Author: cpradmin

The Centre for Policy Research turns fifty this year. Fifty years in the service of Indian policymaking, of keeping a robust conversation between the government, policymakers and the Indian populace alive – this is indeed a moment of pride and reflection for us. As we celebrate this special milestone, we present some snippets of our impact on the Indian policy sphere over the years in various areas of research.

This edition of Policy in Action is dedicated to our work on Climate Change. CPR has been working on climate change policy issues for the last 14 years. Our early work was conducted with the intention of mainstreaming climate change into national policy conversations. We contributed to popularising the concept of ‘co-benefits’ – the idea that many measures to address climate mitigation, such as public transport that reduces congestion, also have development gains. We analysed for Indian policymakers and the public the implications of key international climate negotiation outcomes, particularly the Copenhagen Accord of 2009 and the 2015 Paris Agreement. Our researchers have played a role in key government committees, including the committee for the Planning Commission’s landmark ‘Low-Carbon Strategy for Inclusive Growth’, the first major government strategic document on low-carbon development, in 2014. We also undertook the first-ever analysis of India’s state action plans on climate change, shedding light on their importance in mainstreaming concerns of environmental sustainability into development planning.

Here’s a snapshot of our key work and impact in the area of climate change over the years:

1. We played an important contributory role in laying out what a ‘co-benefits’ approach to climate change means in practice, the resultant framing of climate policy around multiple approaches, and methods for its implementation. Led by CPR’s Navroz K. Dubash, our subsequent research and public-facing work built on this approach. (Read more about the topic in Climate and Development and Economic and Political Weekly)
2. The volumes Handbook of Climate Change and India (2012) and India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development (2019), edited by Dubash, bring together prominent voices from India and are considered important resources for those interested in climate change in the Indian context.
3. We discussed the use of energy and emissions modelling studies for climate policy-making in an award-winning paper in Environmental Research Letters. The resultant engagement with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) led to a request to CPR to lead, along with IIT-Delhi, the process of drafting India’s Long-Term Low Emissions Development Strategy (LT-LEDS).
4. Our research on India’s heat action plans has informed policy guidance from the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to the states, and shaped the design of subsequent heat action plans. Findings from our recent report on heat action plans were extensively covered by Indian and global media outlets and contributed to a more informed discourse on what India’s policy response to heat waves should be.

To know more about CPR’s history of work on Climate Change, you can access a timeline here. To see more details of the work on Climate Change, visit our website at https://cprindia.org/researcharea/climate-change/ or see the work of the Initiative on Climate, Energy and Environment at https://cprindia.org/research/initiative-on-climate-energy-environment/

Stay tuned for our next pop-up edition of Policy in Action, coming soon!

On 30 June 2023 the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) received intimation from the Income Tax department withdrawing its Tax exemption Status under Section 12A of the IT Act, 1961.

CPR maintains that it is fully compliant with the law and all its collaborations and partnerships are limited to research alone. Since the IT survey began in September 2022, CPR has provided detailed responses to various authorities and fully cooperated with all the proceedings.

In response to the current order withdrawing our tax exemption status, CPR will be seeking all avenues of recourse that are available.

Despite this severe blow that strikes at the core of our ability to function, CPR remains committed to working towards its foundational objective of conducting research that contributes to high quality scholarship, better policies, and a more robust public discourse about the issues that impact life in India.

This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with KP Krishnan, an Honorary Research Professor at CPR.

Krishnan spent three and a half decades in the IAS, retiring in 2019 as Secretary, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. Over his years in the civil services, he served at positions in the government of Karnataka and the Union Government, as well as a stint at the World Bank, giving him a unique vantage point to observe the changes taking place in Indian economic and development policy following the 1991 liberalization.

He has previously held the BoK Visiting Professorship in Regulation in the University of Pennsylvania Law School and served as the IEPF Chair Professor at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, in addition to stints as Visiting Professor of Economics, Public Policy and Regulation at the LBSNAA Mussorie, ISB Hyderabad and Mohali, Ashoka University and IIM Bangalore.

In our conversation, Rohan Venkat spoke to Krishnan about choosing a career in the civil services, how policy feedback operated within the IAS especially as the economy opened up and the question of being research-minded vs operational within the Indian bureaucracy. Krishnan also spoke about how external research was integrated into government systems, Krishnan’s work at CPR looking at how well we understand Indian regulators and what advice he has for young scholars.

If you prefer audio, this conversation is also available as a podcast here.

And if you missed our previous interviews, read our conversations with Avani Kapur, Partha Mukhopadhyay and with Navroz Dubash.

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(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity).

Can we get a sense of your personal history with the policy world as you chose to go into the civil services. What was your sense of both what government work would look like and also whether you had an idea of what it meant to work in policy at the time?

I joined the civil service literally as my first job. My background was an undergrad degree in economics, followed by a law degree in the Delhi of the late 70s, early 80s. We were in an area called Bhartiya Nagar, very close to Lodi Estate. My class was a bunch of children of government servants, judges, senior lawyers — so policy was part of one’s DNA.

As a student, one got thrown into conversations on policy because you had a cohort which was in some way or the other involved in policy. In the civil services, typically the first 8 to 10 years of your work are field postings where you don’t do policy. You do an enormous amount of law enforcement, revenue collection, and developmental work.

My first posting in the Government of India was in 1991. India was truly revolutionising public economic policy around that time. I was not on the economic side of the government. I was with the Minister of State for Personnel, Margaret Alva, as her private secretary. But ministers attend Council of Ministers meetings, so the private secretary ends up assisting the minister in everything. You help her run the ministry, craft speeches, and help when she attends meetings of the Council of Ministers. As it turns out, a series of what may look like accidents take you to positions where you get exposed to some things, and if you have an innate interest in that subject, you end up developing a little more interest and you get exposed and one reinforces the other.

I understand that you’d be looking at and thinking about policy in preparation for the UPSC exam. But then, in the 10 years that you mentioned doing more on-ground work in government, before you get into policymaking, are you interfacing with people from civil society or the policy world? Or is it purely internal?

Even while administering laws and implementing laws as a sub divisional officer, you come across situations where if you are somewhat inclined towards policy, that side of your brain gets activated.

I’ll give you an example. In the mid 80s, almost all state legislatures had passed legislation styled variously — in Karnataka it was called the Prohibition of Transfer of Certain Lands Act. This was related to earlier land grants that had been made to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribe families that were landless. The thinking of the government was that landlessness is the primary reason for poverty and making land grants will lift families permanently above poverty and will sustain incomes. The way this actually worked in practice — excess government land is what is allocated to them, which will typically be poor quality, rocky land, far away from the village, not close to a source of irrigation. Even for a capable farmer, it’s not a piece of land that’s easy to work on. And if you are not a farmer already, it’s going to be very difficult to make that piece of land work for you.

We used to have endless cases where we were restoring land back to those farmers, because this law said land grants made to SCs and STs cannot be transferred by them to anybody. And any transfer so made would be a nullity from day one. Sub-divisional officers had the duty to cancel the transfer, restore the land to the original allottee and put him or her in possession. And one would watch this, you know, with a little bit of horror because this was a voluntary transaction. And it was backed by consideration. So the guy who bought it very often would also not be a very rich guy, who spent a fair amount of money buying that piece of land. And once I passed the order as a sub-divisional officer restoring land I noticed once or twice right outside my office. The two parties would get together, exchange further amounts of money, and the land would actually go back to the guy who was purchasing.

So I wondered, what is it that we are doing? We are doing what looks like very progressive social legislation. And if you actually look at ground reality, none of the intentions, objectives of the government was turning into realisable outcomes. So even as an implementing officer, you saw a lot of situations where you realised policy and legislations were not achieving what was intended of them. There are many such examples — we were doing rural housing, we were doing drought relief. And it was very evident that a lot of what secretariats and legislatures thought of were not working in the manner that they were intended to work.

It’s hard for kids of today, or even my generation to imagine a time before you could just immediately Google whether someone had looked into this law and was writing about it. Was there any way for you to examine this policy from a larger lens?

Interestingly, sub-divisional officers would periodically go to the Collector’s office for meetings and occasionally to the Divisional Commissioner’s Office for a meeting where we would exchange notes. Sometimes collectors would respond saying, ‘OK, you guys have said what you need to say. Government policy is government policy, please go and implement, no further debate.’ But there were collectors who would say, ‘yeah, you’re making sense. Please summarise this, please prepare a note’. So it would get raised.

Not that you got a change of policy immediately. But there was a very good, serious feedback loop and I have seen changes come about. Even in the absence of the Internet, even in the absence of quicker modes of communication, there was deliberation and there would be serious ‘sunwai’. If somebody had a point regardless, the IAS gave you a platform because you are a peer group. You may be junior, but your collector is also from the IAS, the revenue secretary is also from the IAS, and the Chief Secretary is also from the IAS. There are various ways in which we managed a good level of communication.

As we move into the 1990s, India was opening its economy. Tell us a little bit about how that played out for you.

That stint, primarily my responsibility was in the Ministry of Personnel and Training. That didn’t have a direct economic policy sort of role, but it was a fascinating perch because as private secretary to the Minister, you get a bird’s eye view and normally in the eighth year of service, you don’t get this great opportunity. So one watched for instance the Harshad Mehta scam playing out in the financial markets, and the personnel consequences of that — the banks that were involved in the scam, the change of management, change of boards. How did the government react in terms of putting in place correctives? I saw it primarily from the personnel side.

But my other great window to policy making during that period was something called a starred question in Parliament. A starred question is a question where the person asking questions in the House can ask supplementaries, because the answer is given orally by the Minister. It’s not an answer which is written and put down on the table at the house. Flowing from the answers, further questions that are related can be asked.

Narasimha Rao, as Prime Minister of India, would take a briefing because he was Cabinet minister for about 6 or 7 portfolios, one of which was personnel. Those briefings would typically be an hour before the question hour, in his Parliament office and those days we were allowed as young junior private secretaries we would be hanging around behind our ministers when the briefing was going on. It was fascinating to see, for instance, Mr. Narasimha Rao’s minister in charge of industry.

So starred question number 2 would be about whether the licensing system for cement industry worked satisfactorily. If so, what were the number of licenses that were received? Are there concerns relating to monopoly or concentration of power and so on? These would be the questions. The Industry Secretary would give some answers. And Industry Minister of State, Madam Krishna Shahi would explain to the PM how she would answer in case there were supplementary questions. Mr. Narasimha Rao at the end of that would ask one short question here, one short question there, the significance of which at that point in time would not be relevant to you. Four weeks later, you would suddenly read in the newspapers about a new licensing system or abolition of the licensing system for cement or some such thing and if you sat back and wondered, a lot of puzzles would fall in place. Mr Narasimha Rao would have heard in that meeting a set of observations on what the Parliament is saying on cement. And the curious man that he was, apparently, that would soon be followed up by actual meetings with industrialists, with economists, and users of cement construction associations. It would be fed in and suddenly, you know, meetings would happen and changes would occur.

I didn’t realise it initially. I figured out this is an excellent mechanism that was being used by Mr. Narasimha Rao — that one hour of give questions would get him a complete sense of what is happening in a particular sector, but more interesting was he would also size up people in their responses to the supplementaries in those 15 minutes. And we saw secretaries and additional secretaries who were fumbling, who didn’t know their subjects. There was no immediate reaction. That was Narasimha Rao sahab’s style. Six weeks later or eight weeks later, you would suddenly see there is a new additional secretary in charge of foreign direct investment in DIPP, and suddenly [you realise] four weeks ago in that question, this gentleman couldn’t answer half of the supplementaries and Mr. Narasimha Rao would go back, get another round of feedback, verified, because he was a deliberate, slow man. So it was a fascinating window into how governments at the highest levels worked. These were my early insights and I am grateful for them.

