 6,250 applicants for every single job,
#
And of course, it is like a lottery.
#
And you said 1 in 200, 1 in 300 being the chances.
#
This is 6,250 applicants for a peon's post,
#
including so many PhDs.
#
And, you know, the corruption, of course,
#
we discussed in the first half also.
#
It's, you know, something that is not surprising.
#
The fact that vacancies come up because the fixed costs are
#
so high, that's also not surprising.
#
The other part that really kind of blew my mind,
#
and I'd want all the listeners to also ponder on it,
#
is when you talk about that study in Tamil Nadu,
#
you know, I'll repeat the figure, though you just said it,
#
80% of all unemployed people in Tamil Nadu are unemployed
#
because they are preparing for the State Public Service
#
This is like just such a crazy opportunity cost because
#
of that 80%, what, 3 or 2% will actually get in,
#
or a really tiny percentage will get in,
#
and the rest of the people could have been,
#
you know, doing productive work.
#
And part of it is, of course, our larger failure of the state
#
in not enabling an ecosystem where there's enough opportunity,
#
where entrepreneurship and enterprise is rewarded in other
#
ways, and that's like a decades-long failure.
#
But I just sort of wanted to, you know,
#
quote some of these figures from your book and emphasize how
#
important this is because it tells you that this dysfunction
#
of the state doesn't just make the state function badly,
#
but it bleeds out into society in this terrible way.
#
It's a waste of so many of our resources.
#
And then you go on to talk about how, for example,
#
there is no link between pay and productivity in the public
#
sector. It's not even that these high salaries kind of help
#
there, and you go on to, you know,
#
talk about how credentialing and training for public employees
#
are weak. Take me a bit through, you know,
#
those aspects of the problem.
#
Yeah, and again, you know, I think this is the one of the
#
reasons for writing this book again, right,
#
is these are not easy questions to answer.
#
Okay, and all of this has come from careful individual research
#
papers, right, that are working on pieces of how do you study
#
the link between pay and productivity?
#
And so, you know, we've done this in education,
#
we've done this in health, and so some of the best evidence
#
comes from education because you're able to match the teacher
#
to their student and seeing, you know,
#
how does the value addition, the learning gains of a student
#
in the course of a year depend on the teacher's characteristics?
#
Okay, so that's what allows us to show robustly, right,
#
I mean that there is basically zero correlation in the public
#
sector between teacher pay and productivity.
#
We see the same thing in health.
#
Okay, we've got another paper which I think I discussed briefly
#
in our health episode when, you know,
#
we had these undercover patients, right,
#
like I mean going and measuring,
#
because the hardest thing in research is the measurement,
#
right, how do you define the outcome?
#
So again, we see that there's no link of productivity.
#
We've done a new randomized control trial in Tamil Nadu
#
where, you know, Anganwadi workers were just given unconditional
#
20% pay hike and again, no impact.
#
Indonesia, we doubled teacher salaries,
#
again, we didn't do it, the government did it,
#
we just kind of worked with them to study it, right,
#
I mean, but again, no impact, right?
#
So if the high pay was getting you high productivity,
#
it would be worth it, but the high pay is absolutely
#
uncorrelated to productivity.
#
In contrast, in the private sector,
#
because we have data management, both public and private schools,
#
in the private sector, there's a very strong correlation,
#
not just between your qualifications, right?
#
See, government will correlate with qualification,
#
okay, but qualification is not quality, right,
#
because the quality depends on knowledge and effort
#
and that effort in turn depends on personnel management.
#
So that personnel management piece then becomes critical
#
to kind of getting the most out of the knowledge, correct?
#
So what you end up with is that in the private schools,
#
like more effective teachers are always paid
#
significantly more, you see a very robust correlation
#
between teachers' effectiveness in the classroom and their pay.
#
We see that in the health data, okay?
#
So in general, the government just does,
#
so these are all examples then of weak personnel management, okay?
#
So going back to saying, what is effective personnel management, right?
#
So going back to the Blumen-Vand Rienen kind of research taxonomy, right?
#
So effective personnel management is essentially the extent
#
to which your prospects in the organization
#
depend on your performance, right?
#
That is the core of effective personnel management
#
and I think we see this in our own data, right?
#
I mean that there is in general management quality
#
between public and private sector is kind of obviously the private is better,
#
but the difference is strongest in personnel management, okay?
#
It's almost like four standard deviations different.
#
So there are just massive weaknesses in public personnel management
#
and kind of no link between pay and productivity is,
#
you know, one obvious one.
#
And in fact, in some ways it's almost perverse
#
and I talk about this a little bit more in the health chapter, right?
#
Which is, see what happens is in fact,
#
because there is no difference between pay and productivity, right?
#
Like I mean the perverse thing that happens is the person who works hard,
#
the only reward is more work, okay?
#
Like I mean without any pay
#
because if you're a doctor who's conscientious
#
and actually shows up and treats your patients,
#
more people will come, okay, which is good.
#
But that means you're getting additional work with zero extra benefit.
#
So yes, there is intrinsic motivation that makes you do that to some extent,
#
but beyond the point we're all human, right?
#
Like I mean and so you actually have negative incentives for the guy who works hard
#
because that person and same thing happens in government, right?
#
Which is essentially the only reward for good work is more work.
#
And so the people who are effective are the ones who get kind of,
#
so sometimes it's its own reward,
#
but sometimes it's just unsustainable.
#
So yeah, so that's kind of exhibit A.
#
And I'll give you another example of public versus private school
#
in terms of accountability, right?
#
So in our All India Absence work,
#
I think out of 3,000 government school teachers we found schools,
#
we had only one case, okay,
#
where the headmaster said we had ever taken any disciplinary action
#
against the teacher for repeated absence.
#
I think that was a case where the person literally didn't show up for a full year.
#
whereas in the private schools, you know,
#
35 out of 600 private schools, right,
#
said that they had taken action.
#
So which meant it was 175 times more likely to take action
#
like I mean for non-performance in the private sector.
#
Okay, and that is the core of the difference, right?
#
The core of the difference between public and private is management and accountability
#
because the government system has better qualified teachers.
#
They are better qualified doctors.
#
They pay for qualifications,
#
but they have absolutely zero investment in personnel management.
#
Right, so you mentioned they pay for qualifications
#
and yet that is also, you know, a dangerous kind of trap.
#
The next point you make in your book is about how the credentialing systems
#
and how those qualifications don't actually indicate that there is quality there.
#
So double-click on that for me.
#
Yeah, so, you know, and I'm glad you, you know,
#
so in doing this, right,
#
I think I also hope to, you know, convey to your gentle listeners
#
that even though this book has pages,
#
it's like a collection of op-eds that are strung together, right,
#
in a kind of sequence where each of these sections
#
is about a tight three to four paragraphs with the underlying research behind it.
#
But, you know, I think the credentialing and training, right,
#
so we think qualifications are quality,
#
but again, we've got several studies mostly from education
#
and, you know, just showing that there is absolutely no correlation,
#
okay, between teachers having a credential
#
and their effectiveness and their classroom effectiveness in the public sector.
#
Okay, now again, this is the edifice on which we build our entire formal education system.
#
RTE says you must hire a qualified teacher.
#
Okay, so if you're not qualified,
#
so the entire system assumes that qualification is quality.
#
Okay, but the data and the research shows zero correlation.
#
Okay, so what is going on?
#
And again, this is where you get your shoes dirty, right,
#
you go in there and figure out ho kiara, right, I mean,
#
and the first part of this is just that many of the degrees are just fake.
#
Okay, so in a world where the degree is what you need as opposed to skills,
#
it's not a surprise that a market will emerge, okay,
#
to kind of create these degrees.
#
And in fact, the influence of these kind of degree mafias are so strong
#
that, you know, Anil Sorup was the former school education secretary, right.
#
So he was formerly the coal secretary and then the education secretary.
#
So he has this famous quote that he says,
#
in coal, the mafias are above ground,
#
in education, the mafias are underground,
#
because in coal, at least you know who the mafias are.
#
In education, they all have this veneer of like, you know,
#
oh, we do social service, we do education, we run teacher training,
#
but they're all basically like, you know, mafias,
#
in the sense that this is essentially the fake degree mafia.
#
And this is how many of the teachers are met in schools would often,
#
how do you apply for every possible government job?
#
Like when you're supposed to be doing teacher training,
#
it's because that degree has also been purchased.
#
Okay, like, so then it's no surprise.
#
Okay, so again, when you, this is the thing, right,
#
and you will love this, that when you create policies
#
that try to disregard markets, the market will come back
#
and bite you like a mean in unfamiliar places.
#
Okay, like, you know, so here you think that I'm going to have much higher pay,
#
like mean and get great teachers.
#
No, the market will come back and create a market for fake degrees.
#
Okay, which is partly what's happened.
#
Now, the second thing is, listen, in every profession,
#
okay, like, you know, so even going back to my own teacher absence work, right,
#
it's very easy to paint that as saying, oh, the teachers are not good,
#
they're not, no, the absence was only 25%.
#
Okay, which means for every one absent teacher, there are three sincere teachers.
#
Okay, so similarly for every mafia education institution,
#
I'm sure there are three sincere institutions.
#
Okay, but even the sincere institutions, right,
#
just like the problem there was that the sincere teacher is teaching
#
and completing the curriculum while the kids are so far behind.
#
Here, the sincere education institutions are teaching history,
#
theory, philosophy, sociology, right, like Kameen of education,
#
but remarkably little pedagogy.
#
Okay, like I mean, so what do you do when you go to the classroom
#
and have 25 screaming kids at you?
#
Okay, like Kameen is something that is not something that's taught in class.
#
Okay, you really have to experience it and the practicum component
#
of our trainings is kind of notional.
#
They've tried to increase it over time,
#
but historically it's been very, very weak.
#
Okay, and maybe this is also time to say a little bit about education schools
#
because, you know, I have had multiple faculty offers to be in top education schools.
#
Okay, like Kameen and I've spent a year at the Harvard Education School
#
and there's a lot of very good people there.
#
Okay, but one of the structural problems for education schools
#
is that often what you end up with is you get, it's a bit like Noah's Ark.
#
Okay, so you get like two of every discipline.
#
Okay, so you will get two economists, two sociologists, two, you know,
#
so and everybody wants to teach their discipline as it applies to education.
#
Okay, which is very useful analytically,
#
but not very useful from a actual effective training,
#
effective teachers perspective.
#
Okay, and I think, you know, we have this problem in spades in India
#
and this is true even in the US.
#
Okay, where in general the correlation between kind of an education masters
#
and effectiveness in the classroom seems to be non-existent.
#
And again, it reflects the fact that the pay schedule for teachers
#
gives you a salary bump if you get a master's.
#
So that creates this kind of incentive for the masters
#
but doesn't give you any real substance.
#
Okay, so the second point is that a sincere well-meaning institutions
#
that offer degrees, but these are kind of focused on things
#
that are not that effective.
#
And the last reason is that even when the training has useful content,
#
okay, you need motivation to use that content.
#
Okay, so what we see is that in our studies on teacher performance page,
#
okay, what you'll see is that in a typical control school
#
where the business is usual,
#
there is no correlation between qualification and effectiveness.
#
Okay, but when you add the performance-based bonuses,
#
then the qualified teachers do significantly better.
#
Okay, so what that tells you is if quality equals knowledge times effort,
#
if my effort is very low, then the knowledge doesn't help.
#
But if my effort goes up, then the knowledge matters, right?
#
Because it's multiplicative, right?
#
So which is why it's not that the training doesn't matter.
#
The training can matter,
#
but if it is deployed in the context where the performance matters,
#
okay, so this is again, see, it's very easy to say,
#
hey, training doesn't matter.
#
No, and this is I think the hard thing about doing systems work,
#
okay, and this is worth pausing and double-clicking.
#
Okay, so if you look at a lot of the education,
#
the key point of systems is everything interacts.
#
Okay, so if you look at the education research
#
and a lot of the findings are that simply spending on school buildings
#
or infrastructure or teachers doesn't seem to give you much impact
#
and people will say, hey, have you lost it?
#
How can you have education without a school?
#
How can you have education without a teacher?
#
Okay, what are you smoking?
#
Okay, the point is that you can have all of those things,
#
but you need to integrate that with the effect of governance and pedagogy.
#
So it is like Anna Karenina, right,
#
like you know, which is happy families are all similar
#
and unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way.
#
Okay, so similarly, success requires everything to kind of come together,
#
but each of these individual failure points, right,
#
like can make the enterprise fall apart.
#
So again, it's not about saying the training doesn't matter
#
or credentials or qualifications don't matter.
#
It's that it is in a system where there is kind of a systemic incentive
#
for fake degrees, a systemic incentive for kind of rote learning
#
as opposed to practical skills, even if it's not fake
#
and a systemic incentive to deploy those skills in a setting
#
where there is no motivation to actually deploy it, right.
#
So it's that combination that makes it be that the training
#
and credentials are uncorrelated with outcomes.
#
Lovely and I love how this, you know, illustrates that the design failures
#
of the system are actually design failures at different dimensions.
#
So it appears to be one problem that you've got credentials
#
being given the importance they are within the government system,
#
but they don't work at all.
#
But actually there are so many different factors to it.
#
Like one part of the design failure is that the way the incentives happen,
#
many of the degrees are fake.
#
Another part of the problem is that even when they are fake,
#
even when they are real degrees, the training content is too theoretical
#
and has no application to the actual classroom.
#
And the third part of the failure is that there is no motivation.
#
Like you said, quality is equal to knowledge into effort
#
and there's no point even having the right knowledge
#
if you don't want to put in the effort.
#
So you got to fix it at multiple areas.
#
If you just do one fix somewhere in the puzzle, it simply doesn't work.
#
You have to fix all of them
#
and therefore you need that kind of holistic thinking,
#
which is kind of mind blowing.
#
But that's why it is so difficult.
#
But that's why it is so difficult, right.
#
I mean, see, it's one of these things.
#
It's so easy to say, huh, but we need to improve public sector efficiency, right.
#
The reason it doesn't happen is because there is no silver bullet, right.
#
I mean, it requires kind of just seeing how these different tangled parts come together,
#
but at the same time being parsimonious to say these are the six critical things
#
and not kind of making that less 600.
#
And that's hopefully what I've tried to do in the chapter.
#
And what you also, you know, display in the chapter right after this
#
is that not only is the recruitment really poor,
#
not only do you get people with possibly fake credentials
#
who are basically not motivated to work,
#
but once they are within the system,
#
the personnel management system is also broken.
#
So, you know, explain, break that down for me.
#
Like, you know, so this is, yeah, sorry.
#
This is something I kind of said that earlier as well.
#
But yeah, the basic point is you hire based on an exam and credentials, okay.
#
So once you have the people in the system,
#
the question is how are you managing them, right.
#
And the most basic metrics failure, right,
#
a metric of management failure is the absence rates, okay.
#
The fact that 25% of teachers can be absent,
#
or 40% of, you know, of health officers are often absent,
#
you know, tells you that you've got this problem.
#
Now, why do you have that?
#
That's partly because you have substantial weaknesses
#
at the management level, right.
#
So very large numbers of block-level supervisory positions are vacant.
#
And now, why are they vacant?
#
And this is the kind of thing that a citizen who's outside will say,
#
yes, government is weak, government is not working,
#
but nobody has any visibility, right.
#
Like, I mean, what is happening in this black box?
#
And one of the reasons those positions are vacant
#
is I can't remember if I mentioned this, I did, right,
#
in the context of the judicial kind of interventions
#
and seniority and promotions, okay.
#
So you end up with all kinds of other people
#
just because the system is risk-averse
#
and because nobody has an incentive to push something through,
#
that you can stop it in many, many ways, correct.