You mentioned a bit earlier about internal feedback of the IAS and that being a super deliberative space. But at what point, then, in your career do you see more interactions with external experts?

Immediately after the Department of Personnel stint, from 1994 to 1997, I had the good fortune to serve as advisor to Dr Bimal Jalan, who was our executive director at the World Bank. That was my first real exposure to international organisations and an organisation which prided itself as a knowledge bank. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is the formal name for the World Bank, its argument was — we certainly bring money to the table, but that’s not the only thing we bring. So if we are lending money, let’s say, for electricity reform or electricity distribution or for a project on women and child development or skill development, in addition to money, we bring you global best practices in similar country situations. What worked, what did not work? In addition to giving you cheaper money, what we bring to the table is knowledge, which is as important as capital resources for development.

And one saw it in action. India has been a great experimenter. Every possible approach to rural development has been tried out in India. If you look at post Independence India, you name the approach to alleviation of poverty, we would have tried it in some block, some district, some state or the other. We were, as it is, a crucible for experiments, and the bank was an enormously good documenter of practices and great cohesive concise compilation of actionable knowledge.

I returned from the World Bank back to Karnataka and decided that this is something I need to do seriously because the next round in government will involve a lot more knowledge. So after a year in the government of Karnataka and the Department of Finance, I wrote the CAT because I wanted to be in Bangalore. I went and joined IIM Bangalore initially for an MBA, because at that time they only had an MBA, they didn’t have Public policy. And completing the coursework I got into the PhD program in financial economic policy, essentially on funding of infrastructure through the securities market. I was lucky enough to be located in a city like Bangalore and ended up doing a PhD and got to apply [this knowledge] because everybody and his uncle, if you remember in the early part of the century, was trying to do public private partnerships in infrastructure. Now governments didn’t have knowledge on how to do this, so we had to dip into talent outside of government. In this case, it was a conventional, straightforward external consulting firm, consisting of serious financial experts, road making experts, building experts, municipal solid waste management experts. And we were among the first states to create a body to catalyse the movement of private sector money into infrastructure in Karnataka. So that’s sort of the beginning of the second journey on applying knowledge and the experience to public policy in government.

I was curious, both in interfacing with the bank and then going out to do this MBA and coming back, how receptive were others in the IAS to external interventions like a consulting firm, the World Bank, or even someone going out and doing an MBA?

By and large, if you don’t wear it on your sleeve and throw it around the system accepts it. One good thing about the IAS, in particular of all the civil services, is that everybody has some strength or the other. If my strength is knowledge-based, evidence-based public policy analytics, somebody else’s strength is terrific execution. A third person’s strength is an enormous nose for handling – and it’s not something I may want to do — politicians and politics. So there are a variety of requirements and therefore a variety of talents in the IAS. So by and large, there is reasonable tolerance. Not only was there no pushback, there was acceptance. Mr. Siddaramaiah was the finance minister in Karnataka when we brought this policy for PPP in infrastructure and created a new institution for project development and infrastructure. He was very supportive. The rest of the government was very supportive. The worst that could be said was that there were some who were indifferent, but no hostility.

Likewise, [after that I] ran a public sector entity created for the purposes of development of infrastructure in the urban space. If there had been a dream PhD followed by a career in exactly the subject on which you did the PhD, it would be this. It was possible, because the chief secretary who recalled me from IIM, in a very interesting way reflected what you said just now. She called me over one day and I met her. Her husband had given me the study leave to pursue PhD, so she said look, ‘Bipul is an intellectual. He believes in these kinds of pursuits. I am a practical Malayali. I believe we are here as civil servants to deliver on outcomes. We are not here to generate theories, so I don’t think you should be wasting your time doing a PhD on urban infrastructure development. I think you should be doing urban infrastructure development. So I’m giving you 15 days notice. At the end of 15 days, I promise you that you will get to work in this sector. Pack up your bags, come here and start delivering on all of your serious research and PhD.’

She made me secretary in charge of municipal infrastructure. And subsequently made me MD of the Karnataka Urban Infrastructure Development and Finance Corporation. So, quote-unquote, you may call her anti-intellectual, but her point was that all of your intellect building, unlike an academic, in the case of an IAS officer, is for delivery of outcomes. So please come here, work your backside off, create the urban infrastructure and don’t lecture about urban infrastructure, which is what I did from 2002 to 2005. I was in that sector doing stuff.

And would you say there was a stereotype within the government for those on the academic side, or the think tank side, for those who do a lot of research but don’t necessarily understand the implementation or the political economy side of things?

To some extent, this is a serious tension in the government. A lot of us are considered bookish by politicians, saying that you guys are good at cracking exams but life in Kakinada or in Srikakulam is about handling stuff in real life. This is a grievance that many politicians have. I would not say it’s entirely misplaced because, at least the initial entry of a lot of us is primarily because of our ability to crack an exam. The personality test that is done by the UPSC is not a serious personality test as much as an interview and notwithstanding all their attempts that also continues to be primarily cerebral and knowledge based. My academic friend Devesh Kapur has written about this: If you are looking for a good forester who would become Principal Chief Conservator of Wildlife or Deputy Conservator of Wildlife, he or she temperamentally needs to be an outdoor person. There is a certain attitude to nature, outdoor life and to innovations, experiments, openness that you need in terms of being a personality rather than just being a great MSc Zoology. Now our system is very good at identifying the great MSc in zoology. But is he or she capable of running around in Kaziranga or in a pinch handling difficult issues of man-animal conflict on the border and deal with a live problem? I think there are serious questions. So the way the civil service recruitment is done, I think you’ve actually hinted at a very serious tension.

Invariably what happens is a lot of us also evolve in the service and the service provides enormous opportunities to grow. The government is a great teacher and typically our bosses are tolerant. They allow us to commit mistakes because there are correctives that are available in the system, so we all evolve in the system and grow. So if I was a bookish guy in the first two years, it’s drilled into me that I need to deliver rations on the ground, not talk about the economics of logistics. Rice has to be delivered on Monday morning. Figure out how. The ‘can do it’ attitude actually becomes a very important strength of the IAS.

And maybe this is jumping ahead a bit, but I wonder if those two strands then come together as you move forward in your career where you invite more external experts to interface with the government. So whether this is with NIPFP or NCAER, I’m curious whether those two strands come together in a way that allows you to better integrate the advice that’s coming from the more academic spaces.

Oh yes, very much. The stint that I did in Delhi in Government of India around 2005 was a post called Joint Secretary, Capital Markets. Now if you remember, these were the serious boom years. The world was growing. Enormous foreign capital was flowing into India. India had started opening up in 1991, but we repealed something called the FERA — Foreign Exchange Regulation Act — only in the late 90s and introduced a new act called FEMA (Foriegn Exchange Management Act), which was much more open. So serious flow of foreign capital into India was a relatively new phenomenon and there is a whole strand of macroeconomics, which is open economy macroeconomics, which is very different from closed economy macroeconomics.

The truth is we guys didn’t know anything about open economy macroeconomics other than what the textbooks told us because we had never been an open economy macro economy. Remember, when dollars come into India through the Reserve Bank of India, it translates into rupees in your and my hands. It seriously fuels inflation. And it is not inflation caused by internal factors, it’s inflation caused by money flowing in from outside. But that money is flowing into productive sectors as foreign direct investment or it’s flowing in as foreign institutional investment and actually adding liquidity to the markets. It’s doing good things, but in parallel it’s also creating a new problem which you were not familiar with earlier. We were struggling with this.

And there was an Ashok Lahiri committee, which went into this question in 2005 and gave a report on how India should deal with these new sets of problems. And one of the recommendations of the committee was: Honestly, we guys don’t know this. We need to reach out to experts in academia and practitioners who know this.

Quickly – and this was a high priority, but then FM wanted it, then PM wanted it – we entered into an MoU with the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. And I must say, though it may sound a little self congratulatory, that it was a path breaking MoU. For relatively very little money, we got access to some first rate brains. And it wasn’t your usual KPMG type consulting assignment. There were a bunch of serious economists, finance policy professionals sitting in NIPFP who would engage with us continually.

If we have a current problem, we pose the problem to them. They give suggestions on how you can handle it. These are the changes in policy. It may require a change in regulation or legislation. Parallelly, they would also build up their knowledge base and out of this engagement would come better policies for the government and good quality academic work for them. Because they are academics first and foremost, interested in research, interested in publications, and there was a lot of global interest in how a newly emerging open market economy like India deals with problems that the West faced 70 years ago, 100 years ago. There was a lot of academic interest, so this was a very interesting, mutually beneficial collaboration. This program ran from 2005 till 2015-16. I left my desk in 2010, but it completely outlasted me.

In 2016, we got an amendment in the RBI Act, converting Reserve Bank of India into an inflation targeting central bank. This specific idea was the direct result of this engagement. Lots of changes that occurred in Indian macro, in Indian finance was were actually the result of this fantastic collaboration, which at its peak cost a crore per annum. It was hugely beneficial mutually and worked because there was a great deal of trust on both sides, because we were handing over current live government data to them and they were handing back to us their thinking, which they could have gone to the market and given advice and made much more money. They didn’t do it, we didn’t hold back. So this was a great collaboration.

One example of a collaboration of the kind that you’re talking about: Policy thinkers in think tanks, academic institutions working closely with the government, not merely as advisors but as actual doers.

Different governments around the world have different relations with think tanks, and India has its own approach. Was it hard for you to push through the idea of collaborating with NIPFP?

Remember, the recommendation to do this came from the chief economic adviser to the Government of India, Dr Ashok Lahiri, who felt it is important for this collaboration to be with an operational arm of government, not with an advisory arm of government. He was wise enough to see that the value will lie not in an MoU with the chief economic advisor to Government of India, but with the unit head of a division, which is the Capital Markets Division, which operates capital controls, which operates the FEMA. A recommendation from him already carries weight.

I was, as it is, very inclined to reach out because we were figuring out already that we didn’t know this area. His recommendation, my willingness, and then my willingness to translate his recommendation into an operational government MoU [made it possible]. Once we agreed, it was a question of whether the minister will agree to this. Since the institution recommended was NIPFP – a Ministry of Finance institution – it made it easy. You are not dealing with a private institution where some of the sensitivities are not easy to handle. P Chidambaram, the then Finance Minister, looked at it once. He said, ‘I’m concerned with advice that comes to me. You guys need advice from XYZ. I have no problem. Follow process, do due diligence, put it in place.’ And in all of two weeks we actually put it in place.

You spoke earlier about the feedback loop within the IAS. Did you find that folks from other ministries looked at this model and found something of value that they could replicate?

This is an interesting question. On balance, I found that on some of these issues, because of 1991 and the liberalisation that followed and the fact that you had serious intellectuals like Dr Manmohan Singh, Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia in leadership positions, the Department of Economic Affairs was more open than any other ministry that I have seen, even within the Ministry of Finance. It’s the department that deals with the World Bank and the IMF and the ADB so it has an international orientation in its DNA. Plus, its leadership over a long period of time had created a culture where this kind of exchange was not out of the ordinary. I don’t find a similar culture or approach in many other ministries. One would expect, for instance, similar lively vibrant relationships say in commerce, say in MEITY… Probably now they are happening. But in the years that we did, I’m talking about 2005, which is 18 years ago, I think we were almost the only exception and I didn’t see enough of this happening in other wings of government. Not at that time.

It’s changing today and not just at the central level. We do see it a bit more now at the state level.

It is changing both at the Center and the state – much more at the state, but I think a lot of the push is also coming from another factor. There is a serious personnel shortage in government. There are serious capacity questions. Work has exploded. There are ministries like MEITY which have to deal with e-governance, privacy concerns, big tech, data… These are huge, huge issues. [But] Ministry staffing positions even today are exactly what they were 15 years ago. So Secretary, IT will be summoned by the PM and asked questions on Meta, on WhatsApp, on regulatory policy. But remember, the machinery that he has today is exactly the machinery that his predecessor had 20 years ago. But he can’t go and tell the PM, ‘sorry, sir, I don’t have a joint secretary who knows this subject’ because the buck stops with you. So they’ve all begun to figure out creative solutions to the problem.

It may be in one sense generically the same as the problem that I faced in 2005. We didn’t know about open economy macroeconomics, so we had to turn to the outside world. Likewise, we don’t know big data, we don’t know data privacy… I’m guessing because I don’t sit inside the government now. Likewise, we may not know regional trade block-related issues. If you don’t know and you still have to find answers, you will turn somewhere. So you turn to external institutions. I think it is happening on a large scale now both in the Government of India and in state governments for broadly similar reasons. But in my case, I wouldn’t say I was motivated by a physical lack of personnel. I had physical personnel, but I didn’t have personnel who knew this subject, so perhaps today it’s a combination of lack of bodies and lack of people with the relevant, right kind of knowledge.

Some of that is material that you spoke about with Yamini Aiyar on a previous set of podcasts. Speaking of that difference in culture, you then moved on to other bits of the government. You moved to land resources. How did that shift play out for you?

So from DEA, I moved to the Department of Land Resources, [which is] a little tricky. The subject is largely with the states, so you had to be very creative in finding a useful role for the Government of India in a subject which is intensely local. And we did. With the help of an external foundation, we got into a program similar to the NIPFP-DEA program. This time, since our knowledge had to be much more regional, we got into a partnership with five institutions which were also local. So evaluation of some of our ongoing land record modernization programs, how to improve the land registration, etc etc.

Likewise, later, when I moved to the Ministry of Skill Development as a secretary in charge of that department, again with external funding support, we reached out to the group that works in Bangalore on the India Stack on how we can build a new regulator for skill development, which is a no-paper, pure IT technology-based regulator and we dipped into good old NIPFP for the legal design for the new skills regulator. With the approval of my ministers, we got into MoUs with them. They helped us and you will be happy to know that there is actually a National Council for Vocational Education and Training, a newly created regulator for skill development and vocational education designed with inputs from these external agencies, academic inputs, technology inputs. So one has been able to transport a bit of that knowledge into other domains.

How has your thinking evolved after your stint in government? You’ve been associated with CPR, with NCAER – what has been occupying your mind since leaving government? What are you working on?

The nature of public policy and regulation, which are the areas that I’m interested in, in an academic sense, are such that if you want to make a difference, you need to necessarily collaborate with the government and the authorities. There is clearly one way of influencing which is – you do research, you publish and people take note of it. And presumably some bit of it gets implemented. A second one is you’re also associated with activities in the government, as an external person. To give an example in the NCAER we got a wonderful opportunity. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India, which is one of the newest regulators in India created by the India Bankruptcy Code, when it was completing five years of its existence wanted an evaluation of the board as a regulator. It approached me and my team in the NCAER. We did the evaluation and the evaluation report accepted by the IBBI board is now in the public domain. It’s the first-ever example of an independent, non-government third party evaluation of a regulator. Public authorities in India do not subject themselves to these kinds of scrutiny. The fact that a regulator decided to do that, I think, spoke about both the integrity and competence and the domain abilities of the team. We’ve also done a series of events on investor protection on how each regulator could improve their own actions: Financial sector regulator, pension regulator, insurance regulator, securities market regulator, Reserve Bank of India in its various roles as a regulator… culminating in a long conversation with all the regulators.

Subsequently, after moving to CPR, we strengthened and launched the KYR series, (Know Your Regulator), in a big manner. The fact we owe a lot of lives to the work of regulators is not something we realise. For instance, practically every piece of packaged food that you eat is regulated by the FSSAI. Every piece of medicine that one pops is regulated and cleared by the drug regulator. Every financial product that you touch, the media that you deal with, your privacy – so much of our lives are in the hands of actions of regulators. The fact that we don’t understand this breed of public servants is what propelled us to do this conversation. We had a long series, 12 of them, looking at the Food Safety Standards Authority of India, the Electricity Regulatory Commission, Water Regulatory Commission, Real Estate regulatory authorities… This we did as a collaborative exercise with the forum of regulators and another couple of academic institutions, where we took them to the general public. All those conversations have also been put into an e-book and it’s a very good reference source material for students.

In terms of your audience, it seems your approach has been not just to speak back to government from the outside, but also to bring this knowledge to a wider audience.

I think that’s a good summary. Feedback to government. The equivalent of some kind of solicited and unsolicited advice to regulators. Parallelly, take regulators and policy to the public. Some bit of it is demystification, some bit of it is explanation and some bit of it is reform in terms of how they work. All of these.

And at the personal level, how have you found it different from your time being within government? Is it liberating in a way that you’re able to say or see things that you weren’t able to see before?

One got a ringside view of regulation, while inside government. That is, from the viewpoint of the regulator who looks at market failure and wants to intervene to correct the market failure. Post government, I also have a couple of corporate boards on which I sit, so I now get to see regulation from a completely different perspective, which is as a recipient to regulation, being a regulated entity. And it’s interesting, having seen market failure from inside government, I can now see state failure from inside a regulated entity. This is well captured in public economics, which is that you have market failures caused by a certain set of reasons, and therefore government needs to intervene. But government is also a set of individuals who come together – as public choice theory beautifully explains, given a bunch of constraints, given a bunch of motivations, this can also lead to another form of failure. Failure in the sense of not achieving the objective that was intended.

It’s interesting that I can get to see that, sitting where I am. I think I now have a good, complete picture of both market failure and consequential state intervention and state failure. Conversations, therefore are much more holistic now. Somebody could say it is motivated because now I am a regulated entity and therefore I may be seeing it from only the view of the regulated entity. I don’t believe that’s the case. I think I now have a more complete perspective and by training I don’t necessarily look at things only from the eyes of the private sector or market, I think I look at it from the eyes of both now.

I’ll just go on then to our final set of questions that we like to direct to all on the series: What misconceptions about government, regulators, and your work in general do you find yourself constantly having to correct whether they are coming from the media, scholars or even fellow civil servants?

There’s this general impression that government is impervious and not open to external suggestions. We’ve covered that area in depth. I think it is not very correct. Government consists of a lot of individuals like you and me, who are exactly like you and me – they sit in different positions, different organisations. They are also open and on an average that is subject to the same distribution of individuals, as in journalism, as in private sector, as in NGOs, as in think tanks. So there are lots and lots of government servants who are open, willing and ready to accept suggestions from the external world.

Two, very many of the more cynical friends of mine in the media and in the civil society very often keep thinking of government as evil. My own assessment is very often, half the problem will be incompetence, lack of knowledge, not necessarily evil. So if there were to be a piece of advice, it is much more about building competence. So, for instance, the kind of things that are now being done like the capacity building commission, which focuses on continuously working on the various parts of the civil service from the lowest to the highest to improve their skill sets to update them on modern methodology etcetera, is a very good idea. So the second point is, can we focus a lot more on competence and a lot of the problems that we see in terms of bad delivery by government?

What advice would you have for younger scholars and folks looking to work with, or get their material to government?

Opportunities in government have now increased hugely both in terms of structured positions. You know there is, for instance, direct recruitment of directors and joint secretaries in the government through a formal advertisement through the Union Public Service Commission. It’s a small number, but it’s still a significant move forward.
Plus, there are large numbers who are being inducted as mid-career consultants, professionals who are part of project monitoring units and things like that. So the opportunities now are far more than before. I would strongly urge my younger colleagues in think tanks that this is an area they should look at. The bulk of them are also not looking for a lifetime of employment in government. They’re quite happy to do a stint in government, move back to academia, or move back to research, so that flexibility is now in-built in some of these positions.
Three, it is also, I think, a very good experience in as much as it brings you close to the reality. Sitting outside, I may feel it is such an easy job of reforming any one program. If only I were in charge, I would have changed India’s rural, water and sanitation campaign…Once you are inside the setup you can then see all the constraints that hold us back. It’s not as if people inside are lacking in knowledge or ability… The fact that the constraints are fully appreciated only when you are inside makes your experience in the government that much more valuable for your own research. So my quick advice is look at these opportunities, take them seriously and do wet your feet, get into the deep end of the pool, understand how public policy actually works, and then be in a better position both to do public policy and comment on public policy.

Would you recommend any three works that have influenced you?

I assume we are in the context of what we are discussing. There are many books that have influenced me, but in the context of what we are discussing today, I think this book, In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Public Policy, by Dr Vijay Kelkar and Dr Ajay Shah is an excellent lucid, very direct, extremely well written book on public policy and now covers regulation. It’s also by a set of people with whom I interact regularly. So they’ve influenced me intellectually and their book has influenced me quite a bit.
Second, some of Vinay Sitapati’s works are styled as biographies of individuals, but they capture the sense of not only the time, but also the events, the activities of those times. So it’s something which has very significantly improved my understanding of the reform process over the last 15-20 years in India.
The third book which I am re-reading for my current work on health regulation, is this book called The Truth Pill by Dinesh Thakur and Prashant Reddy on pharma regulation in India. It’s a great book in terms of enhancing my understanding of how regulation in the pharma sector works and it’s something I’m deeply sort of immersed in, as a matter of study now.

TREADS@CPR, in collaboration with NMCG and NIUA, conceived Planners’ Circle as a forum to draw on the experiential wisdom of expert planners about the structure and rationalities of the statutory Master Plan instrument to address water-centric urban planning.

The Planners’ Circle convened its first panel with a distinguished set of planners on June 2, 2023. Dr. Bimal Patel of CEPT University gave the keynote address, while Mr. Asok Kumar IAS, DG-NMCG, chaired the convening and Dr. Srinivas Chokkakula, MoJS Research Chair and Lead, TREADS@CPR, moderated the discussion.

The key insights (attached here) gathered and distilled from the panel discussion aims to generate useful debate and inform research on the scope and relevance of Master Plans in the governance of urban water bodies and river systems.

This month on CPR Perspectives – our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary – we bring you a conversation with Avani Kapur, a senior fellow at CPR, where she also leads the Accountability Initiative.

The Accountability Initiative focuses on conducting cutting-edge research on India’s public service delivery systems and leveraging this information by ensuring it reaches government officials, academics and citizens with the aim of promoting administrative reforms at the frontlines of service delivery.

Kapur has been at CPR since 2008, beginning as a Research Associate at the Accountability Initiative and working her way up to leading the research group today. Along the way, she has led process- and fund-tracking surveys on vital social sector schemes as well as anchored an annual budget brief series analysing the performance of the Indian government’s major welfare programmes – including, this year, a major lookback at the past 15 years of welfare spending and outcomes to mark AI’s 15th anniversary.

In addition to leading AI, Kapur also set up the PULSE for Development platform in 2020, which brings together more than 90 organisations within the development community dedicated to citizen-centric policies and implementation. Kapur is a Tech4Good Fellow and part of the WICCI Council of Ethic, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Development Policy and Practice.

In our conversation, Rohan Venkat spoke to Kapur about starting at CPR just as the Accountability Initiative was taking shape, the stunning examples of inefficiency she discovered while looking for bottlenecks in public spending in the field and getting positive feedback from the state – including how one government official described AI’s work as being that of ‘physician’ tracking the flow of blood through the body, searching for blockages. Kapur then spoke about why the initiative has moved from talking about accountability to ‘Responsive Governance’, how AI does much more grassroots capacity building work beyond its flagship PAISA public expenditure tracking, and what advice she has for young scholars entering this field.

If you prefer audio, this conversation is also available as a podcast here.