#
So, I mean, and the truth is,
#
sometimes the public's kind of desire for a strong leader,
#
okay, like, comes from this perception
#
that the system is so moribund
#
that you need somebody really strong to beat it into shape,
#
okay, like, I mean, so, and which is why, right,
#
like, I mean, in chapter two,
#
like, when I talk about kind of why improving the effectiveness
#
of the state is kind of,
#
is essential for Indian democracy itself, okay,
#
like, I mean, is that Ambedkar famously had the saying that says,
#
you know, if this structure doesn't deliver for the common citizen,
#
the citizen may, in fact, even break down the edifice
#
of constitutional democracy
#
that this house is so carefully built up
#
and partly because you've got to deliver, okay,
#
like, I mean, but you can't deliver
#
if you're not willing to kind of go fix your systems
#
because all the money you put in,
#
like, I mean, the translation of that is so weak, okay,
#
so, but anyway, so, you know, it's just a bit of a side,
#
but just to say why I, you know,
#
why I've spent this time writing this book
#
is because, again, these connections are just critical
#
to kind of understanding how to make this work better,
#
but who would know that 40% of block education officer promotions
#
because it is stuck in a court somewhere
#
that is rolling, been waiting for five years
#
to rule on seniority list,
#
and you paralyze kind of an entire administrative machinery
#
Now, of course, because we are a jugadu system,
#
there will be somebody acting an additional in charge, okay,
#
so, so, you will have what is called FAC, right,
#
which is full-time additional charge,
#
which is one of the most common acronyms within the bureaucracy,
#
okay, so, if you then go look at the list of block education officers
#
or block ICDS officers, it will be FAC, FAC, FAC, okay,
#
so, which means that they are available to sign the paperwork,
#
but they have very little bandwidth to actually supervise and monitor,
#
okay, like, I mean, the way that that's supposed to happen, right,
#
so, the first is just the vacancies,
#
the second is even when they are there,
#
the tenures are short and unpredictable,
#
third, the supervisors receive very little training,
#
okay, on how to be effective managers,
#
so, often, like, I mean, the promotion is a reward for doing time,
#
okay, like, I mean, where the senior teacher will just get promoted,
#
right, but managing is a completely different role
#
and you need effective training,
#
it can mean to be a manager,
#
there's remarkably little of that,
#
and then even if you are, you want to be a good manager,
#
you don't have the tools to motivate your staff
#
because pay promotions and postings of the staff are determined by seniority,
#
so, as a manager, except beyond a little bit of personal example, right,
#
like, I mean, I don't have the tools to motivate my staff,
#
okay, like, I mean, which itself limits that,
#
so, both the carrots and the sticks are limited,
#
and then finally, like, I think I've said, but it's worth highlighting,
#
is that it's not that there is no accountability, right,
#
but that the accountability is all on compliance and paperwork
#
and not on the outcomes, okay,
#
so, even when I go and supervise,
#
I'm rarely checking can the child learn,
#
what I'm checking is have the registers been filled
#
and if somebody were to audit the supplies at the midday meal,
#
like, there should be no hira peri over there,
#
but nobody is going to come and bother if the child actually cannot learn,
#
okay, so, and that's kind of, you know,
#
when I talk about the weaknesses in the management,
#
it reflects everything from, yeah, the vacancies to begin with
#
and then when they are there,
#
then you have all these systemic challenges.
#
One of the reasons government jobs are so attractive for people
#
is really lifetime employment, right,
#
it's a stability ki ek baar lag gayi naukri toh bas you are set for life
#
and, you know, and that's like the worst incentive of all.
#
Tell me a bit about how this plays into the system
#
and the effects that it has.
#
Yeah, so, again, you know, historically,
#
the logic of lifetime employment was that it was supposed to provide
#
the civil servants the independence and the spine
#
to kind of stand for the public interest
#
and kind of resist narrower political, you know,
#
kind of pushes and pulls, right, but over time, you know,
#
you could argue that lifetime employment is one of,
#
yeah, all of these other factors are magnified,
#
the costs are magnified by lifetime employment, right,
#
like I mean, because, so in a way,
#
it's almost like we have set up the worst possible
#
HR system possible from the public interest, okay,
#
which is for the candidate, the incentives are all to do,
#
maximize your effort before you get in, okay,
#
but the moment you get in, you're set for life, okay,
#
so if you think about it from the perspective of the citizen,
#
it couldn't possibly be designed worse, okay,
#
like I mean, which is you put in the effort to win the lottery
#
and once the lottery is won, like I mean,
#
you're feeding off the taxpayers kind of door, right,
#
I think I mentioned it at the Bombay talk, right,
#
where the former member of the Planning Commission
#
was telling me how, you know, he had this house in Delhi
#
and one day the Mali, his Mali,
#
who had been working for him for a couple of years came to him
#
so the moment you become permanent is the day,
#
like, you know, those pressures to work
#
essentially fall off a cliff, okay,
#
so I think, so the lifetime employment is bad,
#
I mean, obviously, because it reduces accountability,
#
but it also reduces incentives for upgrading skills, okay,
#
like I mean, so why, you know,
#
and so one of the reasons of a government offices
#
are just swarmed by consultants, okay,
#
is like I mean, because when you need to get work done,
#
your existing employees, like I mean,
#
the skills are essentially obsolete, right, like I mean,
#
and so the only way to kind of get the people
#
with the skills needed,
#
so most government offices these days run
#
on some combination of fellowship programs,
#
some combination of consultants,
#
some combination of volunteers, you know,
#
and so it is really an ad hoc mess, okay,
#
like I mean, partly because of the atrophy
#
in the core capacity of the state,
#
now again, we look at the very top, right,
#
we look at the IAS, you go one level below,
#
two levels below, like I mean, the ability to comprehend
#
and do serious stuff just falls off a cliff, right,
#
like I mean, writing a memo, opening a spreadsheet, right,
#
like I mean, we are talking the most basic levels of skills
#
because those things are not tested in your entrance exam,
#
so government entrance exam doesn't test
#
whether you can actually use Excel, okay,
#
so that is kind of the level of, you know,
#
like particularly, and remember,
#
the other perversity in the government
#
is seniority rules, right,
#
so the senior people are in fact the most obsolete
#
when it comes to skills, correct, like I mean,
#
so then you're kind of stuck in this other loop, okay,
#
where that lifetime employment
#
is not only hurting accountability,
#
but it's hurting kind of incentives to skill upgrading,
#
again, this is not to say everybody's this way, right,
#
there are a lot of intrinsically motivated people
#
who will do it, but that is despite the system,
#
not because of the system, okay, that's the key,
#
there are outstanding people
#
who will do their best to stay current,
#
but the system per se doesn't give you
#
any impetus to do that, okay,
#
and then, you know, and then a related cost
#
is that it just burdens public finances
#
with salary costs for jobs
#
that have been made obsolete by technology, right,
#
like I mean, so often you will have, yeah,
#
you've got these examples of the cigar carrier
#
for Winston Churchill or whatever, right,
#
like, you know, I mean, from Trichnapoli,
#
but yeah, once you're in the system,
#
like I mean, you're carrying that payroll
#
regardless of whether the job is needed or not,
#
and then, you know, the kind of deeper cost
#
in some ways is that having employees
#
with outdated skills and weak incentives
#
also slows down the government's ability
#
to adopt newer technologies and improve productivity,
#
so again, sometimes that is a bigger cost
#
than the salary cost itself, okay,
#
so if you look at, say, bank modernization in the 80s,
#
okay, so there was a lot of resistance to computerization
#
saying that this is going to take away our jobs,
#
but some of the resistance also came from people
#
who just were too nervous to handle it, right,
#
so in the end, the only way you could do the computerization
#
was through a VRS, okay, right,
#
so there is a version here of academia,
#
again, this is not just picking on government, right,
#
this is true in every area, let me pick on myself, okay,
#
as they say, even in academia,
#
science progresses one funeral at a time, right,
#
like, I mean, so, because once you have this big banyan tree,
#
it's kind of difficult to get new ideas, okay,
#
so similar, under, through that,
#
so similarly, like, you know,
#
when you've got kind of a seniority-based system,
#
like, I mean, it's very, very, very difficult
#
for the organization to evolve
#
unless you build systems that make that nimble, okay,
#
so the only way to upgrade kind of the bank's technology
#
was to do VRS and do the golden handshake
#
and even giving people five years' salary was worth it
#
because it allowed you to modernize your systems, okay,
#
but now, at least in the banks,
#
there was some pressure because there's competitive pressure
#
from private sector banks, okay,
#
whereas in government departments,
#
like, I remember, I was in Bihar,
#
like, you know, 2012 or 13,
#
like, you know, I mean, large government office,
#
60 people, exactly one computer,
#
one computer was in the principal secretary's office,
#
a budget had been sanctioned, okay,
#
budget was sanctioned for computerization,
#
but they just didn't do it
#
because nobody knew how to operate it
#
and so nobody bothered, right, I mean,
#
and so how do you then end up
#
with these kind of rooms of files and red tape,
#
like, you know, that only those people can find,
#
which therefore makes it possible for them
#
to mysteriously make files disappear and appear as needed?
#
It is precisely because that opacity
#
is where the power of that bureaucracy comes from,
#
Yeah, and you mentioned Churchill,
#
so for those of my listeners who haven't heard it,
#
I'll quickly give a potted story of what that's about,
#
that basically in the mid-1980s,
#
there was a government department in Tamil Nadu called CCA,
#
and they applied for higher budgets,
#
and some bureaucrat decided to look into
#
what is this department and why do they want higher budgets,
#
and the story goes that this department
#
was actually set up in the British imperial government
#
that what happened was Churchill loved cigars,
#
he used to get his cigars from Cuba,
#
but the war disrupted the supply lines from Cuba to England,
#
and the second best cigars in the world,
#
and we should be so proud of this,
#
were in Tiruchirapalli or Trichy or whatever,
#
and so somewhere in Tamil Nadu,
#
so this department was set up to get Churchill his cigars,
#
and it was called CCA, Churchill Cigar Assistant,
#
and the World War ended, India became independent,
#
Churchill died, and yet in the 1980s,
#
the government department has the audacity
#
and this is just a great metaphor
#
for how sort of moribund government departments are,
#
and everything you said here is also,
#
so I'll quickly sum it up,
#
one, of course, lifetime employment,
#
that you don't really need to work now,
#
you're employed for life, nothing can happen,
#
two, it also reduces the incentive
#
for upgrading your skills,
#
and this eventually means that you might be doing something
#
that has been made obsolete by technology,
#
but you're still getting your salary,
#
because the salary is taken up
#
for people with obsolete skills who are not doing anything,
#
you can't spend that money on hiring people
#
who are really needed to do stuff that is needed,
#
and if you try to upgrade these guys,
#
it won't happen too well, because A, incentives,
#
and B, it will just slow down the government
#
in other ways of hiring people who actually do something,
#
that VRS example is a great example,
#
you want to computerize a bank,
#
nobody knows how to use computers,
#
you have to, and they won't learn,
#
so what do you do, you have the voluntary retirement scheme,
#
you give so many of them five years salary,
#
you make them leave, so you can hire new people
#
who know how to use computers,
#
which is absolutely kind of mind blowing,
#
the final factor that you speak about in your diagnosis
#
of the problem is geographic mismatch,
#
so tell me a little bit about why that matters.
#
And again, it's a simple point,
#
it's a simple point, but basically,
#
because government salaries are so high,
#
almost any government employee doesn't see themselves
#
as kind of socially belonging,
#
like in the villages where they're supposed to serve,
#
so which is why almost all of them live in towns,
#
or district headquarters, or the minimum block headquarters,
#
where their own kids kind of can go to a private school
#
and they have access to better facilities,
#
and so a big part of the absence problem, in fact,
#
comes from the commute, right, most kind of teachers
#
and other service workers are kind of going up and down,
#
okay, so there is a trade-off, right,
#
there's a trade-off between qualification
#
and kind of local embeddedness,
#
so obviously, the more qualified the person you want,
#
the less likely you are to find them
#
in kind of a village or a mumm of a cell town, okay,
#
so now the problem is that our system,
#
because it assumes qualification is quality, right,
#
like I mean, tries to hire the most qualified people,
#
now even if they were not from the village,
#
so two problems, right, one is the urban kids
#
are more likely to pass these exams
#
because they just have the coaching and the support
#
and second is even if somebody from a rural area
#
makes it through this, the last thing they want to do
#
is be in the village, they then want to kind of
#
escape to the city, okay, and that's completely fine,
#
there is nothing wrong in the aspiration
#
of moving to kind of urban areas, okay,
#
so I would not want to say, oh,
#
the, it is the wrong, the wrong response is to say
#
I'm going to force an MBBS doctor to go live in a village,
#
okay, because that is the instant control type,
#
you know, mentality that our system will have.
#
The right answer is to say that
#
how do you kind of have this trade-off
#
on a sliding scale between technical qualifications
#
and local embeddedness and saying that,
#
no, the right way to improve local services
#
is not to assign a highly qualified person
#
who doesn't live there and will be absent half the time,
#
okay, but is to invest in the local talent
#
and upgrade them to the point where they can handle
#
all of the basic stuff and then refer a patient
#
to like the doctor who is rationally going to locate
#
like a mean in a high density urban area
#
because the utilization is too low, okay,
#
so I think the geographic mismatch
#
just simply reflects the fact that
#
most of our service delivery needs like I mean
#
are often in remote rural areas
#
and that's where kind of government employees
#
don't want to live, okay, so yeah,
#
but that creates another kind of systemic problem,
#
right, because of this mismatch.
#
So I, you know, normally tell my writing students
#
that use verbs, use nouns, you know,
#
don't use adjectives, adjectives are mostly wasted.
#
However, an adjective that you do use in this chapter
#
is fantastic and, you know, makes it kind of come alive
#
where you could have titled the next part of the chapter
#
Ideas for Reforms, but instead you have called it
#
Implementable Ideas for Reforms
#
and I love that bit, Implementable Ideas for Reforms.
#
You know, which is coming from a place
#
ki hum hawa mein baat nahi karenge,
#
we won't just talk theory,
#
I have worked with government,
#
I know what works there, I mean by I, I mean not I,
#
but I'm saying this appears to be your attitude
#
that I've worked with government,
#
I know what the, you know, what is practical
#
and what is not and these are ideas
#
that will improve the system that can be done
#
and perhaps have been done in some measure.
#
So tell me about these Implementable Ideas for Reforms
#
in the particular context of personnel.
#
Yeah, so, you know, I think the first one is like,
#
again, some of these things I'm going to talk about
#
to most of your listeners who work in the private sector
#
will seem like, you know, so basic as to be like,
#
you know, almost like really like,
#
but, but the first thing, okay, which will shock you,
#
okay, is that most states do not even have
#
an integrated human resource management information system.
#
Okay, so, which means that,
#
so finance department has the list of employees
#
because they send the paycheck, okay,
#
but they have no idea where they are,
#
where they are posted, what their kind of career histories are.
#
Those are with the departments
#
and the departments vary enormously
#
in terms of their kind of visibility on the data.
#
So some like the police are actually quite good
#
in terms of having better visibility
#
on where people are posted,
#
but many other departments just have no idea.
#
Okay, so you have, so if you want systematically to say,
#
so here is kind of how I discovered this, okay.
#
So for about 10 years since my early study
#
showing kind of the correlation between the supervisory,
#
the supervisory visits and teacher absence,
#
I have been obsessed in trying to understand
#
the issue of vacancies, okay,
#
other managerial vacancies, okay, like convenient.