And if you missed our previous interviews, read our conversations with Partha Mukhopadhyay here and with Navroz Dubash here.

(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity).

I’d like to get a sense of how you entered policy in the first place. Did you always know you were going to be going down this road? Could you tell us a little bit about your background well before CPR?

So I was studying history at the Lady Sriram College in New Delhi and I was really loving it. I had great teachers for history who didn’t just focus on the memorization of dates or names but instead about the narratives and stories. All my teachers promoted this sense of inquisitiveness and curiosity and asking questions, not just taking anything on at face value. However, when I got the opportunity to go to a liberal arts college in America, after I had completed two years at LSR, I decided to take that up just because I wanted exposure to different topics. I think I felt that I was a bit too naive and young to decide on a stream and one of the advantages of a liberal arts degree is that I could take up courses on art history, on biology, philosophy, astronomy, even dance or music. The exposure that I got at Smith College definitely paved the way for the journey that I’ve taken in the policy space.
It was during this time when I was at Smith that I took a course on economic policy, and I realised that I had an interest in this field and I wanted to do more in the development space. In fact, during the summer vacations I applied for a research grant and managed to do internships with a micro-finance organization on one break, as well as a research organization on another break. When I completed college, unfortunately in India, during that time there were no real public policy schools and most of the development policy courses in the US were focused much more on international relations or at best international development. But I knew that I wanted to work on India-related issues and so I decided to pursue development studies at the London School of Economics. The course work there, but more importantly, just being in the heart of London where you have numerous scholars coming to visit and give lectures, cemented my decision to work in the public policy space. When I returned to India, I got my first working opportunity at a small research organisation started by Dr Arjun Sengupta, who was then a member of Parliament as well, called the Center for Development and Human Rights. I got to understand some of the rights and welfare literature.
I spent about two years there and then I felt strongly that a thorough understanding of welfare required not just sitting in front of a desk in Delhi, but actually making my way to the realities of the field. I was starting to get a little frustrated about not being able to actually go to the field in that job. And I think luckily at that time I connected with [CPR President] Yamini [Aiyar] and decided to join her in the new initiative she was in the process of conceptualising, called the Accountability Initiative. And 15 years later, it feels almost surreal that I’m now leading that initiative.

That brings us to 2008. As you say that the Accountability initiative was just starting to be conceptualised at the time. So tell us a little bit about that. What was the idea?

When I first joined, India was at the cusp of building the foundations of the rights-based welfare state. You saw an expansion of legislation in key areas of social policy: the right to work, MGNREGA, being a prime example. And you also saw a lot of enhancement in government investment in social policy. What was interesting about this moment was that this expansion in some ways was driven through this unique alliance between civil society organisations on one hand, the judiciary on the other, and members of the political elite. What was also very different about this moment and in some ways, at the heart of this rights-based welfare project was this vision of transforming the dynamics of the citizen state engagement. The idea of empowering citizens to place claims on the state and demand accountability for implementation.
You saw a lot of the new legislation and many of the new anti-poverty schemes that were launched by the government in this phase [had] built into them procedural requirements that asked for greater transparency and created spaces for citizen engagement. For example the use of accountability mechanisms like social accountability, social audits were made mandatory under NREGA. Many of the schemes also talked about the need and importance of participatory bottom up planning.
Yet despite this proliferation of social accountability efforts, there was no analytical framework for understanding and evaluating their effectiveness. It is against that backdrop that AI began this work. The focus of the work was split into two aspects. One strategy was to build a research base and the focus here was to study the unfolding and actual implementation of these new accountability mechanisms, particularly the RTI and social audit. As Yamini would often say, it’s about unpacking the implications of this accountability moment and documenting this new accountability landscape. This was research that tried to understand the citizen-state interactions through these accountability mechanisms, and Yamini was mainly leading that work.
But the second strategy, which is what interested me, was to develop partnerships, to actively engage with the nuts and bolts of implementing social accountability. We started off thinking about education and to do this, we partnered with Pratham and ASER Centre. We initiated an intervention which aimed at strengthening parental participation in elementary schools in a district in Madhya Pradesh through participatory planning. Our work in MP, and in particular that direct engagement with community participation monitoring, meant that every month for a year, I would end up spending time in the field, talking to people, trying to understand what the roles and responsibilities of these parent communities are and trying to develop collectively this ideal plan.
Through that exercise we soon realised that the nuances of government functioning at the local level, whether it’s resource allocation structures, decision making structures, fund flows, end up being a critical bottleneck for effectiveness of these social accountability instruments. In one of the villages that I was working in, the delays in fund flows to schools severely constrained the school’s ability to plan. They never got the money that they had planned for. And as a result, these delays ended up creating a sharp disincentive for citizen engagement and planning. But what was also interesting is that it also undermined the capability of the local administration to respond to the pressures of citizens laying accountability claims. Most of the officials at the local level that we were speaking to, even if they were willing to help, they simply lacked the information or the decision making authority to address the problem and facilitate actions.
This allowed me to get a first hand experience of how implementation works. And in some ways, it was this experience that led us to launch one of our flagship interventions called PAISA.

Yes, and we’ll get to PAISA that in a moment. We’ll also talk about the term accountability. I think the idea that people have in their minds is that money is bottlenecked not by procedural matters but by bureaucratic corruption. What were you finding?

First of all, when the government is making plans or budgets, they’re often making it with incomplete information. Even within government structures, they don’t always have information on what is actually utilised. For the Union government, the second they release money, for them it’s expenditure. But what actually happens with that money is something that particularly then was not captured. There have been some innovations now, but I’m speaking about 2009-2010 where there was very little information about how much of that ₹100 was actually spent and on what?
There was one bottleneck. When you’re trying to create these need-based plans that are done through a bottom-up process, you’re functioning without actually knowing how much money you are going to get in that year and how much you will be able to spend. The problem definitely starts at the planning stage. Once you’ve made the plan, there’s an entire approval process and it’s often the case that what you asked for is not approved. If I’ve asked for ₹100 and ₹60 gets approved, I need to figure out how am I going to divide that 60. If I’ve done my planning right, I would have been able to know exactly where that 40 rupees was meant to go. But if that 40 doesn’t come, how do I rationalise and how do I decide to allocate that money.
We’ve also seen that there are administrative bottlenecks. In one state where we were studying, the sarkari file had to move through 32 desks at the state level alone all seeking approval and trying to capture the corruption question. You’ve got a system of inefficiency in an attempt to capture leakage, but it’s actually leading to a lot more problems in terms of service delivery on the ground.
Some of the decision-making is highly centralised. We have visited schools in Bihar which didn’t have a school building, but there was some order that was passed that every school had to have fire extinguishers. Imagine – a teacher had to lug this fire extinguisher every day back and forth from the school just because someone had passed this order saying that every single school irrespective of need had to get a fire extinguisher. Then you have a situation where money doesn’t come or comes really late. We’ve seen schools where there were annual grants that were meant to come, but either some lag in paperwork or somewhere the bank account numbers didn’t match, so the money just never came in that fiscal year. Or when it came, I’ve seen a number of schools that got money, on the 30th of March or 31st of March, literally one or two days before the financial year is meant to end.
What does the school do? If it doesn’t spend the money, then you’ll be rapped on the knuckles. So the school ends up making decisions of trying to spend, not necessarily on what they need, but on what is faster. I remember going and visiting a large number of schools and what was amazing was that pretty clean looking buildings were regularly getting whitewashed. And when we spoke to people, we realised that that’s one of the easiest ways to spend that money. You whitewash the building so it looks nice and at the same time you are able to show your utilisation. But it still may not be actually what you need because maybe that school didn’t have a boundary wall or didn’t have a toilet facility, but all of those take time.
The other big thing we’ve seen in terms of bottlenecks is that the person who is being held accountable for an action doesn’t always have the authority to undertake that action. We call this the spider web of governance, where you have different people who are on paper meant to be accountable for different activities. But when you start looking at whether they have the authority, the autonomy to make decisions that would enable that accountability, you find that’s not the case. There are a lot of informal networks that are sometimes stronger than what’s written on paper, which impact how services get delivered.

Maybe an outsider’s question here. Why weren’t we – government, or other organisations – tracking this spending already? I don’t know if it’s a naive question, but was it an outcome of the rights based framework that showed up in the late 200s, or is it a matter of capacity?

I won’t say everything is there even now. The fact that we still have governments asking us to help find these bottlenecks and understand what is happening on the ground means there is still a lacuna of information. Part of the reason is that any data below the national level isnt standardised. We haven’t fully valued what all data can be used for, how it can be helped in service delivery, how it can help in planning.
It is, to a large degree, functional capacity. Even now we’ve been studying, for instance data entry operators that collect a lot of data and are responsible for filling information and management information systems which have a lot of ground up granular data. But they don’t have the infrastructure in place. They don’t really fully have computer training in place. So there is a strong capacity gap at the local level, both in terms of data collection, but also data interpretation and data use.
At the national level it’s a question of what we are measuring and what we want to measure. What I’m always surprised about is that the financial side of the story and the physical output and outcome side of the story is rarely analysed together. You’ll have people looking at just the fund flow part and you will have people looking at how many schools were built, how many toilets were constructed. But very few people are actually looking at the process through which money translates into service delivery.
There weren’t too many examples of actual process tracking studies. It was something that was relatively new and it’s been evolving. There’s also a sense that too much information can be dangerous even within the government. So an entire debate in terms of who’s collecting it and for what comes into question as well. Some states are sometimes hesitant to share too much information with the Union government. When we are talking about what’s happening with that ₹100, who’s asking that question? And in some ways, where does that accountability lie?
There were probably some people who would know a little bit about what happened to that ₹100, but that information was never collated nor ever really made publicly available. So you never actually realised that you had the power in terms of using that information about what happens with that money that you have released onwards.

AI has grown tremendously over the years since 2008. And your own role within has evolved quite a bit over that time. Could you give us a sense of how it grew?

It kind of started for me when Yamini asked me to do some research, saying: “Can you tell me how much money actually reaches schools and what is the total education budget? What proportion is going to school bank accounts?” As a young RA, I was of course eager to please my new boss and tried very, very hard to find answers to that question. And I realised that not only was there no work around that, it was impossible to answer. I got training on trying to read budgets. We had a colleague Anit Mukherjee who used to work in the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy who was also partnering with us in the PAISA project and he taught me how to look at budgets and public finance a lot more carefully. I would spend hours in the NIPFP library. Now at least a lot of the state budgets are online. At that time there were 7-8 volumes or maybe even more – thick documents that you have to go through line by line and try to copy onto your laptop. It was very clear that that information just didn’t exist and that’s when we realised that we could fill that gap and try and collect the data.
PAISA started work from when money leaves the government treasury. And to answer this question, we realise that we need to understand government functioning – the links between plans, allocations, expenditures, institutions. How do funds actually flow through the system? What are the links between the needs at the school level and increased expenditures? It was a really exciting time, because, at least in India, public expenditure tracking surveys weren’t very common. Even then, we were very clear that we have to go beyond just expenditure tracking to process tracking.
Expenditure tracking will tell you how much of that ₹100 reaches the ground. Process tracking will also tell you a little bit about the how and the why. The other new aspect we started working on was that we were actually looking at and collecting and analysing district-level data. At that time, the district was never really studied as an implementation unit.
Data, of course, was really, really hard to get. I remember once visiting a government office and collecting some data from them from their computer and then my colleague went a week later and recollected that data, and the two data sets were completely different. This was definitely not a question of corruption. It was just a question of capacity. There were always adjustments that needed to be made and very genuine ones. If money doesn’t come, you can’t stop paying someone’s salary. Money is fungible. So you take it out of a different budget head and then you have to adjust it later. What was really unique for me is we realised that the government itself is not just a monolithic creature. There are people who are very, very real. Who have their own incentives, motivations, and many of them are trying their level best to get things done, but they are also struggling with lack of information, lack of capacity and their own struggles.
Also, for information to be a catalyst for change, people need to be involved in the process of collecting that information. So we did not rely on survey firms. In fact, there were very few survey firms at that time as well, but we would go to NGOs, students and citizens from the same district or the same block and actually get them to collect this information. We were able to get citizens in that sense to participate in governance processes.
One of the best things that we did was partner with ASER Centre in our initial days where we learned a lot. It also allowed us to mobilise a lot of people in the data collection process. In fact, when we were partnering with ASER and coming up with the PAISA national reports, which were part of the ASER report, PAISA became India’s first large-scale citizen-led expenditure tracking survey or process tracking survey. The other thing that we learned through this process was that we hadn’t seen efforts to transfer knowledge on how to do this – how do you create the tools and instruments to generate regular reliable information on service delivery? So we spent a lot of time in our early days making posters, creating ‘how to’ toolkits so that anyone could use this methodology and try their hand at collecting this information bottom up.