#
So I have been looking for data to say,
#
can we just get every kind of in education,
#
every block education officer,
#
every district education officer,
#
and I want to be able to query this by person
#
and query it by post, okay,
#
saying here is the post, right,
#
I mean, has it, you know, tell me every occupant
#
how long this person has been there,
#
is this a full charge, additional charge, right?
#
So you just want to be able to do that basic HR analysis,
#
okay, because my policy goal was to say
#
the research shows the centrality
#
of making sure that the supervisory visits happen.
#
We know that the vacancies are a key driver
#
of the lack of supervision.
#
So can we just kind of organize this data
#
in a way that allows a policymaker to say,
#
okay, here are my vacancies,
#
here are my retirements that are coming up,
#
here is what I need to do
#
to make sure that there is no slippage.
#
Now, this happens at the very top level, okay,
#
at the IAS level because, but that's less than,
#
that's 1%, okay, so at the very top level,
#
of course, there's a very good system,
#
but when you go down to the actual kind of the front end
#
of the government, this data just doesn't exist.
#
It's just not there in a systematic way, okay,
#
so, and so the most basic thing would be to build
#
an integrated finance and HR management system
#
where the government just literally has,
#
you know, every employee that has been on its payroll
#
and is able to look at their employment history,
#
not just their qualifications,
#
but then in this include over time ways to kind of capture
#
the data of skills and modules
#
that have been upgraded over time
#
because that gives you a basis
#
of kind of more professional HR management.
#
And then the other key part of an HRMIS
#
is just it allows you to do better,
#
just allocation of your staff, okay,
#
I'll give you a simple example.
#
So again, in Sieges, we've been doing,
#
again, and sometimes it's just like,
#
it is embarrassing to say how low-hanging the fruit is,
#
okay, like, so we've done work with like tax departments,
#
okay, where you'll see that, you know,
#
over time, because the circles were defined
#
many kind of eons ago, right,
#
and the economic growth in different parts
#
of the country is very different.
#
So in one state, in just one kind of circles,
#
you'll find there are GST officials
#
who have like some, you know, 3000 SSEs.
#
There are others who have 25,000 SSEs or 40,000.
#
I think the variation was almost like 15x, okay.
#
So, and again, it's just humanly impossible to kind of have,
#
and remember what we said,
#
that India has the fewest number of public employees
#
per capita, and there is robust evidence
#
for multiple sectors that actually additional staffing
#
But going back to our Woody Allen example,
#
the point is that you need more staff,
#
but you also need them in ways that are better allocated,
#
better accountable, better trained,
#
and so you need both, right,
#
you need to both redesign and augment.
#
So that's what makes this such a difficult problem, okay.
#
And the chicken and egg here is, you know,
#
people need the positions,
#
so then you keep getting stuck in that loop, okay.
#
So, but that's the basic starting point,
#
that gives you the visibility on your staff,
#
the ability to rationalize kind of workloads, okay,
#
so that you can just see,
#
here is kind of, here is my staff allocation,
#
and what is the workload here,
#
and can I balance that, okay.
#
So every time we have presented this data
#
to the corresponding commissioner or secretary,
#
they have instantly passed an order saying,
#
yes, we should do this, okay.
#
But the point here is that it should not depend
#
on one officer or one CJIS team at that point
#
being there doing that analysis and presenting it.
#
The way you build systems is just by operationalizing this
#
into the daily business of government, okay.
#
So, and just doing an HRMIS
#
will be a step function improvement, okay.
#
And then the related thing that then is, you know,
#
the second thing that comes from there
#
is kind of just building a competency-based
#
career management system, okay.
#
Now, you know, even though I have done work
#
in performance pay and all of that,
#
I'll be the first person to admit
#
that implementing performance pay
#
in public sector organizations is incredibly difficult,
#
and frankly, it may be too difficult, okay,
#
like you need to even try in many settings,
#
and that's because it's very difficult
#
to attribute performance to one person in a team setting,
#
okay, so sometimes you can do performance management
#
for the boss, okay, because the boss's job
#
is to integrate all of the resources
#
and make sure the system delivers, okay.
#
But sometimes it's difficult to do that,
#
so there's a huge literature in organizational economics,
#
managerial economics, right,
#
about the potential perverse effects
#
that can come from doing too much performance-based,
#
you know, incentives and stuff.
#
But I think what should be much less controversial
#
and will already be a step function improvement
#
of the status quo is to do
#
competency-based career management, okay,
#
so what you need to do is essentially
#
rethink your training frameworks, okay,
#
so why is our training broken?
#
So training has programmed problems
#
in design, in delivery, in accountability, okay,
#
so in design, our training modules
#
are often way too theoretical.
#
In delivery, they are still very kind of lecture-based,
#
okay, and they are difficult to deliver
#
partly because government is so understaffed,
#
nobody's willing to sanction training leave, okay,
#
so I highlight this in the chapter on police,
#
I think less than 6% of constables,
#
or some shocking number, or maybe it's 86% have,
#
or some incredibly low number have undergone any training,
#
okay, like I mean, after they've joined,
#
and partly because they're understaffed,
#
so training ke liye the boss can't let you go,
#
because who will man the thana if you're out at training,
#
okay, so we need to kind of recognize
#
that the training and skill upgrading is not happening
#
because of those other constraints,
#
and the last problem with the training
#
is, again, there is no incentive and motivation
#
to absorb it, right, that can mean why bother,
#
so most training programs become a chai and samosa
#
kind of affair, like I mean, where you go,
#
you kind of maybe listen, get a t-a-d-a chai samosa,
#
talk to your buddies, and come back, okay,
#
so we need to kind of radically rethink
#
kind of how we do public sector training
#
and capacity building, right,
#
and that has kind of, it has components
#
at the level of design, right,
#
where the modules need to be much shorter, sharper,
#
and practice-oriented, right, like I mean, for most folks,
#
so if you're a teacher, literally, right,
#
that can mean imagine that saying
#
you need to teach this subject, okay,
#
here are three videos, right,
#
I mean, that give you three models
#
of how you might explain the concept of fractions,
#
fractions we know is a concept
#
where kids often come and get stuck and struggle,
#
so here is idea A, idea B, idea C,
#
and then, you know, see which one works for you, okay,
#
because again, see, this is the point,
#
the point with a lot of training and stuff
#
is in these service delivery functions,
#
you can't make the frontline worker an automaton, okay,
#
the frontline worker needs to have the judgment
#
to see how best do I kind of cater to this particular child
#
or this particular patient, okay,
#
so, but the point of the training
#
is to kind of give you a mental model
#
of kind of saying here is something I could try,
#
here's something I could try, here's something I could try,
#
so the design itself needs to become much more modular
#
and much more practice-based, okay,
#
the delivery then is something that,
#
because it's modular, right,
#
like I mean, can be done on digital platforms,
#
and so that solves massively this problem of lumpiness,
#
okay, training leave, all my training will happen in one week,
#
no, like we know that knowledge absorption
#
is a continuous process and what you want to do
#
is there is value in a classroom setting, okay,
#
but the way to change the delivery
#
is kind of the flip classroom, okay,
#
where you say here is all of the content
#
and here are all of the modules,
#
there will be a training session,
#
like I mean, in three months,
#
where we will get together one Saturday, okay, to discuss,
#
but what you will do in the meantime
#
is you will have absorbed all of this content,
#
like I mean, and kind of done some quizzes,
#
done whatever, so you've engaged with the material,
#
and then there is value in in-person,
#
but the in-person becomes more about reflection
#
and experience sharing and kind of bringing it together
#
rather than the delivery of the content itself, okay,
#
so again, there's a reason I'm getting into
#
this level of granular detail, right,
#
like I mean, it's because the details really matter, okay,
#
and then the last part of this
#
is getting the motivation right, okay,
#
which is saying how do you build kind of,
#
so even a performance space difficult,
#
how do I over a lifetime kind of incentivize people
#
to kind of pick up skills in the way
#
that there is intrinsic value,
#
but there is also instrumental value,
#
not just in terms of promotions,
#
but frankly, more importantly for postings, okay,
#
because see, a lot of people join the government
#
often the most satisfied,
#
like why do I do what I do, right,
#
I must have taken at least an 80,
#
if not 90% pay cut relative to my private sector life, okay,
#
I do what I do because solving difficult problems
#
is challenging and intrinsically meaningful, okay,
#
so a lot of people in government like, you know,
#
will get highly motivated
#
if you give them good problems to solve,
#
and one way of saying this is that your postings
#
in terms of will more likely reflect the skills
#
you've chosen to build, okay,
#
so again, these are examples
#
I talk about in the police chapter, right,
#
I mean, there are so many different sets of skills
#
that we need in policing, right,
#
like you know, so people might choose to invest
#
in cyber crime, invest in forensics,
#
invest in, you know, field investigation,
#
so, but right now, like I mean,
#
training is kind of one big lumpy thing,
#
and then where your postings are
#
is kind of unrelated to that,
#
you're lucky if, when you're given a posting,
#
you might get one week crash course, okay,
#
saying yeh karna hai, okay,
#
but this is kind of reimagining
#
a kind of lifetime skill and career management system
#
whereby you say there's modularized content
#
and then every one of these will have tests and exams
#
because, you know, education doesn't stop,
#
then you get your job, right,
#
like I mean, because that way it also speaks
#
to this problem of lifetime employment,
#
and because your increments and promotions over time
#
are going to be linked in part
#
to your demonstrated trajectory of competences,
#
I think, you know, and this is all doable.
#
Now, to be fair to the government,
#
I think Karmayogi, the mission Karmayogi,
#
which is the Prime Minister's kind of, you know, pet project,
#
I think has a lot of these ideas in place, okay, right,
#
like, I mean, and you know, and they're trying to do it,
#
but you know, it is a huge task, okay,
#
and so it is something that states probably need to,
#
and like I said, a lot of what's going on in this book
#
is focused on state-level ideas,
#
so we really need to kind of catalyze state-level reform agents
#
to say this is essential, like, I mean,
#
take the frameworks from Karmayogi
#
and Capacity Building Commission from the center that help,
#
but then really accelerate the implementation.
#
Now, to be fair, I wrote this draft in 2019-2020,
#
and then Karmayogi was announced after that, okay,
#
like, you know, so, and a lot of this is also reflects the fact
#
that I'm in conversations with some of the key people,
#
and so ideas kind of, you know, filter in and out,
#
but, you know, the good news is that people are, you know,
#
are listening, and the fact that they're doing it
#
shows that this is practical.
#
This is not like pie in the sky.
#
This is like practical plumbing
#
of how do you improve public HR systems.
#
Magnificent, I have a question,
#
but before my question, a couple of observations,
#
and my first observation is that your skill
#
for coming up with a brilliant, memorable phrase
#
that could go on a t-shirt keeps, you know,
#
coming to the fore, this great phrase of yours,
#
one big lumpy thing, you know, could easily go on a t-shirt
#
worn by every middle-aged bureaucrat in India,
#
one big lumpy thing, and also what you sort of describe
#
as digital human resource management information system,
#
which I'll just call Hermes,
#
which is kind of what the acronym is,
#
and it seems to me that Hermes is, like,
#
you describe to a private sector person,
#
it seems like not only low-hanging fruit,
#
it seems positively underground,
#
like, yeh toh hai, this is like the foundation of the building,
#
how is the building standing, like, this is so mind-blowing
#
that government departments don't know who work for them,
#
and in fact, there have been scams
#
where many people on your payroll are actually dead people
#
or fictitious people and all of that,
#
so this is fundamental.
#
My sort of question comes from, you know,
#
when you talk about motivation, at one point,
#
you, one of the solutions that you give in the book,
#
you have the sentence which says,
#
quote, a simple solution is to require employees
#
to log into the training portal with their Hermes unique ID
#
and have a personal competency passbook
#
that records their completion, mastery, and certifications
#
of various training modules and competencies,
#
stop, quote, and the moment I read this,
#
I thought that, okay, boss, this is going to be gamed,
#
you know, every metric that there is can be gamed,
#
just as, you know, for the certification thing,
#
you had people giving fake certification,
#
even here, this will be gamed in various ways,
#
people will be logging, there'll be services
#
where you can take somebody's Hermes ID and log in with that
#
and help them get a good score and all that,
#
and the thought that strikes me is not that this shouldn't be done
#
because it will be gamed,
#
but that the core problems are really upstream,
#
that unless you solve the upstream problems
#
which you spoke about before this,
#
like the lifetime employment, like the high salaries,
#
like, et cetera, et cetera, all those things
#
which create bad incentives,
#
this won't really move the needle much
#
because people will just game it
#
because they have nothing to lose,
#
and gaming it is like the easiest way.
#
I completely get all everything that you said
#
about intrinsically motivating them
#
with difficult problems they want to solve,
#
but frankly, Kartik, you know, it's just going to be outliers
#
like you or me who are going to respond to that
#
and go beyond the call of duty.
#
Most people are just going to take whatever boxes have to be taken.
#
So, okay, so here is, I think, you know,
#
my slightly less cynical view on the whole thing, right,
#
like I mean, which is, you know, in general,
#
all orgs have a bell curve, okay,
#
so I would say that there are 20%
#
who are going to do outstanding work,
#
regardless, you know, even,
#
so for them, this doesn't make a difference
#
because, you know, there are IAS officers I know
#
who have read more NBER working papers than professors, okay,
#
like I mean, it's unbelievable, okay,
#
the way they're motivated to stay current
#
of literature research, right,
#
like I mean, you know, it's truly magnificent, okay,
#
and for them, this is almost can be an annoyance, okay,
#
like, I mean, I'm doing real HR skill,
#
now you're making me do this kind of dumb little thing,
#
okay, like I mean, so there is that risk, okay,
#
but this is where you can obviously be sophisticated
#
about this and, you know, and find ways,
#
but I think this is middle 60%, okay,
#
the gamers and the fakers are the bottom 20%, okay,
#
but there is a middle 60%,
#
there is a middle 60% that is not evil,
#
they're not malicious, they just go with the flow,
#
okay, they just go with the flow, okay,
#
and if the flow expects that this is something
#
that you will do, right, like I mean, so,
#
and I'll give you an example, okay,
#
like in the university, okay,
#
so we have to do this as faculty members,
#
like, you know, every one or two years,
#
we will have, you know,
#
there will be a human subjects kind of research training
#
that has to be revisited every three years,
#
there will be like electronic record safety,
#
there will be, if you're working in biological labs,
#
there will be kind of a, you know, a patient safety,
#
there'll be like animal safety, okay,
#
so, and these are things that the law requires
#
by federal law says that if you have these grants,
#
you need to recertify yourself every three years, okay,
#
now, I'm sure there are people on the margin
#
who outsource the assignment to some PhD student
#
up there as you do this, okay,
#
but most of us don't, okay,
#
it's painful, like I mean, and we'll say, okay, chalo,
#
and I will typically do it late in the evening
#
when my creative cells are kind of not this thing,
#
but when I'm, that's my admin time slot,
#
toh kar denge, you know, like I mean,
#
so that middle 60%, like I mean,
#
the defaults really matter,
#
and if the defaults are that this is how you'll do it,
#
it'll work, now, of course, over time,
#
you can tighten the system, like, you know,
#
so event, in fact, Karmayogi has this provision
#
for what's called these proctored independent assessments,
#
okay, so you can do all of the modular tests,
#
but then if you want the actual credential,
#
you have to come and take a proctored test,
#
so these things can be done, okay,
#
those are not deal breakers,
#
but I think it's just about signaling an intent, okay,
#
that says, listen, business as usual is so dysfunctional,
#
like I mean, matlab yeh bill bas nahi chalega,
#
and we really have to kind of fix these systems.
#
Wonderful, no, that makes a lot of sense,
#
and the middle 60% and, you know,
#
breaking it up like that is a good way to think about it,
#
I, of course, you know, I'm like, you know,
#
I always think about the bottom 20%
#
because that's kind of, so a digressive question,
#
before I move on to the next point,
#
that you mentioned Karmayogi
#
and how you've been having conversations with these people,
#
assuming that one's ideas, assuming that your ideas
#
lead to actual change within the government,
#
is it part of the compact
#
that you're not allowed to take credit for it
#
or speak about it too much?
#
Is that part of the whole process?
#
No, I think to be completely, yeah, see,
#
to be completely honest, anything in government, right,
#
like I mean, it is almost never the case
#
that one person is responsible, never, okay, never, right,
#
like I mean, that these projects are so,
#
so first of all, even the ideation itself,
#
like, you know, requires,
#
so it is so far from kind of taking credit,
#
but to the extent that, like I said,
#
I can't remember now, you know,
#
whether I said this in person or,
#
but see, the role of the academic,
#
the role of the researcher,
#
because the politician is under so much pressure,
#
okay, like I mean, the bureaucrat
#
is also under a lot of pressure,
#
so we have the luxury, right,
#
like I mean, to do the research,
#
put the facts, put the frameworks, put it together
#
and saying, you may wish to consider, okay,
#
and there what you will see is going back to that,
#
you know, maybe it's 10, 70, 20, okay,
#
like I mean, among the bureaucrats,
#
you know, there'll be 20%,
#
like I mean, who are malign actors
#
who are in there literally, like, you know,
#
to feather their pockets and be like, you know,
#
they won't give you time of day.
#
There's a middle 70%, like I mean,
#
who'll say, ha, idea mein toh dum hai,
#
lekin, but this is too complex,
#
and then there'll be the 10%,
#
who'll say, not only is the idea great,
#
but I will do the work needed
#
to build the coalitions inside
#
to kind of make something like this happen, okay.
#
Now, so for Karmayogi itself,
#
like, you know, see, this is,
#
so there are people like, say, Dr. Santosh Mathew,
#
okay, like Kameen, who's now
#
leads a lot of the state capacity work
#
at the Gates Foundation,
#
but he's one of these, like, outstanding scholar officers,
#
right, I mean, who went and got a PhD
#
and thinks deeply about state capacity,
#
and, you know, so, and what was interesting about him,
#
and again, coming back to being motivated
#
by getting things done,
#
as opposed to being motivated by titles, right,
#
so normally the holy grail in the government of India
#
is you will not retire till you've hit secretary, okay,
#
but he had this opportunity to leave the services,
#
I think, in his mid-50s, okay, before he became secretary,
#
but in a way of kind of shaping
#
a larger state capacity agenda,
#
where kind of being with the Gates Foundation
#
gives him a memo, and again, see,
#
what does the foundation do?
#
The foundations, it's not that different
#
from the World Bank or any global development agency.
#
Their main kind of power is the ability to convene experts,
#
okay, like, because there are a lot of experts
#
who have a lot, very, very well-intentioned, okay,
#
but the expert has no idea how to translate that idea
#
into a way that a government will find, okay, so again,
#
so coming back to the pipeline
#
from idea creation to implementation, right,
#
professor's job is to sit in universities,
#
take five years, 10 years,
#
write deep peer-reviewed work
#
that will stand the test of time,
#
but the professor doesn't have the comparative advantage
#
in translating that to policy,
#
because policy happens when there's a window
#
when the policymaker has the attention, okay,
#
so what a think tank is doing
#
is collecting the evidence and synthesizing it,
#
so often the World Bank, its foundation,
#
like, I mean, function in those kind of intermediate roles,
#
where they have technical staff with them
#
who are in dialogues with the governments
#
who say, we are doing this, we want some help,
#
and then they will reach out,
#
like, convening here are experts, here are experts,
#
whatever, like, you know, so, but in the end,
#
none of, see, nothing can happen without political will,
#
okay, whether it's the World Bank,
#
whether it's its foundation, see, India is too big,
#
so in very small countries,
#
sometimes the external agencies like convene
#
can have a disproportionate role.
#
In India, like, I mean, none of them can do anything
#
that the government is not primarily interested in, right,
#
but when the government is interested,
#
they might reach out and say, you know,
#
we would value some technical support
#
because you're able to convene certain expertise,
#
and that's kind of, you know, how they play a role.
#
So anyway, so I think, you know,
#
my role in all of this is very, very, very peripheral, right,
#
like, convene conversations, ideas, draft chapters,
#
and maybe, you know, this is happening anyway.
#
I think the more concrete contribution in Karmayogi
#
is not what I'm doing as an individual thinker,
#
but more what Sieges is doing,
#
where we have entire teams now, like, convene,
#
who are supporting this kind of competence-based
#
capacity-building frameworks within the government,
#
because again, see, the reason we have Sieges
#
is the book provides some sense of what to do and how to do,
#
but there is an entire, every, you know,
#
we can talk later about some of the implementation,
#
say, of the things in Telangana, right,
#
but sometimes, like, every two pages in the book
#
is like three years of work, right,
#
I mean, downstream, of how to make it happen,
#
and so part of the reason for building those teams
#
is to say that let's do the kind of, get our shoes dirty,
#
right, let the convene do what it takes,
#
and in that process, it is so iterative,
#
and frankly, most of the improvements
#
come from the government, okay,
#
so again, it would be really hubristic to say,
#
you know, that I did this or we did that,
#
we help in a small way to accelerate the right thing happen,
#
okay, so let's, I think that's probably the most we can,
#
So I have an additional question,
#
double-clicking on that, like, our friend Ruben Abraham,
#
who runs Arthana, earlier IDFC Institute,
#
often used to say that we are a think-do tank,
#
we don't just give ideas, we help governments,
#
sort of, carry those things out,
#
and they have worked, and work, currently,
#
with a bunch of different governments, just as you do,
#
and his main point that he would always say
#
is that I keep myself out of the way,
#
we should never take credit,
#
all the difficult decisions with high stakes involved
#
are being made by politicians and bureaucrats,
#
let them, they take the credit,
#
we'll do our job in the background.
#
Now this leads me to the question
#
of when a nonprofit takes a stance,
#
it also militates against their incentive
#
to show results to their funders,
#
so when you go out fundraising,
#
the fundraiser will want to know what have you done,
#
and if you are not going to sort of be,
#
if you're going to underplay your role,
#
and you're not going to be able to quantify what you've done,
#
it can become a bit of a problem,
#
and I've seen this incentive playing out really badly,
#
like, more than a decade ago, I remember,
#
the Center for Civil Society,
#
which I used to respect until that point,
#
you know, took credit for the RTE,
#
the right to education, which is a disaster,
#
which they will say so openly now,
#
it was a complete disaster, they knew it was a disaster,
#
but they had to appeal to people like Atlas for funding,
#
so they actually went and stood on the Atlas stage
#
the RTE is the biggest voucher program in the world,
#
and that's just intellectually dishonesty,
#
intellectual dishonesty,
#
and at a human level, I understand that,
#
because they needed the funding,
#
they needed to show that all these years we've been working,
#
something has come out of it,
#
except that in that case, it was a misrepresentation,
#
and I wonder how those pressures play out,
#
because a lot of think tanks and NGOs and nonprofits
#
will start out with the best intentions,
#
but then getting further funding becomes an existential issue,
#
and can, you know, drive you into different kinds of directions,
#
so how does one balance that,
#
like I have no idea what the seizure structure is,
#
and so on and so forth,
#
but how does one balance these different imperatives,
#
how does one think about it?
#
Yeah, no, see, it's a great question,
#
and I think, see, frankly, there is a reason why,
#
and it's interesting, right,
#
because the episodes of yours I've heard recently
#
were with Prithika and with Argya, right,
#
and those are, I think, very, very kindred spirits, right,
#
I mean, and I think, so I'll say two things, right,
#
I mean, one is that this kind of entity
#
is funded very differently, right,
#
like I mean, it is not, see, the kapas,
#
there is a traditional kind of funding
#
that says I'm funding you to kind of make this policy,
#
which I'm interested in, happen,
#
and that is where things get very murky,
#
because then there's conflict of interest,
#
and, you know, all kinds of stuff, right,
#
like I mean, whereas I think what is,
#
so to build something like this,
#
I think it's only possible
#
after establishing a certain amount of credibility, right,
#
that can mean that you're functioning
#
purely in the public interest,
#
so the CEO, which is former IAS, right,
#
the VP Ops is former IAS,
#
so these are people who've been in the system
#
and have kind of impeccable reputations
#
as functioning in the public interest,
#
and the good thing for us is we say this,
#
we will be very happy to disband, okay,
#
I mean, you know, with nobody's in here, look,
#
see, it's not like I don't have enough other things to do,
#
right, like, you know what I mean,
#
but the, we're not here to,
#
so in that sense, the, what I think,
#
so since you're asking about this, right,
#
I think recently, about a month ago,
#
I had a review meeting with the finance secretary
#
in one of the states we're working in,
#
and because I have not reviewed the work in six months
#
because I've been focused on the book,
#
and I said, you know, it's been about two years,
#
what is your overall take on the Seegest team?
#
And what he said was just,
#
like, I couldn't have asked for anything better, right,
#
he said, your team is competent,
#
committed, humble, and trustworthy,
#
okay, I mean, and so, which means that,
#
essentially, we're able to, see,
#
what is the advantage of the non-profit form, okay,
#
like, why does that form even make sense from a social,
#
see, let's take a step back and think social structures,
#
okay, which is, there are people, the private,
#
so, again, Mani Sabharwal said this very nicely, right,
#
he said, government has an execution deficit,
#
private sector has a trust deficit,
#
civil society has a scale deficit, right, thank you.
#
So, right, so, the government has legitimacy
#
and can function at scale, but can't execute,
#
the private sector can execute at scale,
#
but because it's because of the profit motive,
#
it doesn't have the trust, right,
#
civil society often draws motivated people and can execute,
#
but can't scale because they don't have a revenue model,
#
like, you know, they neither have paying customers,
#
nor do they have taxes, okay,
#
so, in that, therefore, is like you kind of saying,
#
listen, so, the right way for a civil society org, right,
#
which is essentially what any non-profit is,
#
is to kind of saying that we are not looking to scale,
#
right, because that is not where we are,
#
but it is to help the entities
#
that have the legitimacy to scale, right,
#
like, you need to do stuff better,
#
so, by being in a very limited role
#
that we're not trying to expand for the sake of it,
#
and I think the best way to kind of then give the example
#
is saying these are capacity building investments
#
that the government is doing,
#
that is going to strengthen government systems more broadly,
#
it is not about like, you know, pushing, but you're right,
#
I mean, it is, but that's kind of why we have a distinguished,
#
you know, a board of very distinguished civil servants,
#
like, you know, I mean, so, then a lot of this
#
then becomes a corporate governance issue as well,
#
like, I mean, and yeah, I mean,
#
that's almost a whole separate conversation,
#
maybe in a couple of years, but, you know, at this point,
#
I think the goal is not to say,
#
so, one of the things we're doing is,
#
the demand is already outstripping our capacity to deliver,
#
okay, because I think there's a word of mouth effect
#
that's happening, so, what we're focusing on
#
is really now building knowledge products,
#
like, I mean, that the states where we've worked with
#
can themselves champion to other peers,
#
and saying, okay, this is what was done,
#
if you're interested, here is a set of templates,
#
okay, that you may wish to consider, but that's, yeah,
#
that's a complex org building org strategy kind of discussion,
#
but I think the way we kind of feel comfortable
#
with all of this is that we're focusing exactly,
#
like Ruben said, like, I mean, on strengthening public systems.
#
Really, no, no, no, man, more power to you guys,
#
you know, both Artha and you guys are just doing incredible work,
#
and that's a delightful thing about the book,
#
that it is not just a book of ideas,
#
it is a book of ideas that emerge from this ongoing,
#
you know, interaction with the state,
#
so it's got an impact in the real world,
#
in things like Karma Yogi, for example,
#
which I didn't know about till you just told me,
#
and I'm like, you know, so impressed by that kind of impact.
#
And sorry, I don't want to take any credit, right?
#
No, no, no, we are not giving you any...
#
Karma Yogi well has been happening in parallel,
#
yeah, Karma Yogi almost certainly was happening in parallel,
#
right, like, you know, but what we are doing
#
is supporting certain work streams in there,
#
because, again, you see, nothing happens
#
without political leadership, without bureaucratic leadership,
#
but when those two pieces are aligned,
#
having a high-functioning organization
#
can accelerate kind of getting to where you want to get it, right?
#
So that's the way to think about it.
#
Noted your clarification in triplicate has been,
#
You wrote your book at least, right?
#
At least that will take credit.
#
That I'll take credit for.
#
That I take credit for.
#
So one of the revelations in that,
#
which, again, I give you credit for,
#
is that while I've heard the term before,
#
it never struck me till you gave a detailed exposition of it in this chapter,
#
that it is actually powerful, practical,
#
and can have huge impact,
#
and that is apprenticeship-based models
#
for skilling and hiring within government,
#
which, you know, when I first heard about the thought,
#
the instinctive thing is,
#
oh, it's like, it's a marginal thing that is happening somewhere,
#
matlab kya hoga hai, the scale is limited, blah, blah, blah.
#
But actually, it is pretty huge,
#
and you've elaborated at length in it,
#
so I'd ask you to take me and my gentle listeners
#
through, you know, through your entire exposition.
#
Thank you, and I think, you know, I discussed some of this in the education chapter,
#
but it's something, you know,
#
it's something I've been thinking about for a long time,
#
and again, it gets honed with every practical encounter with reality,
#
Like, you know, but see, the core idea is simple, okay?
#
And I consider this one of the most important ideas in the entire book, right?
#
I mean, because it is, I discuss it conceptually here,
#
and then there are variants of this that show up in the education chapter,
#
the health chapter, the police chapter, the courts chapter, okay?
#
And see, in all of this, what is our core problem?
#
you have existing pay structures that are too high,
#
and you don't have enough staff, okay?
#
You have a training system that is overly theoretical,
#
like, I mean, and not focused enough on practice,
#
and you've got this spatial mismatch, okay?
#
I mean, and interestingly,
#
these are all sectors that also have huge demand in the private sector, okay?
#
So, the core idea here is that
#
what the government or what kind of the structure of the program would be
#
is to create these practicum-based skilling programs, okay?
#
For these key functions, okay?
#
For education, for nurses,
#
for police constables, for sub-inspectors, okay?
#
And then eventually even for lawyers,
#
and I'll briefly talk about that, okay?
#
if you have, say, a four-year practicum-based,
#
you know, a two- to three-year diploma or three- to four-year degree, okay?
#
Let's take education, that's the easiest example,
#
because there's a lot of other research that feeds into that, okay?
#
So, the idea is very simple.
#
Today, what happens to become a government teacher, okay?
#
You kind of get a graduate degree somewhere,
#
and then you do a B.Ed., okay?
#
So, you've already got five years of post-12th standard education.
#
Then you enter this lottery of the government job lottery, okay?
#
Like, I mean, and then maybe you'll teach a little bit in the private school here or there, okay?
#
But what you've not shown in this period,
#
and then you're trying every government exam, okay?
#
And it has all of these problems we talked about.
#
Now, imagine a different model, okay?
#
Where you say that after 12th standard itself, okay?
#
That you will create, essentially, a four-year teacher training program
#
that has a combination of theory and practice, okay?
#
Where you spend about three to four months, like in a...
#
So, imagine each district, okay?
#
Has its own district kind of practicum-based training program, okay?
#
And over there, you admit, say, the top 100 or 200 candidates from every panchayat, okay?
#
Like, I mean, who apply for the program.
#
And the structure of the program is you come to the district headquarters for three months,
#
to the training, you get your first set of classroom training, okay?