For context, for the reader, PAISA is today the flagship research program under AI. It stands for Planning, Allocations and Expenditures, Institutions: Studies in Accountability.

Thank you for remembering the full form. Even now when our state colleagues go to government offices we have to spend some time telling people that we’re not ‘Paisa’ people. Paisa doesn’t mean that we’re going to give you money or take money from you. Since 2010, when PAISA started, we now have full time colleagues in five states of India. And while we started in the education sector, we’ve managed to use that methodology now in different sectors like health, nutrition, sanitation as well as in local governments, at the gram panchayat level.
There were roughly 3 steps: The first was building evidence and research so that was a lot of the desk-based work where we would study the three P’s – the public finance aspect, the processes and the people. Next was going a little deeper into the administrative data that was available, but also coming up with these tactical scalable tools where we could actually collect information on gaps that we saw. This was also accompanied by the capacity building initiative to empower citizens, by getting them to be part of this tracking exercise and use that data collected themselves as well. And then finally, we shared that information not just with the highest levels of bureaucracy, but through the government hierarchy. I think again that was something that was a little unique. Earlier, there was this feeling that a lot of the policy research rests in Delhi or at the state level. But we used to go and speak to district magistrates to cluster resource coordinators to block level officials to school management committees, sharing with them findings.
I remember in December 2015 we had conducted this large-scale PAISA survey where we had combined different schemes – ICDS, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Swachh Bharat Mission. This is after 2014 when the Finance Commission had talked about more untied resources. So we wanted to understand what’s happening with schemes in particular. But when we went to the ground where it found very pretty much similar things that we had seen before, which was the structure challenges of the public finance system, who’s not receiving their money or not receiving it on time. Instead of presenting a report to the government, we ran something that we called PAISA dialogues.
The idea of a dialogue was that instead of circulating reports, we would try to share research findings through a dialogue with certain block-level implementing officials. The overall objective was to leverage research findings to catalyse the discussion on how to improve implementation. So between May and December 2016 we held a total of 40 such PAISA dialogues across ten districts in which we were working. And it was amazing. The kind of response that we got, it forced us also to ask ourselves: Where does our role end? Does it end in just identifying the problem? Or does it also mean that we need to force ourselves to really think about what possible solutions could be? That was a big journey for PAISA. We have since then moved towards articulating the Accountability Initiative’s vision from just accountability to responsive governance.

One of your key insights is that it is not just a matter of us outside the government not fully understanding these processes, but many people within government not having the information either. How have governments at different levels responded to PAISA and your work?

I think we’ve been lucky that there’s been limited scepticism. A senior official from the Elementary Education Department in Purnia in Bihar summarised what we do better than we could:
“The flow of funds through various levels of the government is very similar to the flow of blood from the heart to various parts of the body. If there’s a blockage somewhere, it affects the entire body. So in that regard, PAISA studies do the work of a physician.”

That is what we had hoped would happen. To diagnose where that blockage is and share that with the government because at the end of the day, all of us are trying to ensure that service delivery improves. The intent was never to point fingers, but literally emphasising that this is our problem, not just yours, and so that we can have a meaningful discussion on solutions as well.
I remember relatively early on in 2013, we got a request from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, now the Ministry of Education. They came and asked us to undertake a PAISA study for the midday meal scheme. And I remember being really confused. I had gained confidence by then to actually ask government officers questions. So I remember asking him, ‘Sir, you already have this information or even if you don’t, it’s so easy for you sitting in the ministry to collect this information. You don’t need us. You could literally pick up the phone and try and get all the other officers to collect it for you.’ And I remember so clearly that he turned around and said to me, ‘as an administrator and a researcher, we have very, very different lenses and we’re able to gather different sets of information.’ And I remember him also saying that ‘I don’t just want to hear information that people think I want to hear, but I want to be proved right or proved wrong in my own assumptions.’
That has been really heartening. Even when governments often have access to this information, they have seen value in the kind of work that we’ve been doing. I remember again a district administration coming to us when there was a lot of pressure to meet the Swachh Bharat Mission target of October 2019. There were a lot of construction activities happening on the ground. While the SBM approach talked about it being a lot more demand-led focus on behaviour change, at that time, it was the last year of the mission, a lot of the focus was just supply and infrastructure. This official asked us to use our techniques to ground truth through actual observations whether toilets are there, whether they are being used, but also to understand from the service providers what they thought about this campaign. I really liked the fact that he was curious to know actually what the CEOs (Chief Executive Officer), the gram panchayat sarpanch to the block development officer, what they actually thought about the campaign. To what extent did they believe in it and how it had impacted their work.
It’s much easier for people to open up when it’s not your boss asking you the question, but someone who is independent, going in as a researcher, having conversations with people about what they do and how they feel and their motivations, their incentive, their means, their opportunities. It’s amazing how receptive the government has been for us to kind of come in and help them either think through their own research questions, but also validate, verify and question.

Over the years, you’ve moved away from the term accountability and now see your mission as being that of advocating ‘Responsive Governance.’ Could you tell us more about that shift?

Throughout our journey, we were constantly using the learnings to further develop our theory of change. The critical point for me personally came in 2017 when I took over. In 2018, we would have completed 10 years of our existence and an important question that we were asking ourselves was, where do we go from here? We’ve had a successful 10 years, but do we want to do more of the same? How do we scale our impact? When we started doing our own diagnosis, we realised our strengths was our research on understanding the nuts and bolts of implementation. But there was this missing gap between researchers and implementers. In our team also there was always this little bit of a friction saying, ‘Should we just stop at saying these are the bottlenecks, or should we push ourselves to think of solutions?’ And most of the research organisations around us were focused more on the academic and policy circles. And then there were the CSOs [Civil Society Organisations], which often didn’t have the tools to use that evidence or the research, nor did they know how to actually navigate the government structures or even constructively work with the government. We felt like there was this gap and we were kind of one foot here and one foot there.

Around the same time there was a growing body of work that said, for citizens to effectively demand services, it’s not enough to just give information on rights and entitlements. It’s important for them to learn how to navigate government systems. I remember works by Jonathan Fox and others called ‘doing accountability differently’ and there were several others, who said that for social accountability interventions to actually succeed, you need practitioners to have the tools to navigate the local context better. But you also need the state to not be thought of as this monolithic creature.

That’s when we rearticulated our vision towards responsive governance. We used the social accountability definition and applied it to our work, which rests on 3 pillars:

• An empowered citizenry that is able to articulate their voice
• Informed decision makers that are able to develop policies aligned with that citizen voice
• The right service providers who have the right incentives to be able to do their jobs well

Using that we realised that it’s really important for us to work across all three stakeholders. So we provide both government and citizens with access to information on schemes, government functioning, bottlenecks and implementation. For citizens, we also figured out that it’s important to provide them with tools to allow them to navigate the local state. We work with service providers to build their capacity and recognise those spaces for increased citizen engagement. And then of course, we also work with governments in identifying the root causes for implementation failures. We advocate with them for opening up more spaces for citizen engagement.

It was a journey that was happening globally as well, but I think we saw it in our own work: The need and importance of working across different levels and not just thinking of ourselves only as a research group or implementation group, but bridging that gap between research and practice required us to redefine ourselves as working on responsive governance.

So with that shift, could you give us a sense of everything that the initiative is doing today, PAISA and beyond?

One is of course research. PAISA is a methodology and a tool. There are times when we focus more on the administration side, such as capacity, there are times when we focus more on the expenditure side, but our core goal is to continue looking at process tracking studies. Another big flagship project for us is the budget briefs. Again, it started literally from when Yamini asked me that question about understanding how much money is going to different things in the education sector. Eventually I was able to create a 2-3 page brief. We felt that the difficulty in trying to collate that information, which was not available in one place, but required going through multiple government websites. It required detection work where RTI responses versus what was on the website versus parliamentary answers all had very, very different data even for the same year. Having gone through all that trouble, we felt like it was useful to share that with the world, and particularly with Members of Parliament.

We felt if we could share what we had learned at least for the large schemes with Members of Parliament and other decision makers, maybe it would help them get access to knowledge that may not have been easy for them to otherwise access. So we started the budget briefs. This year was our anniversary year, where we completed 15 years of budget briefs. Every single year, come rain, come hail, we’ve produced our budget briefs. This year, in fact, we did an anniversary issue where we were able to look at welfare trends over the last 15 years in the budget analysis.

The second thing that I think we’ve expanded on in the last few years is our capacity building courses. A lot of this comes from the fact that we spend a lot of time understanding how public finance and administration works and we felt it makes sense to then share that information with others. So we have one course called ‘Understanding state capability’ which is in an experiential learning program tailored for development professionals and students to unpack India’s very, very complicated governance structures. The idea is that it will build a community of impactful leaders.

Since we have colleagues in five states, we realised that we needed to initially build their capacity as well. They all had a lot of experience undertaking surveys but they didn’t necessarily have the theoretical background of government structures, of budgets, of fiscal federalism or even of social accountability. So we ended up training them first and now they run this program called Hum aur Hamaari Sarkaar. The idea here is that we try and teach civil society organisation leaders and practitioners on the ground. Our hope is that by doing this course of trying to unpack this black box of what is sarkar and what is implementation, they can design appropriate interventions. We’ve had different organisations from Pratham, Piramal, some very, very small grassroots organisations also taking our courses. These courses are delivered in Hindi and we try and hold them in Tier 2 cities. We’ve been very conscious that it’s not just the translation of the English program or a translation of research, but it’s actually trying to see what is most useful for different people who are going to be taking the course.

Then we have a course called Hum Sarkaari Adhikari, which is for local government actors and institutions. So Panchayat secretaries, sarpanches, ward members. We also developed a tool which was earlier a part of our training program called Mapping Governance. In a federal structure like India where you have decentralisation, elected representatives, bureaucrats, quasi-government bodies, all working together, understanding how services are delivered is a challenge in itself. There are informal and formal lines of reporting and accountability. We try to map out this governance. It’s an interactive visual tool that gives a holistic understanding of social sector programs.

While we were always one for convening and having discussions and dialogues, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I had co-conceptualised, with a friend and colleague from Pratham, the need for a platform for development partners to come together. This was during COVID-19 where there were so many organisations that were doing amazing work, but a lot of the existing platforms focused very much on service delivery on the ground. But what were the research organizations doing? What were the implementing organisations doing or the funding organizations doing? So we started this platform called PULSE for development and again it has a long name. It stands for Platform to Understand, Learn, Share and Exchange (PULSE) for development. It was a resource sharing platform initially. In 2022 as the pandemic waned, we made a conscious decision to include within it longstanding development issues and shift the focus towards the attainment of the SDGs. In this present form, PULSE for development has become a community of practice where we have cross-pollination of knowledge. There are nearly 100 member organisations and almost 200 individual practitioners. This includes even young IAS and state officers as well as implementing organisations, research organisations, think tanks, funders, grassroots organisations. The idea is to have an interdisciplinary pan-India community of practice and we cover 16 themes and we often have regular coffee chats on critical issues that different organisations are working on.

It’s been really interesting. I remember one session where we had different government officers who work in difficult geographies, but at the same time very, very different states. So someone from Arunachal Pradesh, someone from Maharashtra, someone from Odisha. But when they started talking about some of the challenges that they were all facing, you could see this exchange of ideas of ‘Oh, that’s what you’ve done. That sounds really interesting. Would love to learn more about it.’ So we think of ourselves as kind of reducing the learning curve for organisations and government by being this repository, but also facilitating interaction and engagement between government on one hand and different types of organisations on another.

What misconceptions about your area of work — accountability, public finance, welfare spending and studying government — do you find yourself having to correct all the time, whether it’s from the lay public or even fellow scholars or people within government?

I think the biggest misconception on accountability is that it’s a fault finding mission. I remember sitting in a government meeting where they heard the name of the initiative and said, ‘Oh then I have to be careful about what I say’ and when they learned what we do they said ‘Oh you mean the good kind of accountability.’ And I didn’t actually know that there was a bad kind of accountability. It’s not a fault finding mission. It’s also not just external. It’s as much internal. It’s accountability to ourselves, to be able to do our jobs to the best of our ability. Also, it’s not just vertical, it’s not that I’m accountable just to my boss. I’m equally accountable to people below me, but it’s also equally horizontal. How do I interact with my peers and with other stakeholders?

I think the other misconception is that we’re not all embedded in this complex set of relationships. Accountability is complicated and so is governance. There is no black and white, there’s often a lot of grey. That’s one big misconception about our work that I wanted to repeat. It’s not a fault finding mission. It’s not someone externally trying to lay blame and point fingers at all.

On public finance, one of the biggest misconceptions was that it’s a very technical skill or it’s a very technical concept. But I think, since I hadn’t actually got formal training on public finance and literally learned on the job, I’ve learned that using a public finance lens can tell you a lot about people, about institutions, about federal relations, whether it’s Centre-state dynamics or state and local dynamics, it tells you a lot about who has decision-making power based on the concentration of financing on funding. It’s actually super interesting and it’s a lens that you can use in your work. It’s not just data crunching. It’s not just numbers. It’s not just technical skills. There are times when you do the mundane data crunching and more than that data entry, but it’s when you’re trying to look at the stories and what it’s telling you, that’s where it’s definitely super exciting and can get really interesting.

That leads into my next question, which is what advice would you have to young scholars entering this space? What tools or lenses or approaches that you found most useful would you recommend to someone who’s entering this area?

The world now is so competitive that the younger generation is already often looking for specialisation. I see young 20 year olds who are, at least in their CVs, specialists in different skills. My advice would be there’s always time to pick specialties, but initially you should just be building your knowledge and understanding your issue through different lenses. If I go back to the question of how I started, where my history background actually helped me understand economics better and led me to a public policy world, I do think that that liberal arts degree — even studying philosophy — all of these are things that you never know when you’ll use it.

The other thing that I would say is listening to different scholars speaking across topics really helps and I think this has been one of the great parts of CPR where we have people across different walks of life talking about different aspects of their work.

I do think and maybe that’s my bias a little bit is that in today’s day and age some data proficiency is useful. It helped me become more structured in my argument, because the second you’re working with data, it forces you to be more organised, be more structured, and also not take anything at face value because you could slice the data in different ways and you could get very different answers and results. For all of those aspects, I would say some understanding of data — and I don’t just mean quantitative data, it could even be qualitative data — is really useful.

Yeah, I think I’d be happy to direct anyone who’s working in this space to get a little bit of philosophy every once in a while. Are there specific pieces for AI or of your own work you’d like to direct people to as either things that encapsulate your work, or that you think would be valuable for someone who’s interested in this conversation?

Definitely, budget briefs and the 15 year trends.

The other piece would be one I did with Yamini Aiyar, called ‘The centralization vs decentralization tug of war and the emerging narrative of fiscal federalism for social policy in India’. In some ways it encompasses some of the inherent tensions in our fiscal federal framework. It gave me the opportunity to both use my quant skills, but it was fascinating because I got a chance to talk to finance officers and planning officers across different states.

We did one for CPR policy challenges, which forced me to look at everything that I have understood on centrally sponsored schemes and social policy and put it together in one place. That may be an easy snapshot summary of some of the lessons that we have learned through our PAISA work and through our other work at Accountability initiative.

What 3 works have influenced you personally?

This is a very difficult question because I think at different avatars and different times of my life, I’ve been influenced by different works. So I will cheat and not just stick to three.

In college I was deeply affected by Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power. That pushed me to work [and] wanting to work in the development sector a lot more. Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson and Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen — all of these propelled me into the public policy space. When I joined CPR on accountability, Jonathan Fox’s work — where he explains the sandwich strategy — we use that in our courses as well, so that’s been really influential for us.

As someone who is starting to understand intergovernmental fiscal transfers I would highly recommend Robin Broadway and Anwar Shah’s book, Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers, Principles and Practice. It’s very long, but it’s got nice, clean sections, so you can pick and choose what you want to do. It’s like an encyclopaedia of everything you want to know on intergovernmental fiscal transfers. Rethinking Public Institutions in India by Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav was again super interesting. What I like about edited volumes is that you get to learn a lot from very, very different perspectives.

For someone who’s just starting out and doesn’t necessarily want to get too technical, I think there are a large number of books where you get a glimpse of the welfare state or glimpse of public policy without necessarily feeling like you’re studying it. Recent works like M Rajshekhar’s Despite the State: Why India Lets Its People Down and How They Cope was really fascinating and similarly I think Ajay Shah and Vijay Kelkar’s In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy. It’s also a course now on Coursera. I can go on, but I’ll stop now.

This month on CPR Perspectives – our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary – we bring you a conversation with Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at CPR, where he also leads the Initiative on Cities, Economy and Society.

Mukhopadhyay is one of the foremost experts on urbanisation, although his expertise extends well beyond the subject. He has been at CPR since 2006, after having been on the founding team at the Infrastructure Development Finance Company, and following stints at the Export Import Bank of India and the World Bank in Washington.

Over his wide-ranging career, Mukhopadhyay has introduced important concepts like ‘Subaltern Urbanisation’, referring to vibrant smaller settlements that provide a very different picture of urbanisation than the one we get from India’s mega-cities; brought careful scrutiny to India’s Special Economic Zones; studied the all-important question of informal work; and played key roles on a number of important government panels.

He was chair of the Working Group on Migration, Government of India and member of the High Level Railway Restructuring Committee, Ministry of Railways and of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. Previously, he has been associated with the Committee on Allocation of Natural Resources and with the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Infrastructure.

In this conversation, Rohan Venkat spoke to Mukhopadhyay about choosing to work on policy in India, how being at CPR has allowed him to work across a wide range of subjects and why it is important to think about government policies as a combination of safety nets and spring boards. We also spoke about how India could be an exemplar when it comes to urban policy, why governments ought to stay away from ‘magic bullet solutions’ and why younger scholars should always balance quantitative analysis with a more thoughtful approach to processes and outcomes.

If you prefer audio, this conversation is also available as a podcast here.

And if you missed our first interview, with Navroz Dubash, read here.

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(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity).

You’ve had a long, distinguished career in public policy. You began teaching at Delhi University way back in 1986 and you’ve worked in the policy field in many different roles ever since. I’d like to take you back a little bit to how you got started. Did you always know you wanted to come into this space or was it something that you just fell into?

I think policy is something you fall into, especially my generation. At Delhi School of Economics, people like Sukhamoy Chakravarty were iconic but I think my first brush with “policy” kind of work was after I had finished all the requirements for my PhD at NYU a little early and did not have a clear idea about my thesis. I was hanging around my department doing nothing. So they asked me to go out and find a job, which I did and it was at the World Bank in Washington, in their trade policy division.

It gave me a sense of what that kind of world is – also at a time when the Berlin wall had just come down. It was full of incredible people – very committed, very smart – but somehow as an organisation it seemed much less than the sum of its parts. That led me to realise that organisations are important in how they bring people together.

I went back to NYU after a year and a bit with my thesis idea, and found my advisor, Andres Velasco, who later went on to be the Finance Minister of Chile (come to think of it, maybe that too was a sub-conscious policy push!). During my time, NYU economics was a very intellectually diverse place, not just due to legends like Leontief. It was the hub for Austrian economics, it had Marxist economists, some of the top neo-classical economists, game-theorists, econometricians – faculty from business and political science joined our talks and the NBER was on the top floor. The student body, and thus many of my friends, was also incredibly diverse, literally global. And New York City elected its first black mayor. I think my time at NYU and New York made me very comfortable with diversity of all kinds.

I knew I was definitely going to come back to India almost immediately after my PhD. My partner, Kavita, was even more sure and consequently we landed up in Bangalore, where my task was to set up a learning centre at the EXIM bank of India which was itself not too old of an organisation at that point. The [question we were tackling] was ‘how do you get small and medium enterprises to engage with the global market?’ So I dived into real-world problems quite quickly – both in terms of insights into how governments think and fairly deep immersion into how industry thinks.

Next, I was offered a position to start up, along with Atul Prakash, the Delhi office of IDFC, which was then a fledgling organisation tasked with bringing private infrastructure into India. That was 1998 and I have been here in Delhi ever since. I think the term at IDFC was very exciting because India was creating new things at the time. We were at ground zero and actively engaged with actual policy decisions, such as being the secretariat to the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Infrastructure which kick-started our investment in highways, ports and airports, on one hand and re-negotiating Dabhol on the other. So you did get inside access and there were a lot of relationships built up in those years, within and outside government. I learnt a lot about financing and risk and got to work closely with people like Deepak Parekh, Nasser Munjee and Urjit Patel.

My fundamental takeaway from that was how honest, in terms of being true to purpose, the Indian bureaucracy was. They might make mistakes, they might take the wrong decisions, but these were mostly men and women trying their level best to actually solve the task that they were given. There is that fundamental streak which I think has held our nation in good stead, that for the most part these are just hard working people trying to do an honest day’s work. And it’s that which for me has bred a certain kind of optimism. When I approach policy now, I do not automatically jump to cynical explanations for why things aren’t happening, because that hasn’t been my experience.

That has also helped me well, since I joined CPR almost 17 years ago, it’s pretty easy to get discouraged but that helps one keep going. So yes, very much falling into it, but I was lucky to be able to swim with the current and end up in where I am now.

Maybe before we get specifically to what brought you to CPR and your 17 years there since, before that you had time in both the US and in India and I’m curious how that shaped you. I wonder how that played for you in your decision of where to be within the policy space?

For me, I think it was easy. I don’t think I ever contemplated staying back [in the US]. I met my partner there and she was as committed – perhaps more so – to getting back. I wasn’t ever thinking of anything else. But even retrospectively, [if I had stayed there] there would have been somebody else in my place doing the stuff that I did and they would have also made their contributions and the world would have most probably not looked very much different.

So I don’t think my being where I am at any given point in time has changed anything anywhere but one has got the feeling that one has been able to contribute a fair bit to critical decisions that have been made in this country. I don’t think that would have been the case were I back in the United States. I might have had a different career, but I doubt I would’ve had that kind of satisfaction. The time that we have been here are times when India has made step changes. It has made critical decisions. The US, just simply by where they are in their stage of development, is not a country that’s going to make step changes.