#
And then, for the next eight months, you get deployed to a school,
#
and you're deployed to a school, ideally in your own home panchayat, okay?
#
So, the costs are minimized because you're living at home, okay?
#
And in that period, you're working as an apprentice.
#
You are being trained in the practice by reporting to the regular teacher.
#
But you've also got digital smartphone-enabled modules,
#
like, I mean, that are being sent to you from your training program.
#
You've got networks of peers, like, I mean, with whom you discuss some kind of form,
#
essentially a community of practice, okay?
#
Like, I mean, because you're teaching, right?
#
And so, the beauty of this program is it's good for candidates,
#
it's good for the existing teachers, it's good for the system, and it's good long-term, right?
#
So, for the candidates, this is attractive because the training itself is free, okay?
#
So, you're not paying kind of money for unscrupulous fly-by-night kind of degree meals, okay?
#
It's a credential, it's a program that's free to you.
#
And you actually get a modest stipend.
#
I mean, obviously, it's a very modest stipend, like, you know,
#
because it's part of your training and the training itself is free, okay?
#
So, but just to give you a sense, even a stipend of, say, 3000 rupees a month, okay?
#
I'm just making that number up, okay?
#
Compared to what would be so attractive to these candidates, right?
#
And I'll give you some benchmarks of that based on our data in Tamil Nadu, okay?
#
Where this Illam Thirikalvi volunteer, like, you know, was for an hour and a half a day,
#
was paid a stipend of 1000 rupees per month and got four applicants for every opening, okay?
#
Like, I mean, so that tells you, again, how much latent demand there is, right?
#
Like, I mean, for people to have work in rural areas, particularly for women, okay?
#
And I'll come back to the gender piece of this in a moment, okay?
#
But the idea is that, you know, you are actually providing services for those eight months.
#
Then you go back for your next round of theoretical training, okay?
#
So, and then at the end of three years or four years, you get a full-fledged degree, right?
#
Because you've gotten the theory, you've gotten the practice, right?
#
But now you've got so many other advantages.
#
You have improved the quality of training, right?
#
Because all of these service delivery functions are fundamentally about practice.
#
That's where you learn.
#
That's kind of where, how do I handle a classroom of 25 kids, okay?
#
Like, I mean, when I go there, you sit there, and on day one, you're not the person in charge.
#
On day one, you are the assistant.
#
You're seeing how this is happening.
#
You learn, you learn, you learn, okay?
#
So, over the three or four years, you're substantially improving the quality of the skilling, okay?
#
That's advantage number one.
#
Second, what you're doing is that you're augmenting state capacity and staffing in a fiscally feasible way, okay?
#
So today, if you look at education, see, our policy documents for the past 10 years have been saying
#
we need to do foundational literacy numeracy, okay?
#
But the problem is, like I mean, that has still taken the form of content and training,
#
but there is no staffing, okay?
#
There is no additional staff to make this happen because nobody can afford to hire the staff
#
and because their staff are too expensive, okay?
#
But what you know from all this teaching at the right level kind of work is that you ideally want the kids in small groups
#
in kind of, you know, where they can get individualized attention.
#
When I think about my own son's preschool experience in the U.S. when he was four or five,
#
the class would have 25 kids.
#
There was one teacher in charge, but there were four teaching assistants, four, okay?
#
So, you know, you would have groups of six, like I mean, where they would work in small groups,
#
and the class size really matters when the kids are young.
#
They don't matter as much when you're older, okay?
#
So, what you're doing is you're augmenting the staff capacity, like I mean, in a fiscally feasible way
#
that allows you to dramatically improve kind of the service delivery itself, okay?
#
You're solving the spatial mismatch because these candidates are from their own village, okay?
#
And therefore, connected to the community.
#
And it can be a huge step in terms of female labor force participation, okay?
#
Because the way everybody sits and kind of, you know, scratches their head about what to do.
#
I think the right way to think about female labor force participation is not zero to one, okay?
#
It is a continuum, okay, like I mean, and the first victory comes from creating meaningful jobs outside the house, okay?
#
That lets you get outside the house, is part one.
#
That lets you get paid something for it, is part two.
#
And then this thing about climbing up the ladder of job quality, right?
#
Like I mean, it will come, okay?
#
But if you, you can't go from zero to one, okay, like I mean, so those intermediate steps can be massive
#
in terms of kind of improving female labor force participation and empowerment, right?
#
So what we heard in the qualitative work in Tamil Nadu Illam Thedikalvi is
#
why are these young women, like I mean, so excited about this at a stipend of 1000 rupees a month?
#
It is because it lets them leave the house.
#
It lets them leave the house with a legitimate purpose, okay, for an hour and a half, okay?
#
On a completely different note, this is recent study I saw in UP that was just mind-boggling
#
that it said that the average young woman, married young woman in UP, in rural UP has zero friends, zero, okay?
#
And that's because you've come from a different village and here you are essentially stuck in your in-laws place,
#
like I mean, so where do you even form some sense of connection to the community, okay?
#
So just getting out of that house is such a big deal, okay?
#
And so you get that and you create the kind of the dignity and the empowerment, right?
#
Like I mean, that comes from providing a service in the village, okay?
#
And then the long-term benefit of this is this is then the other key reform,
#
which is public sector recruitment, okay, should then start saying that you will still have exams, okay?
#
You will still have a meritocratic kind of standard system,
#
but you will start providing some extra points for every year of practical experience, right?
#
Like I mean, and so then what happens is that if I've got two candidates,
#
like you know, who have both scored 80% on this exam,
#
but one candidate has four years of practical experience,
#
then you get an extra two and a half or five marks per year.
#
And so then that candidate all else being equal looks better.
#
So now what this does in the long term,
#
it is also substantially going to improve the quality of public sector hiring
#
because now instead of somebody taking every possible government exam
#
and here you need to show that there is some intrinsic interest in this career,
#
okay, like I mean, so by which you put skin in the game by doing this practical training, okay?
#
And then the related question will be but wait,
#
how can I do this when I can't absorb everybody into the government?
#
Okay, like obviously even with this system,
#
you're not going to be able to absorb every training,
#
but that's where the key thing about these sectors
#
is that the private sector demand is like three times in the,
#
so private sector employees three times as many teachers,
#
private sector has three times as many health workers,
#
private sector has four times as many security officers, okay?
#
So in each of these cases what happens is like I mean,
#
ideally then the government should also be partnering with the private sector employers to say,
#
okay, what are the skills that you value that you're paying for,
#
help us co-create some of the content like I mean of the training modules.
#
So what you're doing is like I mean, you're focusing on skilling, okay?
#
This is fundamentally a skilling intervention for the sector, okay?
#
But it's a skilling intervention that has these massive downstream benefits
#
and then it is also central for our long-term job strategy, right?
#
I mean the truth is in a world of automation, AI, computing, whatever,
#
like I mean the jobs that are not going to go away
#
are the jobs that require human interface and human interaction, right?
#
And so by improving the training like I mean of people
#
in these professional service delivery functions early on
#
by making them lifetime learners through this kind of combination of digital content
#
and peer groups, et cetera, you're also improving the long-term human capital
#
in the sectors that are least likely to be automated away, okay?
#
So you see why this little simple idea like is something that I consider to be
#
one of the most important ideas in the book because of how practical it is
#
and how wide-ranging like I mean the applications are.
#
I couldn't agree more, it's practical, it seems relatively easy to implement
#
and for me what really excites me about the idea are the downstream effects
#
that you spoke about like one theme I keep going back to on the show
#
is something I learned from Chinmay Tumbe's book on migration
#
that you know the largest internal migration happens in India when women get married
#
and that's exactly the phenomenon that you're speaking about
#
that when a marriage happens, a man essentially has the same number of friends
#
as he did before, hopefully one more if he counts his spouse
#
but a woman has no friends, you know, because you've been uprooted
#
into an entirely new way of life, into an entirely new way of living
#
and that's a great social tragedy befalling half the people in the country
#
and you can like leave out the most extremely elite women
#
but otherwise it is widespread throughout the country
#
and that's a massive social problem and what do you do with that?
#
And one way of kind of alleviating that could be, you know, little things like this
#
which get them outside the house, which get them some income
#
which help them form a new kind of social circle and that's mind-blowing to me
#
and the other really good downstream effect is, you know, the moment you make it
#
you know, one of the criteria for getting an actual public sector job
#
you know, if you're getting 2.5% per year, you know, or whatever it is
#
it amounts to a big deal and what then happens is that you would automatically be selecting
#
for the people who are more intrinsically motivated and who have more enterprise
#
because they actually went out there and they did this thing rather than, you know, sit in a hostel and prepare
#
and for people who have practical experience and all of these are mind-blowing
#
so it is worth doing just for its own sake
#
but these downstream effects just, you know, excite me so much about the whole thing
#
Thank you, you know, and I think, you know, I elaborate on these in kind of later chapters
#
because obviously there's sectoral specific things, right?
#
minor things like should the practicum be in your village or not in your village
#
so for police, for example, it might be better to have it outside, you know
#
so there are all of these other variants which I expand
#
but, you know, one thing which I had not made the connection initially
#
and then it also shows up in the courts chapter, right?
#
like, I mean, as kind of a way of kind of improving and augmenting capacity in our district courts, right?
#
I mean, which is, again, we know these are horrendously understaffed
#
and I was discussing that paper earlier, right?
#
I mean, where adding an extra district court judge, right?
#
like, I mean, has all of these downstream benefits
#
the problem today is sometimes it's not even easy to find good qualified judges, okay?
#
so the idea then is to say, why not simply kind of augment the capacity of every existing judge
#
by giving them a legal clerk, okay?
#
and the legal clerk is, you know, you finished your law school
#
and then there's a two-year clerkship program that the government runs
#
and then when you make it to that, you get assigned to kind of assist the judge, right?
#
and so a lot of this is kind of the research, the writing the drafts, writing all of that
#
so it expands kind of the capacity of the judiciary
#
and also improves the quality of law school training, right?
#
because see, all of this is also about, see, what we forget is
#
the government by virtue of being the biggest employer
#
has enormous power in shaping the training ecosystem, right?
#
because the most lucrative job in the game is the government job, right?
#
I mean, so when we rethink this, we are changing the entire skilling, this thing on the...
#
see, everybody thinks about skilling on the supply side
#
but it's the demand, it's the demand that drives everything, right?
#
so I think Lance Pritchett once famously told me, he said
#
demand and supply matter for outcomes as much as gin and tonic matter for getting you drunk, okay?
#
so now, like I mean, if what you have is a system which says
#
that because I think it was the Madras High Court, right?
#
or somebody that basically it was...
#
and I think Abhishek Singh, we had a piece on this in the Hindustan Times which I cite
#
that literally, I think said that some 80% of law school graduates are essentially unemployable like as lawyers, okay?
#
like so, the problem of a long left tail in our higher education quality exists in every sector, okay?
#
so again, rather than regulate them out of existence which then creates its own rent seeking
#
a different way to do this is to say, listen
#
I'm going to have an exam whereby the best candidates from wherever you are are going to be selected
#
like I mean for this clerkship program
#
and in doing that, like I mean, you also send a market signal
#
like you mean that forces that kind of...
#
so it's a very deep idea that runs through a lot of the sectoral chapters
#
because if you'll notice, these are core service delivery functions
#
but they're also very human resource intensive, okay?
#
so if you think about kind of even the current government's overall approach
#
I think at some level, like I said
#
I think the Prime Minister and the political leadership get this, okay?
#
they get this which is why they have invested so much in kind of Aadhaar and DPI
#
in terms of, you know, just cutting corruption, cutting middleman
#
so my high level judgment is that this approach has worked in terms of disintermediating layers of corruption
#
when it comes to financial transfers
#
but it won't work when it comes to human intermediate services, okay?
#
so whether it's education, whether it's health, whether it's police, whether it's courts
#
that requires a completely different way of thinking about it
#
and the old metric of just danda maro, danda maro doesn't work
#
because these are all professions that require kind of people to exercise judgment, right?
#
that can mean, it's not, you can't be an automaton
#
an effective police, a big police officer, an effective frontline health worker
#
an effective judge, an effective teacher
#
these are all professions with judgment, okay?
#
so the way you improve this in the long term is by improving the quality of the pipeline on the supply side
#
and by shaping the demand
#
by kind of saying the people who are going to get in in the long term
#
are going to be the people who are both better credentialed with practical experience
#
and, like I mean, have shown the intrinsic motivation
#
and have actually become, you know, just lifelong learners through the nature of this training, right?
#
so anyway, so that's kind of why I see this as so fundamental to some of the broader state capacity issues
#
another great point that I liked and which kind of tackles the problem of the lifetime employment
#
is your suggestion to augment state capacity by hiring staff on fixed term renewable contracts
#
and this is something like what the army tried to great outrage with the whole Agnipath scheme
#
you know, which was tackling a huge problem of theirs
#
I mean, lifetime contracts are a big problem there
#
and they said, we'll get you in for four years and we'll train you
#
and then you can reapply and we'll take the best of the lot
#
and even the others will, you know, be useful to the private sector
#
and in various ways they've learned stuff and they can use all of that
#
and there was massive outrage and it became just a huge political issue
#
but leaving that aside, you know, elaborate a bit, you know, on how this would play out
#
having fixed term renewable contracts for people that you're actually hiring within the public sector
#
how does it function, how does it change the incentives, you know, has it been tried, etc, etc
#
yeah, so let me first say, actually make a quick comment on Agnivir, right?
#
I mean, so I think the, so I'm broadly, I think in favor of that
#
there is one little change I would make, you see
#
like I think the Agnivir model of four years, it works well for support staff within the army
#
but I wouldn't recommend it necessarily for the fighting soldier, okay?
#
and there are three reasons for that, right?
#
because first, the fixed cost of weapons training is so high
#
that you don't necessarily recover it in four years, okay?
#
and there's another subtle point which is
#
there are no civilian jobs, okay?
#
that require that kind of battle-ready fighting machines, okay?
#
so it's almost better if that level of arms training and the ability to apply lethal force
#
goes with kind of a more implicit longer-term contract, okay?
#
but where I think the Agnivir model makes enormous sense, right?
#
is doing this for all the support staff, right?
#
like I mean, so, you know, the cooks, the drivers, the support staff
#
because those are all, and again, we know that every fighting soldier is actually supported by some aid support staff, okay?
#
so the model is, I think, still has a lot of legs
#
but the support staff then have jobs in the private sector
#
and those private sector employers will enormously value the discipline and training that comes
#
from having picked up those functions within the army, okay?
#
so that's, I think, the only modification I would make
#
but it's an important one, you know, it's an important one
#
but I think now coming back to the next idea, see?
#
this idea of practicum-based training, it works for frontline service delivery
#
but it doesn't work for the more managerial analytical tasks within the government, okay?
#
so, like I said, you know, this is not a model that helps you hire staff
#
who can write draft better memos, who can analyze data, who can run spreadsheets
#
who can do like serious kind of analytical work, okay?
#
now, what ends up happening is that a lot of those jobs is where kind of the consulting firms have taken over, right?
#
like I mean, because the consulting firms, they have some advantages, right?
#
they give you flexibility and they give you accountability and they give you kind of current skills, okay?
#
now, so, this is not to say the consultants don't have their value, okay?
#
the limitation is threefold
#
the limitation is first, the consultant doesn't have the legitimacy to act on behalf of the state, okay?
#
so you are only doing what is in the RFP, okay?
#
because the RFP itself is kind of is drafted normally in a way that doesn't give you scope to think about the problem, okay?
#
the RFP, this is the request for proposals, right?
#
so the RFP reflects a certain problem statement and looking for solutions, somebody to help execute that, okay?