Therefore the chance to be part of those changes [lies] much more here in India. If you’re excited about being part of those kinds of things, then this is a nice place to be. But different objectives drive different people. So, there are people who are excited about discovering certain mathematical relationships that make breakthroughs in a particular area and for those kinds of things one might be better off in the US. So there are differences. It is more or less dependent on what is driving you.

I think people would dispute your characterisation of yourself and your work. But it also strikes me that those early years did coincide with India’s economy opening up and a lot of change here and as you say, this continues to be a place where significant things are happening. You mentioned – whether it was EXIM bank or IDFC – that there were interesting opportunities for the India story. So, what brought you then to CPR in 2006?

IDFC listed in 2005 and for me at that point the kind of role it was going to play was not as exciting anymore. I’d been there for almost seven years by then. [I] thought about going back to academia. I had earlier spent over a year at IIM Ahmedabad, on leave from IDFC. In fact, my first foray back was with XLRI in Jamshedpur where I was teaching immediately after I left IDFC. And then I even spent a whole year in Sri Lanka with a consulting firm, working with the government of Sri Lanka on their highways programme.

But when [former CPR President and Chief Executive] Pratap [Bhanu Mehta] asked [me to join], what was exciting was the ability to deploy the skills that one had picked up – the engagement with policy – with the freedom of academia, that you were answerable only to yourself. At that time I had done a lot of stuff with infrastructure, privatisation, and I was looking for a new space and one of the issues that came up was [India’s] urban transformation. I had a sense that we weren’t thinking hard enough about it. Given the scale of the issue, there was, I thought, space for some new thinking in that area. With Mr KC Sivaramakrishnan, former Secretary Urban Development, who was then the chair of CPR, it seemed to be an interesting place to come and try it out and that’s what it turned out to be.

It’s a space that has kept me intellectually excited, engaged and enables you to have that same feeling of contribution and more importantly – and I think that’s characteristic of CPR – where you have the space and time to try and thoroughly understand the problem. You’re not firing from the hip. When you are taking positions, it’s a position that comes out of work over a considerable period of time. And it may not be directly related, but because you have put in that effort, you’re able to respond to different questions across a wide range. At that point in time, and in fact even 3 today, I don’t see any other institute like CPR, and that’s a pity, because you want more institutes like CPR to be out there.

Most important at CPR are your colleagues. It is what makes CPR what it is. Because you are in an atmosphere where everybody is interested in trying to do something. They’re all smart people with whom you can have very productive conversations and in all these years, across so many colleagues, maybe very few instances where I might think of people who are not genuinely collegial. The level of rancour is so amazingly low, at least in my own personal experience. You might think with so many smart people floating around that all would be at each other’s throats, but no. These are all people who are very self-assured. Very few of them have stuff that they are trying to prove or show off to anybody and therefore there are a lot of people generally at peace with themselves. And thus, people with whom one can really have very productive discussions.

For those who may not be as familiar, I want to pick on one thing you mentioned at the start about choosing CPR as being a choice between the sort of work you were doing at IDFC or at the EXIM Bank versus going into academia proper. You said CPR offered you to do something that was a bit different from either of those options, what is the difference? What do you get to do here that’s not the same as being at a university?

At the university you also have to teach, which is important, I think it’s productive. [But] also, it does take up a lot of your time, so there’s only so much other research that you can do and usually that’s why university professors end up being very focused. The other thing with academia is they’re also within departments so you would stay within particular disciplines. What CPR allows you is like full-time research, which is exciting. You sometimes miss the ability of bouncing your ideas off young minds, which is what university professors get to do and I think are the better for it. But at the same time, you do have a lot more time to define what you want to do.

It’s a place where you can actually pick the kind of work that you want to do and secondly, you’re not constrained by discipline. So you have sociologists, anthropologists, climate scientists, doctors, engineers, strategy and IR people, economists, political scientists – across the range. It’s exhilarating to have that kind of multidimensional conversation – to be able to see what exactly might be a problem and how one could get around it. Universities have been trying to create these kinds of multidisciplinary spaces for a long time, but they haven’t succeeded very much.

Maybe just to make that a bit more concrete, you work across a diverse range of subjects. I think you’d be known for your work on urban policy or on SEZs, but over the last couple of years you’ve also had time to do work on COVID. If you could give me an example of how being here has allowed you to go down different paths?

For example, these are some of things I have been involved in over the last fifteen years.

Soon after I joined, I was involved in restructuring Delhi’s bus system – visible in the orange buses that ply in Delhi today. It innovated a new contractual structure – a gross cost contract – that is now being used nationally – almost fifteen years later – in the various contracts for electric public bus transport under the FAME scheme of the Government of India. The work of SEZs began shortly after – along with Loraine Kennedy and Rob Jenkins, which built on work at IDFC.

When I joined CPR, I was also part of a very innovative fellowship of the India China Institute of the New School – which helped me look closely at China, which I had begun doing while working on SEZs in IDFC. Soon after, via CPR, I fortunately, also got the opportunity to work with IDDRI in France and the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) on urban environmental issues and then later participate in tripartite dialogues with Chinese and American think tanks – all of which, I think, has helped me understand China better.

There was also another bit of early work that has gained prominence recently. In 2008, Devesh Kapur, Arvind Subramanian, who later went on to become our Chief Economic Adviser, and I 4 advanced the idea of direct cash transfers to people. As digital payments technologies and identity programs have evolved, this is catching on – perhaps more than it should. It is an interesting look at how ideas move through the system.

And, building on my past, I also played a role in formalising the definition of infrastructure in India. I was then able to work with the CCSAP – Committee for Consultations on the Situation in Andhra Pradesh, involved in recommending whether or not Andhra Pradesh should remain a state or should be divided into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. One of our tasks was to try and understand how to think about the city of Hyderabad in the context of the state bifurcation. So that was an urban problem in a much wider context.

Then there was the work that one did with the Committee for Allocation of Natural Resources, chaired by Shri Ashok Chawla, with the Cabinet Secretariat, which then looked across natural resources of India, whether it was things like telecom spectrum, coal, to urban land, to forest, to minerals – across that range.

Later one was involved in the restructuring of the Indian Railways. The railways have been in the news recently for being one of the drivers of capital expenditure in India etc. One of the things that we had actually recommended which got accepted was discontinuing the practice of a separate railway budget – which had been in place for over 90 years at that point in time. It is again something different than for those who might have just been working in the urban space.

Then there was of course the urban work. Following on from SEZs, was subaltern urbanisation, a framework, we, i.e., Marie-Helene, Eric Denis and I put forward, arguing for looking at urban transformations beyond the big cities. Simultaneously, one was involved with KC Sivaramakrishnan, who was working on megacity governance and on central schemes like JNNURM. Also, we, Patrick Heller and I along with a really bright group of young scholars, dived deep into Delhi – at its various cities, not historically, but contemporaneously – how disparate the lives of people were, depending on where you lived.

I was also fortunate to be the chair of an inter-ministerial working group across different ministries on migration in 2016. A lot of those findings, fortunately, were helpful when we were confronted with the COVID migration story. This, again, followed on from a project, funded by the Tata Trusts, with Chandrasekhar and Mukta Naik, which worked with various civil society organisations who worked on migration.

And just before, and a bit during CoVID, we were able to bring together a consortium of major institutions working on urbanisation in India, IIHS, TISS, Hyderabad Urban Labs, in a multi-year project to look at how urban knowledge is conceptualised in India. And as you mentioned, the work on COVID, I found myself analysing health and infection data for states, and for the first time publishing in a medical journal with colleagues within CPR and outside CPR. It is that kind of breadth I wouldn’t find [elsewhere].

I did mention the fact that I miss students, but one of my big satisfactions at CPR, is if I look at the younger people one has worked with, a number of them went on to do their PhDs at some of the best institutes in the world. So if we were in some sense a college with a placement record, we would do pretty well. People who I have worked with at CPR, in our group [have gone on to] Kings College in London, to Harvard, MIT, Yale, Brown, Berkeley, NYU, Sciences Po. It is also exciting to see people come in, spend their time here and then move on to other institutions, even in India like those who have finished their thesis from places like IIT-Delhi and JNU and so on.

It gives us affirmation that the people who spend their time here do actually end up adding to themselves in a manner that they can compete with the best in the world. That’s useful confirmation. It’s also the kind of people we build at CPR because it’s important to us that the spirit of inquiry that drives the institution is passed on to younger people who flow through here.

So at both those levels in terms of the breadth as well as in this affirmation of the kind of places that people end up in, I don’t think one would have had exactly that kind of experience in an academic institution.

If I could then turn the focus from the institution to your work. How do you see your role today at CPR? What is it that animates your days?

My current hobby horse is to try and argue for fare-free public transport. I believe that it is fiscally possible and ecologically responsible to have fare-free buses across all Indian cities, and it is possible to finance this with a relatively small impost on personal cars. Aside from that, more of my time right now is acting as a sounding board to help others figure out whether or not they’re asking the right questions – and making sure that the kinds of work one was able to do at CPR, others will be able to do once one leaves the place.

I was fortunate that I stepped into CPR a time when someone like Mr KC Sivaramakrishnan was there, with the kind of administrative experience, natural curiosity and intellectual bandwidth that he had. And it becomes incumbent, while I don’t think I’m anywhere in that space, to try and ensure that when one moves on, people at CPR are able to ask questions and they’re able to continue with the spirit of curiosity.

I think increasingly also in certain respects, one is working directly with government to take on some critical pieces where one can possibly add value because of one’s experience in interacting with government per se and understanding how governments works – which someone who may be a much better researcher than I am, may not have had that opportunity to engage with. So [I] can then act as a catalyst to make those policy engagements richer and productive, one hopes.

One of the things that you say is unique in this institution that you’re not necessarily able to see elsewhere in India is the ability to stick to a question over a period of time, to really attack it from multiple angles and spend time understanding it. What is that question for you? My assumption is that the answer to this is something to do with cities, but how would you define that question for you?

Different things. One on which perhaps I should spend more time is the notion of informal work and informality more generally – one of my favourite projects at CPR, with Anvita Arora and others, was on the auto-rickshaw routes of Kolkata – an excellent example of formalised informal transport. The second is of course, both within the academic discourse nationally and internationally when it comes to India and even within the discourse in policy circles in India, I think, as I said earlier, made the case that one should be looking at not just the large mega cities.

They are very important – Mumbai and Delhi and Bangalore and even Chennai and Kolkata. But there is a growing number of people who live in mid-size cities and some living in even smaller cities where a lot of transformation is happening and where there is a lot of vibrancy that powers the Indian economic growth engine. India fortunately is not just a double-engine story. It is a story of multiple small engines that work across different spaces. These engines have always existed and that is what makes India resilient. Just like migrants have always existed, and have always powered our cities and it’s only during COVID that they came into prominence. I think we have helped a little bit in making sure that these spaces, the mid-sized cities and the smallest cities, have the day in the sun and are considered more seriously within the policy discourse.

That’s one of the things that I would say began fragmentarily when I think we started off with this project I mentioned earlier, that we called somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘Subaltern Urbanisation, about 10 or so years ago. Lots of people are now taking that framework forward.

On things like SEZs – I wish I were wrong – but most of my work in that space has largely been to throw cold water. Those are the kinds of things that don’t give you much happiness because you absolutely do want things to happen that will make India move on. I remember a former chief 6 economic adviser saying that the job of the Finance Ministry is not really to get anything right, they just have to make sure the wrong ideas don’t take root and the right ideas will take root as long as you have space for them anyway, so it depends on how you think about what your role in the system is.