#
so consultant can only do what is in the TOR, right?
#
second is there is kind of huge lack of institutional memory and continuity
#
because people come, people go, like it means it's not there
#
and the third is that the consultants have no incentive for state capacity
#
because their incentive is state dependency, right?
#
because they want to keep continuing the contract, okay?
#
so, and so that way the consultants are both a symptom, a cause and a consequence, okay?
#
the kidney of the atrophy in state capacity
#
so again, you can't blame anybody, right?
#
this is not blaming them
#
they are actually adding value given the status quo
#
but it's always one of these things of the urgent, the immediate kind of comes at the cost of longer-term investment, okay?
#
so, so my proposal is very simple, okay?
#
that people have talked about lateral entry of various kinds, right?
#
like I mean, and it always runs into this problem of
#
okay, will you get favoritism?
#
you know, how do you get maintain the rigor?
#
because see, the one thing that the exam-based system has
#
is it has its kind of perception of complete fairness, okay?
#
it may not, it may be completely ineffective, okay?
#
but it has a perception of complete fairness, okay?
#
now, in particular, UPSC
#
you know, and I remember talking to somebody senior
#
he said like, you know, wherever they might get calls for favors, this thing, whatever
#
that the UPSC has never faced one of those
#
that the UPSC is still clean, okay?
#
so, recruitment in the UPSC is the gold standard of running a high-integrity recruitment process, okay?
#
so, my idea is now very, very, very simple, okay?
#
which is, we are running this high-quality recruitment process
#
but we use it so inefficiently, so inefficiently, right?
#
because you hire the top 0.2%, okay?
#
we'll make it into kind of the grade A services
#
maybe top 0.02% make it to the IAS and others make it to other services
#
so, my idea is very simple, which is that
#
all you need to do is create kind of an empaneled list, okay?
#
like, you mean of saying, let's go down to the top 1%, okay?
#
or the top 2% of the people in the UPSC list, okay?
#
so, these are not like you're selecting some slouches, okay?
#
like, these are still the top 1%, okay? of the distribution
#
it's just that right now you're selecting only top 0.2, okay?
#
so, if you increase that by 5x, okay?
#
what you do is you still have a pool of incredibly kind of qualified
#
and motivated by public service people, right?
#
and then what you do is you don't necessarily change kind of the current hires
#
because you do need full-time hires, okay?
#
it's not like, because you need full-time people who kind of function with a mindset
#
that they are not kind of revolving door people, okay?
#
like, I mean that they are long-term thinking about the state, okay?
#
that's fine, but you can take the next 4x or the next 9x
#
if you go to 2%, like I mean you get 10 times that number
#
and then you say, you have shown, you are meritorious
#
you have been chosen by this absolutely objective process, okay?
#
and you are now on a list of UPSC and paneled kind of candidates
#
who can be appointed on 3-5 year contracts
#
by any government, department or office anywhere in the country, okay?
#
and then what you do is you say you're going to have maybe a 3-month foundation course
#
like, I mean, so, you know, people who go to UPSC, like who get selected
#
have a foundation course and then they branch off into different services, okay?
#
because, so, IAS will have its own, IPS will have its own forest service, economic service
#
they all have their own, but they have a foundation course, okay?
#
so, we'll kind of make sure that these MPaneled candidates also get a foundation course
#
maybe digitally, obviously, you've got to handle the numbers, okay?
#
but once you have that foundation course, then you are in this MPaneled list, okay?
#
and then, when a government needs to augment its staffing
#
it doesn't have to go looking for a consulting firm to find 3 bodies or 4 bodies
#
you've got a UPSC process that has been vetted, that has got, you know, training
#
and then what you can do is, see, in every government
#
see, part of our problem is that when we've got massive understaffing at the frontline level, right?
#
so, at the district collector level, I mean, a district collector handles over 50 departments
#
over 50 departments, okay?
#
so, augmenting that district collector's office with two such young professionals
#
who are able to just kind of analyze data, make presentations, go on review meetings
#
and they have the authority of the government, they are government employees
#
it's just that, like, I mean, like, the military used to do the short service commission
#
you were officers, you were full government employees at that time with the authority of the state
#
it's just that your own contract is a 5-year contract that is kind of well-defined in terms of what you're doing, okay?
#
so then, what you get is, you are augmenting state capacity
#
you are using kind of, you know, this, the marginal cost is almost zero
#
because you've got the UPSC system already, okay?
#
so, you're augmenting capacity, you're doing this in a way that incentivizes skill building
#
because the job is not guaranteed
#
so, now, in 5 years, it could be renewed, okay?
#
like, I mean, and if you're truly outstanding, maybe there is a track to become permanent
#
we can work that out, okay?
#
but the core idea is there are frontline jobs and then, there are staff jobs, okay?
#
so, in government departments, you need people who can actually, you know, draft contracts, read memos
#
think about RFPs, like, you know, do data analysis
#
so, these are almost as good as IS officers, remember, right?
#
like, I mean, the talent you're pulling is of that same level
#
but you're saying that instead of, I mean, think about it, right now
#
if we select top 0.2% and if the average candidate goes through 2 years of prep, okay?
#
2 years is very conservative
#
the cost of every civil servant we hire is 1000 years of time, okay?
#
of opportunity cost of people who are taking these lotteries and not making it, okay?
#
so, what you're doing is, you're kind of saying, let's kind of reduce this waste, right?
#
and use that pool of talent to then become kind of a long-term base for augmenting capacity
#
with these kind of flexible but also incentive compatible ways, right?
#
where people pick up skills
#
now, some of these people may choose to go to the private sector after 5 years
#
they'll say, I want a different experience
#
and that's completely fine
#
but that becomes almost a better way of doing lateral entry, right?
#
because you've been in the system, you've experienced kind of the government from the inside
#
and then you go and then you come back
#
so, I think, again, this has the kernel of something that is incredibly low cost
#
but can be a huge force multiplier
#
so, again, I've had multiple, like I said, what I did with the book was the first 8 to 10 drafts
#
I wrote and iterated myself
#
and then I had it read by people in different walks of life
#
and multiple IAS officers who have kind of about 15 years experience
#
who remember their life as a collector
#
have said that, listen, this would be such a game changer for me to have 2 other good people
#
like a lean in supporting administration
#
and so, this happens right now in an ad hoc way
#
it happens in an ad hoc way
#
so, Swachh Bharat will get kind of, you know, its own kind of volunteers that are coming and funded by Tata Trust
#
so, every major program tries to get its own fellowship programs
#
partly because of this problem
#
that you don't have the resources, okay?
#
so, instead of all of these ad hoc things
#
the government itself, like, and you can still get support from non-profits
#
in terms of training and capacity building, right?
#
but the staff should be government staff
#
because otherwise it is not state capacity
#
otherwise it is band-aids and jugards for individual projects
#
without institutionalizing that within the government itself
#
no, I absolutely love the idea
#
and my sense of, you know, given the UPSC exam
#
and given how arbitrary it is and how many people actually apply
#
and how many get through
#
my intuition is that the top 2% would be as good as the top 0.2%
#
you know, they'd be pretty much the same quality
#
it's just luck whether you're, you know, part of the 2% and not in the 0.2%
#
so, it would be exactly as good
#
and then there can be various ways to structure this
#
you mentioned that the IAS officers who kind of read your draft
#
with about 15 years experience, broadly, you know, said it would be a great aid
#
I can also see the IAS community reacting against it
#
because, you know, they could consider this a threat to their power
#
and, you know, then they also have to perform
#
if these other people on fixed contracts are performing
#
it kind of, you know, in every other field
#
you see that there will be guilds of established practitioners
#
who are trying to, you know, keep outsiders out, as it were
#
to reduce competition, that's kind of how it works
#
so, is that something that would be a problem
#
or is it that the kind of people who make a decision on these things
#
are so senior, they're not under threat
#
and they can see the benefit of it clearly?
#
see, and I think this is something that I talk about a little bit more in Chapter 18
#
like, you know, when I talk about building broad
#
you know, the whole point is the core of the book, right?
#
Chapter 4 to 16 is a bunch of kind of
#
technique, ideas fleshed out in detail
#
based on research and practical considerations, right?
#
But, you know, there is still this point about
#
who are the stakeholders and how do you build a broad coalition around it, right?
#
I mean, and so part of the reason, Chapter 18
#
and it then talks about how each of these ideas
#
should be widely popular, okay?
#
And so one of the things I've consciously tried to do
#
is recognize that the political economy of reform
#
requires reforms to be Pareto-improving, okay?
#
So, if you make people worse off, okay?
#
then you're going to have kind of an obvious complaint, okay?
#
So, one way this solves all of that
#
is that all of this applies to future hiring
#
it doesn't change, like I mean
#
I'm not doing lateral entry at a Joint Secretary level, right?
#
the guy who's been there at 20 years comes and says
#
Arre ye baar se kaun se aagaya, right?
#
if you're doing this at the entry level
#
so imagine today's UPSC aspirant, okay?
#
So behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, right?
#
Like, I mean, where you say
#
I don't know where in this lottery I'm going to rank, okay?
#
Would I prefer a system like, I mean, that had this
#
and then I think the other way to kind of harmonize these tracks is that
#
you know, you could imagine after 3 years or 5 years, right?
#
Like, I mean, there is a way for the very best of those folks
#
to become confirmed IAS, okay?
#
So, and that is going to be a much more
#
see, think about this, okay?
#
Today, somebody takes the UPSC 5 times, okay?
#
Because they want this guaranteed shot at the IAS
#
so each time, they want that shot at that thing, right?
#
But, and I think Mahima Vashisht, right?
#
In your episode long time, very long time ago, right?
#
Because I think she was in the information service
#
and she was saying, how?
#
Matlab, that rank that you get in
#
Matlab, it stays with you for your whole life
#
and the number of people who go with that regret
#
and therefore keep trying this exam again and again, okay?
#
Now, but suppose you had this pathway where you say,
#
listen, you have two options.
#
One is you take this exam lottery again
#
and have whatever, say, 1% or 2%
#
or maybe you're very good, maybe it's a 10% chance, okay?
#
Or we give you the second track, okay?
#
Like, I mean, where you come and do this
#
but that gives you a higher chance
#
like, I mean, of after 5 years, the top 20%
#
and if you don't make it, then you picked up skills
#
and doing the job that you're going to have outstanding options
#
in the private sector anyway.
#
So, you're getting the skilling
#
that comes from kind of being in the government machinery,
#
the dignity, the respect and all of that
#
So, I think if this was a proposal
#
that was to be offered to a new cohort of UPSC candidates,
#
my conjecture is they would all take it, okay?
#
Because you're not saying I'm not having the IAS,
#
you still have the IAS.
#
So, the current, whoever makes it in the top 0.2%
#
is not worse off, right?
#
They are augmented with capacity
#
like, I mean, only the very best ones,
#
like, I mean, will make it
#
and given the needs of governance, right?
#
Like, I mean, I think everybody would say that we,
#
that we actually need the capacity.
#
So, my sense is thinking aloud
#
and taking this to a logical conclusion is that,
#
let's say you have, for every one person in the IAS,
#
you have nine people basically who are, you know,
#
who have these five-year contracts
#
and my sense is because these nine...
#
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,
#
The nine of them don't have contracts.
#
The nine of them are empaneled.
#
So, the number who get hired will be a lot less, sorry,
#
and I forgot one other important nuance there, right?
#
So, what that means is suppose I am the forestry department
#
or I'm the GST department is even better, okay?
#
I'm the tax department, okay?
#
So, as a tax department today,
#
like, I mean, my generic exam doesn't privilege somebody
#
with law or chartered accountancy
#
like, I mean, or any subject-specific knowledge.
#
It is what have you done on this particular exam, okay?
#
Now, imagine that I have this empaneled list of 9X,
#
but now every department,
#
see, that is just allows you to be selected.
#
It doesn't guarantee your position at all, okay?
#
It just makes it easy for a department.
#
So, why am I doing 10X?
#
Because it doesn't mean there are 10X
#
as many positions, okay?
#
The positions might be only 2X or 3X, okay?
#
But it's giving departments a pool of people
#
who are vetted through the UPSC process
#
so rather than have a CV that says
#
for 10 years I was a UPSC aspirant,
#
I would much rather have large number of youth in the country
#
who have a CV that says, like,
#
a means selected for completed UPSC foundation course
#
and empaneled for, like,
#
mean short-term government appointments, okay?
#
Then, from a department perspective,
#
so this is how you balance kind of autonomy and accountability,
#
because you want the departments to have a little bit of freedom
#
to say how do I find somebody
#
who is intrinsically motivated in my sector
#
as opposed to just taking a generic exam
#
and I might have certain additional points for saying,
#
if I'm hiring in the tax department,
#
like, you know, do additional points for CA,
#
additional points, like, you know, I mean, for law
#
and, like, I mean, you know,
#
so that's the way I'm thinking about it.
#
So, it's not like all nine of them get the job,
#
and then the job is still conditional
#
on meeting the requirements of a specific post.
#
This detail actually buttresses a point I was going down on,
#
which is that all of these empaneled people
#
who actually get one of those fixed-term contracts
#
and often way more suited to the particular job as well
#
than the regular IAS officers themselves.
#
So, my prediction is that what you will find after five years
#
but perhaps 100% of all those who got short-term contracts
#
have done better than 100% of the people
#
That is exactly what I would expect,
#
in which case the question could be asked
#
that why have the IAS at all?
#
Everyone should be on a fixed-term contract
#
so the incentives are good.
#
And, you know, this will, of course, create great
#
sort of political outrage just as during Agnipath,
#
but I suspect ten years later, Karthik,
#
this is what you will be recommending
#
if your current recommendations are taken up and successful,
#
because this is such a far better structure
#
that you have to perform otherwise you're out.
#
Correct. So, I think this is where, you know,
#
I think my approach to reform is both conservative
#
and progressive, right?
#
I mean, in the sense that it is progressive
#
in the sense of saying this is how we improve.
#
It is conservative in the sense that you don't kind of
#
dismantle existing structures, right?
#
I mean, but you do it incrementally, okay?
#
What I often say about politicians like Gokhale and Ranade
#
is they were liberal in their ends
#
and conservative in their means,
#
which to me is like the perfect balance, right?
#
But that, by the way, my dear buddy for whom I wrote this book,
#
that is the core of what I say in chapter 10, right?
#
Like, if you read that paragraph out, which we will do, right?
#
Like, you know, that it is deeply centrist, right?
#
Like, you know, but by being kind of progressive in goals
#
and kind of more conservative in means.
#
I wouldn't use the term centrist.
#
Centrist is a pejorative these days.
#
It has, you know, like a fence balance of PR.
#
Split the difference of type. You're right, you're right.
#
No, but anyway, but coming back to this, you know,
#
I think, see, in fact, recently a young IAS officer told me,
#
he said, I think the IAS is dead, okay?
#
I think the IAS is obsolete, like, you know,
#
I mean, because most of, you know, most of us,
#
once we get in, kind of essentially get caught up
#
with kind of the Lord of that office.
#
And so, yeah, I think one way to do this is to say that,
#
imagine the slight following change, okay?
#
Like, I mean, there is an IAS, right?
#
Like, I mean, and then there is kind of this empaneled body.
#
And then over five years or 10 years,
#
when it comes to your next promotion or nexus thing,
#
like, I mean, you're complete, you know,
#
so there are ways to do this, okay?
#
But again, I am not the, I'm, because this is why
#
it will then have to go through what the administrative rules are
#
and that's why you will need a KP Krishnan,
#
like, I mean, to take something like this and run with it
#
because he will have the economics, he'll instantly get it,
#
but he will have the law training
#
and he will know the administrative procedure
#
to say what it takes to kind of take these ideas to happen.
#
So, which is why I think, you know, my hope is that the book,
#
and again, see, coming back to IAS officers who've read,
#
multiple people have said, you know,
#
everything you say is true, we know this, we feel it,
#
but what you've done is put it with so much framework
#
and clarity and evidence.
#
And so, my hope here for the IAS community is that
#
almost all of you know these issues, okay?
#
But what the book is doing,
#
it is making private knowledge into common knowledge.
#
And when it becomes common knowledge, game theory teaches you
#
that it becomes much easier to then kind of act around it.
#
So that is the hope, right?
#
I mean, again, in the end,
#
the champions are all within the government.
#
They are the ones who have the agency.
#
As an outsider, I don't have the agency beyond kind of saying,
#
like, you know, you may wish to consider, okay?
#
But for the people inside,
#
it can mean this gives them material to work with.
#
No, I love that framework of private knowledge
#
into common knowledge, which is supremely important,
#
because I think in the earlier part of the episode,
#
you quoted, or did you quote this in a private conversation?
#
But you quoted the politician who said,
#
I know what is the right thing to do,
#
but I don't know how to get elected after doing it.
#
And what the process of turning private knowledge
#
into common knowledge does is that you can do the right thing
#
and get elected because everybody knows why you did it
#
and it makes perfect sense.
#
In that way, the book is such a great public service,
#
but I don't want to fill your head with too much praise.
#
So let's kind of get back to the content of the book.
#
Your next point is improve time use and task allocation of staff.
#
You talk about technology and data collection.
#
So, you know, tell me a bit more about this, you know,
#
bring this jargon more vivid for me.
#
Humanize it, Karthik, humanize it.
#
Humanize it? No, again.
#
So the simple way to humanize this is to say that, you know,
#
it goes back to the point about it's too portion,
#
food is too small and portions are terrible, right?
#
It can mean, so as it is, you're understaffed,
#
and then you make, you use the time of those staff so poorly, right?
#
It can mean partly because a lot of their time gets spent
#
doing completely pointless paperwork, right?
#
So if you do, so the simple idea is,
#
and now we've seen this in multiple departments, right?
#
So in ICDS, like I said, the average Anganwadi worker
#
spends 25 to 30 percent of her time filling different forms, right?
#
And then we saw a striking example of this in agriculture, right?
#
Where we were doing some work on agriculture yield estimation.
#
And then, you know, when we did our,
#
so that's why there's a chapter four on data that sits between three and five,
#
you know, and that's partly because the quality of data
#
underpins our ability to improve every downstream aspect of government, okay?
#
But one of the things we were doing there is part of this work on data quality.
#
We're just going and looking at the accuracy of reported data on crop,
#
you know, area cultivated and yields, right?
#
And the shocking thing is you find that, like, in over 25 percent of the cases,
#
even the crop recorded is wrong, okay?
#
Like, so the data is saying,
#
here green gram or red gram has grown,
#
when in practice it might be rice, okay?
#
So how on earth do you get that level of discrepancy?
#
Now, and it turns out that this is not just a question of blaming the frontline worker, okay?
#
Because if you look at kind of the number of staff they are,
#
and they are expected to do a census, okay?
#
It is physically not possible to go and visit every field,
#
and nobody's actually done that analysis.
#
So, of course, this person does some estimated guesswork.
#
So the averages will line up.
#
They'll take last year's estimates, they'll add this thing,
#
and just kind of fill out a bunch of forms.
#
And, but the data is kind of, if you go down to the ground,
#
it is the wrong crop, okay?
#
So, but that tells you kind of how one of the chief secretaries in,
#
who I quote in Chapter 4, right,
#
said that our entire systems are built on the house of cards, okay?
#
And that's because the data quality at the front end is so problematic.
#
But the point in this case is that there was a committee,
#
there was a Vaidyanathan Committee of Agricultural Statistics,
#
like, I mean, that actually recommended that taking a 10 percent sample or 20 percent sample
#
and kind of doing stratified representative sample
#
and doing better data collection will give you better data quality, okay?
#
So that's just like a simple example of kind of redesigning the task to be smarter.
#
Now, today with satellites and remote sensing,
#
you can kind of get way better data way faster.
#
Now, you still need some field people to do ground-truthing,
#
because otherwise the algorithms also have a way of becoming self-referential
#
with, you know, with just their own training data.
#
But the deeper point which cuts across all of these examples
#
is the fact that there's this lovely quote from Andy Grove,
#
which, you know, which I have over there, right,
#
which says that all bureaucracies value money, but not time, okay?
#
Because there is a paper trail on money, but not a paper trail on time, okay?
#
Like, so if, and so he has this great quote, which says,
#
if I need to spend $500 or $1000, I'll need like four levels of approvals.
#
But I can call a meeting of 20 people and waste $10,000 and nobody's holding me accountable, okay?
#
So, and I think that applies in spades to the government, okay?
#
Like, I mean, where essentially the audit trail and the amount of care
#
that goes for spending one rupee is so high.
#
But like, absolutely no attention, right?
#
Like, I mean, to the quality of time use, okay?
#
And to the extent that salary costs are 20 to 25% of our overall public expenditure,
#
like, I mean, improving, it's over 12 lakh crores, right?
#
I mean, so improving just the time use, and I am confident, okay,
#
that if you do this, 5-10% will come out, okay?
#
Like, I mean, and so even if you just improve this by 5%,
#
that's 60,000 crores of kind of savings every single year, okay?
#
So, what I recommend is just like the CAG, like Amin does,
#
and does elaborate audits every year of fund use,
#
even just once in 5 years or even once in 10 years, okay?
#
If one were to do a systematic time use audit, okay,
#
like Amin of every government official, and use that to kind of,
#
yeah, that will also catch the Trichinapoli cigars, right?
#
Like, Amin, if you do that.
#
But just do that to kind of re-optimize both tasks and staffing, right?
#
Like, Amin, that itself, because remember, what we're talking about here is,
#
none of these are kind of quick fix solutions, right?
#
What I'm talking about are systemic interventions that over time
#
will bend the curve of government effectiveness, correct?
#
So, going back to Chapter 10 and that shifting the Preston curve
#
that I'm talking about, it is kind of these incremental system level things,
#
but I'm focusing on not saying, oh, this department should do this.
#
I do that later for some of the core sectors,
#
but I'm focusing on processes, right?
#
Like, can mean that can systematically improve government functioning over time.
#
So, you know, at one level, it's almost an obvious point
#
that to fix a problem, you have to know what the problem is.
#
And therefore, good data is fundamental.
#
It's essential. At another level,
#
I think of how data has become politicized in the last few years.
#
And I wonder to what extent that is a problem here.
#
Now, high level data like GDP, et cetera, is politicized
#
for a reason because they have become like propaganda tools in the narrative wars
#
that you have, and that is fractious and that remains away.
#
But how much of this low level data,
#
which is kind of beneath the surface, like which crop is being grown,
#
how much in a particular district, et cetera, et cetera, is I imagine data
#
that would be outside the purview of that.
#
But the point is that if your institutions that collect data
#
and your data collecting practices within existing institutions
#
have been, you know, subverted, then the whole edifice could be a problem.
#
So give me a sense of what it is like.
#
Give me a sense of what it is like, you know, right now.
#
And also what you then talk about, you know, later in the chapter of
#
why it's so important and how we can actually start implementing
#
Yeah, so, you know, I get I won't get into because chapter four
#
does data in great detail, right, like I mean, and to keep scope manageable,
#
we'll, you know, we stick to personnel.
#
But I think there is a reason why, like I said, right.
#
Normally I would have kind of the personal chapter would have naturally flowed
#
after the bureaucracy chapter.
#
But when I talk about the systems, the data comes first.
#
OK, so let me just give you one positive example.
#
See, I think one of the reasons good data collection doesn't happen
#
in the government is, yes, there are political reasons,
#
but often it's just much more mundane administrative things, right,
#
because the skills of atrophied, the technical skills of atrophied.
#
Again, let's not forget that the reason kind of India's statistical infrastructure
#
was world class was not just that somehow we magically built this in the government,
#
but there were serious technical collaborations
#
with the Indian Statistical Institute, which is where kind of, you know,
#
was actually a professor and director, right, like I mean, so there was
#
there was constant interface between the technical side and the practical side,
#
which is what allowed those things to happen.
#
So I think Chapter 4 essentially outlines kind of a essentially
#
a re-architecting of our measurement infrastructure
#
that allows us at a cost of less than 0.1 percent of state GDP
#
to have an exponential impact, right, like I mean, on the effectiveness
#
of the remaining 99 percent. And I think the one reason
#
why I'm more optimistic about this data agenda than, you know,
#
the politics of the other ones. So, of course, this politics
#
everywhere is that, see, the problem with most of our statistics
#
is they are used in a retrospective way to kind of pass judgment
#
on how did you perform, okay.
#
There is the measurement infrastructure I'm talking about
#
is measurement for management as opposed to measurement for kind of
#
exposed accountability. And that is something that I think
#
like every officer instinctively understands that, like, you know,
#
having better data is going to help me drive the system better.
#
So again, you know, we found enormous champions of support,
#
like, I mean, for this kind of work, you know, where we're working.
#
But yeah, so anyway, you know, so coming back to personnel,
#
like, you know, the last point, which is what this is linked to,
#
is to have some elements of database performance management.
#
And that's why the data becomes foundational.
#
And you can't do this without investing.
#
So the chicken and egg with performance pay is one of the things
#
I get irritated sometimes now with even the academic literature
#
and performance pay is that there's a lot of work showing.
#
And again, I wrote one of the early papers and highly cited papers.
#
So I take partly some of the blame for this, right.
#
But it is the research shows that performance pay matters.
#
OK, but after 15 years of such papers, nothing has ever happened
#
in government because the foundation to implement that is measurement.
#
OK, so so the performance pay gets exciting to economists
#
because it's about incentives. How do people respond?
#
But measurement is considered mundane kind of things
#
But that is the foundation of the entire enterprise, OK,
#
which is kind of why, like, I mean, I put that measurement chapter first.
#
But I think the point is that to give a simple example
#
and again, this relates to something that was discussed
#
and now in the public domain.
#
So I feel more comfortable talking about, which is the Telangana
#
again, finance secretary was in Tamil Nadu, my Chennai book launched two days ago
#
and talked about how one of the things we've done there over the past two years.
#
This is kind of probably the first time in independent India is follow
#
kind of what's in chapter four and implement this KPI survey.
#
OK, and the KPI survey is because your administrative data is problematic
#
and because you don't cover private facilities.
#
OK, so as a policymaker, you care about
#
what's happening to every citizen.
#
OK, today we get malnutrition data once in five years,
#
which is just enough to have conferences, but not enough to hold anybody accountable.
#
OK, so the whole point is if you want to change the culture of government,
#
see the pillars of effectiveness are measurement, right?
#
What is being monitored?
#
What is driving personal incentives and what drives budgets?
#
OK, which in turn drives chapter four, five, six.
#
Those are the core chapters.
#
But the measurement is foundational.
#
So the so what we're doing is saying today in government,
#
when a principal secretary takes a review meeting
#
with the district collectors on something, it will be on scheme implementation.
#
OK, because that is what is visible.
#
How many schools were built?
#
How many houses were built?
#
How many toilets were built?
#
How many trees were planted?
#
How many? But how many children are able to learn are able to read?
#
OK, like is not something that is in that discussion
#
because that data is not there to drive that discussion.
#
OK, so what you measure is what you manage.
#
And so the goal of the KPI survey is to then have independent
#
annual district level measurement of every kind of key indicator
#
that we care about for accelerating development.
#
So we've got child malnutrition numbers.
#
You've got learning outcome numbers.
#
You've got a bunch of health numbers.
#
You've got some livelihood numbers.
#
And now you're getting this data every year for every district
#
in partly repeat cross-section, partly in panel.
#
So you're following the same kids over time.
#
And once you have that annual data,
#
it fundamentally changes the culture of government
#
because now the culture of the review meeting,
#
like Kabir is OK, what are our targets for next year is going to be
#
in terms of outcomes as opposed to scheme implementation?
#
And then you start getting the whole system oriented towards outcomes.
#
Then you can start improving your budget allocation.
#
OK, by saying and again, these are old ideas.
#
I've talked about ages ago to the Finance Commission,
#
14th Finance Commission, I'd made this recommendation, right?
#
That we should be allocating our budgets on principles of equality,
#
equity and effectiveness.
#
OK, today we don't even know like, I mean, the baby do equities.
#
We create certain schemes.
#
But ideally, if you just have a sliding scale of kind of deprivation
#
and you're able to put additional resources there,
#
so that allows you to kind of both target your budgets better
#
and do better performance management.
#
So then as part of the ACRs and the career trajectories of officers,
#
like I said, for the frontline staff,
#
it may be enough to just measure them on data integrity.
#
Are you reporting the data correctly
#
and on your competencies which are in your control?
#
But for a district level officer,
#
it makes sense to start putting some weight on improvement of these outcomes.
#
Like it could be a very small thing.
#
But then again, you start institutionalizing a system
#
from the data into the ACR
#
and then that is what changes the culture of the entire government.
#
OK, so the way I like to say this is, you know,
#
we're trying to move this 800 megaton aircraft carrier
#
that is the government.
#
OK, nobody knows how it works.
#
OK, but if you are sitting on the shore
#
and you want to move this aircraft carrier,
#
the best option you have is to move the lighthouse.
#
So if you move the lighthouse,
#
this beast will somehow, like, you know, meandering,
#
will turn and find a way to kind of move towards the lighthouse.
#
OK, so similarly, if you start collecting the data on the right things
#
and making that what the whole enterprise is then kind of,
#
you know, held accountable for
#
and start aligning the personal incentives towards that.
#
And again, these are one subtle point I make,
#
is that these incentives can be very minor.
#
OK, so sometimes minor incentives are better than major incentives
#
because if the incentives are too big,
#
the incentive to cheat becomes too big.
#
OK, so the problem today is that there is nothing in the system
#
that rewards you for good performance.
#
OK, so even putting a little bit in there, right,
#
I mean, that makes you recognize and reward effective performance
#
So yeah, so again, the point of this is it's a menu of ideas, right?
#
Each of them, like, can be done in different places,
#
different departments, you try this,
#
but it reflects kind of my considered judgment
#
based on both the research, the evidence,
#
and what I think is practical to say,
#
you know, here is a roadmap.
#
Magnificent, and I've got a new acronym out of this,
#
What is OIS? You have to guess, Karthik, come on.
#
You could get the Nobel Prize for this.
#
OIS is optimal incentive size
#
because you said that sometimes a big incentive is too big
#
and, you know, so there is an optimal size where it works
#
and then it stops working,
#
almost like an incentive bell curve, perhaps.
#
So OIS, so, you know, when you,
#
in your Nobel citation, please remember me.
#
And so these are sort of great points,
#
except I also, by the way, much as I like,
#
much of what you've done in this book,
#
this metaphor about the aircraft carrier and shifting
#
the lighthouse makes no sense to me.
#
So please find something else because...
#
No, but you know, the good news,
#
I did not put that in the book.
#
So maybe, I'm pretty sure I did not put it.
#
So this, I think, just came up right now.
#
So maybe it reflects, this is why it takes 20 drafts, okay?
#
Like, you know, even there is...
#
You put in metaphors, you take out things that...
#
If I was one of your readers,
#
I would totally have told you that,
#
Now, you know, you speak about the implementation...
#
You speak about the implementation at the end of the chapter
#
where you point out, you know, with much more optimism
#
than I would look at these sort of roadblocks,
#
but you look at them much more optimistically
#
and you think they can be overcome
#
when you talk about things like the fact that
#
to implement these, you need political commitment,
#
you need convergence and coordination across departments,
#
you need buy-in from government employees themselves,
#
So take me through this.
#
Like, what are the implementation challenges?
#
How can they be overcome?
#
And in your case, they are being overcome.
#
You know, you were speaking about the Telangana example
#
at the panchayats and all of that.
#
If you want to elaborate, please do so.
#
So give me a sense of this.
#
And I think that's exactly what I was going to do, right?
#
I think because sometimes the examples
#
are more powerful than the concepts
#
because the risk when you read all of this is it seems like,
#
okay, the theoretical academic,
#
practical ideas look like, okay.
#
And I think the, you know, what's been fascinating
#
about the plan was to first kind of write a book
#
and then to think about how I would help governments do this.
#
And the fact that we built sieges in parallel
#
like Kamheen has partly delayed the book
#
but it's also enriched it so much
#
because remember the draft chapters
#
were there four years ago, right?
#
Like Kamheen, this has been an iterative process.
#
So the ideas were available for us to share.
#
And I think the, and so the Telangana example
#
I think is very powerful because see,
#
it shows how the political calculation is changing.
#
Let me repeat, all the technical,
#
see the typical way economists write about the government
#
and this thing is saying, oh, this is what we should do
#
if only the politics would allow it, okay?
#
And that is kind of hand-wringing virtue signaling, okay?
#
Like, I mean, this is what you should do, politics.
#
So if you really want to make it happen,
#
then you have to think about how do you,
#
what part of this agenda is going to be good policy
#
and good politics, okay?
#
And like I said, there is an aspect of politics
#
which I have absolutely no appetite for
#
which is the pursuit and retention of power, okay?
#
But there is an aspect of politics
#
that is kind of the core of policy,
#
which is how do you take conflict, okay?
#
Like Kamheen and how do you come up with a win-win solution?
#
And that requires being willing
#
to listen to everybody's perspective,
#
engineering a better solution,
#
building the trust that you will do it
#
and then doing it, okay?
#
So that itself like Kamheen is a complex process.
#
Now, the good news here is that the political, you know,
#
in this case, the Telangana Chief Minister,
#
like Kamheen intuitively understood, okay?
#
The fact that even without reading my chapter,
#
I've never met him, I doubt he's read my chapter.
#
Like, you know, anything that's got to him
#
went through multiple levels of officials, right?
#
So I only interact usually at the official level.
#
But intuitively, I think he got the point, okay?
#
That what I'm saying in this chapter,
#
which is you don't have enough employees,
#
but the ones you have are not accountable enough, okay?
#
So he came up with this radical idea
#
where he said, listen, I care about rural development
#
and we are going to appoint like some 10 to 12,000
#
new panchayat secretaries whose job is to going to improve
#
all matters of last mile service delivery,
#
street lighting, street cleaning,
#
like, you know, water, garbage cleaning, right?
#
Like Kamheen, almost like a local city manager
#
in that panchayat area, okay?
#
But what he said is, I'm gonna appoint 10,000,
#
I say 10,000 to round up,
#
but it's roughly about nine to 11 in different phases.
#
And I'm gonna appoint them
#
and then we're going to measure your performance
#
And then we are only going to regularize you
#
on the basis of your performance, okay?
#
And then, this is then where the CGS team comes in, okay?
#
Because the political willingness is there,
#
then the bureaucratic leadership is willing to implement,
#
but they don't have the technical know-how
#
of how are you going to design
#
a performance measurement system, okay?
#
So that's where we came in, like Kamheen had said, listen,
#
let's kind of think about
#
what are the right metrics to collect,
#
how do you build an app to collect the data real time?
#
How do you build kind of a nested supervision model
#
so that the data is not fudged?
#
How do you build an outbound call center
#
to verify some of this, like, you know,
#
with directly talking to citizens?
#
So the point is that once the political instinct is there
#
that I want more people, but I want them to be accountable,
#
then that everything in this chapter, right?
#
Like Kamheen then becomes something that you can work on,
#
okay, and that's what we did.
#
And so two measures of success, I would say, okay?
#
One is that, you know, even though this was the BRS government
#
that was in opposition to the central government, right?
#
Every central government independent visit
#
to do Panchayat Raj awards, okay?
#
Consistently found Telangana, the top performing state.
#
So they have 5% of the population,
#
but won like 40% of the Panchayat Raj awards.
#
I think in nine categories or something,
#
they were number one or in the top three.
#
I think top three and eight out of nine.
#
So the performance is exceptional, okay?
#
So clearly this worked because in the end, like I said,
#
we don't have enough employees, right?
#
So having staff matters.
#
You need the staff, but you need them on structures
#
that are accountable, and that's exactly what this was.
#
So, you know, and this is, I think, a template
#
that then can apply to augmenting public sector staffing
#
And the good news is, again,
#
it's the government that talks about it, right?
#
Like Kamheen and these two little extracts, you know,
#
I checked with them that it's okay to put and I put it there.
#
So that's one, and then the second related thing was,
#
sometime last year, there was huge pressure
#
from kind of the unions to get regularized, okay?
#
Saying that, listen, and normally, nine times out of 10,
#
the politicians were just given, okay?
#
But what's interesting here is that the political calculus,
#
and I say this in chapter two, right?
#
Because the concentrated interest diffused costs, right?
#
So there's concentrated cost benefits
#
for getting regularized, and that group can create
#
enough political pain that you give in,
#
that is, the cost of that is borne by the diffused taxpayers,
#
which is not seen, okay?
#
Which is why the traditional model of political bargaining
#
is that you give in to these large concentrated interests.
#
But what changed this time was that the CM being willing
#
to kind of take a stand and have the public backing for it
#
to say that, no, your interests matter,
#
but the performance for the citizens also matters.
#
And so we are not going back on our kind of commitment
#
that we will regularize only on the basis of performance.
#
I think, I don't know the numbers,
#
but this is what kind of SES was saying,
#
that in the first round after three to four years
#
of performance management, they regularized about 80 to 85%.
#
Now, it's not like they fired the rest,
#
but the probation was extended for the others, right?
#
So again, this is how you move the culture of government
#
in the direction that we're talking about
#
in a way that is kind of win-win-win for everybody,
#
and you see the results.
#
Because remember, it's win-win even for the employees.
#
Because without the structure,
#
the government may not have sanctioned the recruitment
#
See, we are stuck in this low-level equilibrium
#
where everybody knows that once I hire them,
#
I'm not going to get much output out of them.
#
So you resist the hiring in the first place.
#
So everybody is worse off in the status quo.
#
The potential aspirants are worse off,
#
the citizens are worse off, and they're all worse off.
#
So that's where figuring out these things is essential.
#
And if you communicate this overall framework,
#
then it becomes win-win-win that allows you to build
#
a broad coalition around it.
#
And just as our nation is a work in progress,
#
I think your book is a really handy guide
#
to how to make some of the progress happen.
#
It's full of, for the listeners,
#
it's full of stories like this which
#
demonstrate exactly all the principles and frameworks
#
So I'd strongly recommend that.
#
I think we're almost done with our time for today,
#
and this has been pretty damn good.
#
I should remind our listeners that this is a very deep book,
#
and you can kind of make out the scale of the book
#
by just thinking about how episode 185,
#
my first cult episode with Karthik,
#
is covered in just one chapter, chapter 11 on education.
#
Our next episode together is covered in just one chapter,
#
which is chapter 12 on health care.
#
So it is a book that contains multitudes.
#
In fact, this episode is perhaps in some ways extraordinary
#
because we've covered two chapters, three and five,
#
So of course, the length is also increasing.
#
So I must thank you for writing the book.
#
I mean it when I say that the kind of work
#
that you're doing is a public service at multiple levels.
#
So thank you for coming on the show and giving me your time
#
and sharing your insights so generously.
#
But I will ask for a little more generosity
#
with my final question.
#
You have, of course, made recommendations in the past,
#
and you have also promised to sing Antakshari in the past.
#
So I will ask you to do both of these so very quickly
#
because I know your time is running out.
#
We have eight minutes left according to the calendar entry.
#
So I'd like you to quickly recommend stuff
#
that you've been reading recently or anything
#
that you feel you haven't recommended before
#
or that you'd really love to recommend,
#
whether it's music, films or books.
#
And also, you cannot get away from it.
#
Ideally, something themed to government,
#
you know, maybe starting with the letter K,
#
if I can provide a prompt because after all your name,
#
but it's completely up to you.
#
Yeah, yeah, no, I think, I mean, so, but one of the things,
#
you know, since we're in addition to the two chapters,
#
like, you know, we're also, this is the episode
#
that I guess will release just when the book comes out.
#
I mean, so, you know, I just wanted to tell your listeners
#
that there's a lot of, I mean,
#
the lot of Easter eggs in the book,
#
including like, you know, I mean,
#
the design of the cover itself, right?
#
I mean, so the cover is something I must have spent
#
like 40 or 50 iterations on, right?
#
Because I got a, you know, whole bunch of bland covers,
#
you know, generic buildings, generic, this thing.
#
And like, you know, I think the idea then of,
#
and I don't know how many of you will kind of figure out
#
what the theme of the cover is,
#
but then the idea was to kind of,
#
and I wanted something like, you know,
#
that had a feel of a monument,
#
which is a personal nod to my dad.
#
Okay, like, you know, and that was one.
#
But the other part was kind of representing
#
state level governance, okay?
#
So the ring what you have is different state assemblies.
#
And then the other Easter egg there is that the one
#
at the bottom is Karnataka,
#
which is kind of probably my favorite kind of
#
government building in India,
#
not just because of the grandness of the building,
#
but if you look very, very, very carefully,
#
like I mean, you will see fine print that it has there
#
that says government work is God's work, okay?
#
So, and that was inscribed many, many years ago.
#
And so it's not in your face, okay?
#
So if you see the cover, you'll not see it.
#
But if you squint and look at it,
#
so that's why it's an Easter egg.
#
Like, you know, so people who know it,
#
like, you know, will know it's there.
#
But it, I think, speaks to this larger point, okay?
#
Which is something I talk about,
#
like, I mean, more in chapter two,
#
which is that this is not just a technocratic agenda
#
of saying, okay, let's improve efficiency
#
of government, whatever, right?
#
I mean, it's that, see, the miracle of Indian democracy
#
in some ways is that we are an outlier
#
of having democratized at such a low level of development.
#
Right, so the good news there is that it gave
#
every poor and marginalized citizen in the country
#
the ability to make a claim on the state, right?
#
And saying, okay, the state should be able to do this.
#
But it hasn't given the capacity
#
to the state to deliver that, right?
#
And so this is kind of why the task
#
of building a more effective Indian state
#
is the great unfinished task of Indian democracy itself.
#
Okay, so if you want to deliver
#
on the promise of Indian democracy,
#
that's kind of what this is about, okay?
#
So over the next 25 years,
#
and what I've tried very, very hard to do in the book,
#
and not just in tone, but also in substance,
#
is to kind of focus on areas
#
where we can have a very broad alignment
#
as opposed to kind of get caught up in kind of,
#
you know, you can always disagree, right?
#
So India's full of argumentative Indians, okay?
#
Like Kabir, but at some point in terms of making progress,
#
and so what I like to say is that
#
there is the agenda of building a more effective state
#
is something that whether you're in the left
#
or in the right, right?
#
Like Kabir should value, and that's because, you know,
#
it is, for the left, this is how you're going to improve
#
human development at scale, like Kabir,
#
and kind of fulfill the promise of Indian democracy.
#
And it is, in fact, the only way to improve equity at scale.
#
And the fact that I'm talking about the state
#
as opposed to talking about naive privatization
#
is also something that the center left would apply.
#
Now, at the same time, like I mean,
#
the ideas are kind of much more center right
#
because it is about kind of data, evidence, efficiency,
#
management, cost accountability, right?
#
Like I mean, these are all considered like, you know,
#
more center right concepts
#
and treating the market as an ally, okay?
#
And that goes back to kind of nuanced use of vouchers
#
and PPPs, which I talk about in chapter nine,
#
like I mean, then shows up in the sector chapters.
#
So anyway, so the clarifying point I wanted to make
#
is that the book might seem intimidating at 800 pages,
#
but it's really just 600, 200 pages of notes and references.
#
And every chapter is written to be incredibly accessible,
#
though the research underlying that each paper
#
has probably taken years to do.
#
So yes, bear with the length and you will be rewarded.
#
So that is, yeah, so at this point, I'm sorry,
#
the book I'm going to recommend
#
is pick up this book and read it.
#
Recommendation to Bhai ka ho gaya abhi gana baki hai.
#
The, yeah, no, I mean, I haven't thought about this,
#
but I think I wanted to like,
#
yeah, the process of writing the book itself, right?
#
Like I mean, has been so many ups and downs, right?
#
Like I mean, so, you know, there was kind of,
#
there was COVID, right?
#
I mean, which was this massive down.
#
And one thing I must say, okay,
#
one more thing from the book, which you'll allow me.
#
I want to read to your listeners
#
this paragraph from the acknowledgements, okay?
#
Because the listeners are all part of this, okay?
#
So when I say, why don't you read this out?
#
No, no, no, you read this out.
#
So it says, I'm also grateful to Amit Verma
#
and to listeners of the Seen and the Unseen podcast
#
for the affirmation during the book project.
#
Single authored book writing
#
can be a very lonely enterprise.
#
And I have greatly benefited from doing
#
three extended episodes with Amit
#
covering different chapters
#
over the past three and a half years.
#
The positive reactions to these episodes
#
have helped sustain my momentum on this project, okay?
#
So every listener can take some credit
#
for kind of the positive affirmation loop, okay?
#
Like, I mean, that it takes
#
to do this kind of lonely project over five years.
#
But every listener is now thinking
#
that thanking is not enough.
#
Abhi gaana gaana parayega.
#
So again, it's gonna be a sad song, right?
#
Like, you know, because one of my hardest moments
#
in writing this book was actually last February
#
where we were all falling sick.
#
I think it was a bunch of flus and a bunch of stuff.
#
And I, but one of my dear, dear friends passed away.
#
Like, you know, near that time.
#
And he was kind of a kindered spirit, right?
#
Like, you know, who was a topper,
#
IIT Delhi, I am in Ahmedabad, was at Harvard.
#
His name is Amit Bordia, okay?
#
And many people might know him.
#
And a true kindered spirit in terms of combining
#
both zest for excellence and a zest for life, right?
#
Like, I mean, and where we would unite on
#
is his love of Amitabh Bachchan movies
#
and my love of music, okay?
#
Like, I mean, and the song that would stay in my head,
#
right, for literally, like, weeks,
#
and I couldn't stop every time,
#
was the moment was the song that combines
#
an Amitabh Bachchan song with the emotions I felt,
#
like, you know, on his passing, which is
#
Zindagi toh bewafa hai ek din thukraega
#
Maut mehbooba hai apne saath lekar jayega
#
Marke jeene ki yada jo duniya ko sikh laega
#
Wo mukadar ka sikandar jaane man keh laega
#
So, does that do it for you?
#
It totally does it for me.
#
Beautiful, deeply moving.
#
So, thank you so much, Kartik, for, you know,
#
bringing your real and authentic self
#
to this podcast every time.
#
I love the work you do, more power to you,
#
and maybe have more epic conversations like this.
#
Thank you. Thanks, Amit. Always a pleasure.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode,
#
head on over to your nearest bookstore,
#
online or offline, and pick up
#
Accelerating India's Development by Kartik Muralitharan.
#
You can follow Kartik on Twitter at
#
kartik underscore econ is linked from the show notes.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at
#
Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
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 this show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support
#
and contribute any amount you like
#
to keep this podcast alive and kicking.