One of the things that I like to ask scholars and experts is what misconceptions about your field in particular that you see the media, but also fellow scholars, students, the lay public getting wrong? I see in some of your work, particularly on the idea that Indian cities are big engines of growth, that India is migrating to its cities, that what we need are smarter cities, a through-line of trying to debunk some of these…

Not much of that has happened. Most of our migration is to the next district over in a rural area. That’s one of the things. It’s not as if hordes of people are leaving our villages and dropping into our cities, which is how some people sort of tend to characterise it. Somehow for all the work that’s been done on this, people still seem to think of migration as something bad. It is this old ‘do-bigha zameen’ kind of characterisation, that somehow migrants are leaving their space not out of choice but because they are being forced to leave, pushed out rather than being pulled into other spaces. Migration as an act of desperation, not an act of seizing opportunity.

And I don’t want to belittle a significant – though to my mind a minority – chunk where that is true. People are being pushed out, it is an act of desperation, and, especially with climate change, it is possible there would be more of that story. But for the large part migration is essentially about seizing opportunities though we may not be able to relate to those opportunities.

It’s hard to relate to a Mumbai taxi driver who goes home to a shared bed – a 12-hour shift where somebody else uses the bed [when he’s working]. But that person is doing that because he’s minimising the expenses in the city, maximising the surplus and sending money back to the village, where his child is then getting educated, intriguingly enough, in a pretty good quality school, that may have sprung up not too far from where he lives in his village. And that child may then have a completely different life and different set of choices and chances, which he is able to see. His being in Mumbai allows him to see the kinds of opportunities that people with certain types of human capital have. And yes, this person will not get the same opportunities as somebody who’s going to Bombay Scottish because life is not just about human capital, it’s also about social capital.

But it can be a step change. For him to go through what looks like a dismal life, to do what he sees as enabling his children to seize opportunities that he could never have dreamt of, that kind of transformation is not what people see. They see the squalor, they see the person in that structure and often times, one could do much better. There’s no reason why that person should not be living better, why housing costs should be the way they are, but that’s true even if it’s in New York… Could we do much better? Yes, is everything in Mumbai housing, right? No. But it isn’t all about the stress.

It is this [question], how do we create conditions that people feel empowered enough to seize opportunity. How can we make those conditions happen? That’s fundamentally what drives the way I think about development and change in India.

Many of my colleagues were excited about NREGS, but to me, it was never about [whether] it reduced migration or even being skeptical about whether they build real assets. A safety net is important. But I prefer to think about springboards. It’s important for government to focus on both, because only with safety nets, you’re not going to get very far. But it’s very difficult for people to jump off springboards unless they’re aware that there is a net underneath in case they fall.

It’s this balance between safety nets and springboards in government policy, that’s fundamentally what you’re looking for.

Tell us a little more about subaltern urbanisation.

The most striking story I always tell about policy change in India is of Vajpayee’s Prime Minister’s Task Force on Infrastructure, which essentially started off from his vision of building the north-south, east-west corridors, from Saurashtra to Silchar, Kashmir to Kanyakumari. In order to finance that and the Golden Quadrilateral, they started to levy this cess on fuel. There was a lot of pushback, especially from farmers who said ‘why should we pay for this extra money on diesel’? ‘We don’t use those fancy highways that you’re talking about. So what is in it for us?’

To me, it was an astounding act of political imagination from the then Prime Minister, Mr Vajpayee who basically said, ‘half, the money that comes in from the diesel cess will go to build rural roads’. That was the beginning of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, the Prime Minister’s rural roads programme. And now there are 700,000 kilometres of rural roads across this country and I think it has been the most transformative infrastructure intervention done by any government, definitely in the last 30 years, post 1991, in trying to ensure that this country grows together.

What that enabled, let’s say, for Gopalpur, a small census town near a place like Balurghat in North Bengal, with a small dahi making industry, is that it suddenly expanded its market. Now you could reach Malda, you could reach Balurghat, within an hour just because you had this extra connectivity. This changed the incomes of people. This builds up demands for transport, builds up demand for education, and varieties of other changes come in. [This] is what we call in-situ urbanisation, the transformation of work, where you are, without moving.

But it also enables somebody who is thinking, ‘should I take my chances and go off to Malda or Siliguri or even Kolkata or Delhi?’, it enables a person to take that leap because they now have enough of a surplus at home that if that bet doesn’t work out, they’re not going to be left completely high and dry.

Now we have come to a situation where only about 2/3rd of our people in rural areas are actually on the farm or maybe less. Half our rural income is from non-farm activities. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t move, because what we know from migration is that the guys who move are often at the upper end of the scale because mobility requires resources. What this does is push people over the threshold whereby they think it’s okay to try. So in-situ urbanisation and the old-fashioned urbanisation through migration, both are forces that could very well work in tandem, they’re not inimical to each other.

And it’s this kind of multifaceted process of transformation that is important for people to understand, because we often tend to think much more linearly in silos. At the level of the household, there are people trying out different strategies because it’s a complex world. We have a place like Tiruchengode, which is a small-town in Tamil Nadu which basically made its name making drilling rigs. They reengineered trucks, refitted them, strengthened them, turned them into drilling rig machines and they ended up not only building a drilling rig business across the region and across South India but, given the robustness of their technology and their cost, they became able to export to places in Africa and others looking for much more rugged, lower cost solutions. And this is out of innovation that happened in a relatively small town.

This is not unusual. If I look at China, you have exactly the same kind of thing. A major city like Yiwu, which is the beginning of the railway to Europe, is essentially a marketplace. The city aggregates a whole host of products across small businesses in that entire region, which then uses it as a huge mall. A lot of that excitement and energy and ability to build and innovate and deliver and manufacture is at a relatively small scale. The Foxconn factories in Shenzhen are the imagination of what one has of Chinese manufacturing, but the real transformation that has taken place in China is not just driven by those Foxconns, it is driven by these much smaller places spread out across a much wider range of smaller towns. These are the kinds of pathways to transformation and if you’re just focusing on the big guys, you’re missing out a lot of the action and that is something that one has been trying to convey.

Since your focus both on census towns and subaltern urbanisation, have you seen the conversation shift?

Census towns have become fashionable now. People would still say, ‘why don’t we just give them urban status?’ Actually, it doesn’t matter in many cases. This is another big issue: A lot of our schemes across India are separated into this urban and rural category, and that separation, to my mind, is often not very productive.

For example, one of the clever things that some states did when they were doing the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana for urban is they figured ‘this allows me to not just work in the urban local body, (which is the municipal limits) but I consider the area defined by the development authority, it allows me to sort of work in those places.’ So some states took that up and then suddenly you see all these Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban), in places that were not urban. This is because they fell within this development authority, which allowed them to bypass the restrictions, so some bureaucrats got clever and found ways around it.

In many cases, these bifurcations lead to inefficient use of resources. One of the sites that we worked in, there was a definite tension between the bazaar and the basti. The bazaar wanted to be urban, but the basti wanted to remain rural, because of the nature of work in these two kinds of places. In a place like India, where today’s rural will be tomorrow’s urban, you need to be able to have that flexibility and intertwining that allows local government to deliver whatever services it needs to. So urban transport may not be the most important thing for a village, but it may be incredibly important for an urban area. So you have district guys giving out licences for three wheelers that then act entirely as local transport services connecting villages and local towns and cities. But you’re making do, because you’re limited by the way the world is structured into separate boxes.

The other space where I think more action is happening is the informal and formal workforce. The figure that goes around is that 90 percent of India is informal. Once you start breaking that up, you realise that maybe it’s not as much – and much less, in fact. What is it that the formal sector worker expects to have? If you say these are benefits like health insurance, pensions and so forth then, even government pensions today are contributory and you’re opening that up to a wide range of people — that’s one of the things that the government has been doing. The second is to open up health insurance to a wider range of people. You realise that the distinction between what you called formal work and informal work starts to blur. Especially as in your own work, you will see the distinction between ‘formal 9 to 5 templated jobs’ and gig work. There are things that we need to sort of think about much more carefully rather than try to box them into these little boxes. The same is true for skilling, which is now, increasingly being recognised as something that is a lifelong process.

We have the opportunity to be at the vanguard of many of these changes because our workforce is one that’s transitioning into this new world of work and we don’t have to take it through the same pathways that the old world has gone through. We can leapfrog them, but whether or not we have the imagination to do that is something that we’ll have to see.

All these themes are related to transformations and the particular circumstances in which a country like India finds itself, and the excitement of actually being able to be at the forefront of policy. Though we often talk of ourselves being the vishwaguru, sometimes I don’t think we focus as much on what we can actually, seriously do that will be an exemplar to how the world sees itself both in terms of work and living.

Over the time that you’ve been able to observe urban policy, has the capacity of government, whether national, regional, local and the policy space to understand become linearly more complex? Do you see a vast difference from where it was 15 years ago, 20 years ago?

First, because there are a lot more resources and action in the states, there is more thinking and experimentation in states. This is similar to what China went through in its own reforms phase, and that I think is encouraging. But I get very worried when I hear the word one, so ‘one district, one product, one nation, one election.’ Because it’s great if that one is the right thing. But if it’s not, you have a heck of a lot to undo. And in an environment that’s constantly changing, you would expect that right thing to evolve and change and if you have 10 different things happening out there, you’re much more able to figure out which directions you might want to go to. That I think is what stood China in good stead between 1990 and 2005.

This is not just this government. This tendency of seeking uniform solutions is a characteristic of union governments, in general. The other thing that is constant and which is also worrying, is eventually, and especially in India, because our bureaucrats are fixed term, you tend to look for a magic bullet. There really is a magic bullet syndrome. Even when there is one, there are many other things that need to be done to make sure that the stuff works. That particular characteristic of searching for the magic bullet solution is something that is also consistent across governments over time and that’s I think where we in policy come across as dampeners and you might end up with some consultants who say ‘yes, we have it and here’s what we need to do’ and then eventually, the world settles down. We find our best interlocutors are bureaucrats who have been through that cycle and realised that this is a complex problem. That’s when I think institutions like ours add most value because you recognise what is it that they actually bring to the table.

In one of the pieces on subaltern urbanisation, you made the point that we need to go beyond urbanisation theories that were developed in the global north. You also mentioned that India can be an exemplar. What did you have in mind?

Agglomeration is the big theoretical insight that came through on urbanisation. Big cities, with what economists called ‘thick markets’. But one of the things we don’t know is, at what scale does it start to kick in? After all, million plus cities are not really that common across the world. It’s common in India. We have 50 plus. But if we are looking in Europe – Bordeaux is a big city by French standards – but it has less than a quarter of a million people in its municipal limits and a bit more than a million people in its metro area, right? At what level of agglomeration does the game start to slow down? That’s not a question that we’ve been able to answer very well.

There are some numbers out there. There are some who have said, Chinese cities are too small, they should have 50 million people. We’re not there yet – Tokyo-Osaka may be close. But one of the things that we’ve said is, let’s look at what is already happening, and at what scale. So if a place like Tiruchengode, what we call a Micropolis, can actually perform a lot of the functions that you’re looking for on a wholly different scale then perhaps you need to think about the way the urban transformation is happening.

I think our engagements on the way India worked out our hybrid annuity road model which is used both for our roads and highways and also our sewage treatment plants is actually an innovation that’s not that much elsewhere. We haven’t gone around making a case for it, both within the country and across the world. It is again one of those things which was introduced within the government, I think in 2005. At that time, there were other ideas on the table that people found more acceptable and exciting. It wasn’t until the highway sector and the toll roads projects collapsed, that this new government came back and said ‘what can we do to revive the sector?’ That’s how it came into being 8-9 years after it first went into the government system.

It isn’t as if ideas are not spreading because people are sitting in their haunches. There’s obviously inertia, but even when you recognise the need for change, there often many competing models for change and in different circumstances, different things get chosen. Which is precisely the point I was making earlier, that if you insisted on uniform models across places you would not realise whether or not one is the best way forward. One should recognise the value of diversity.

For example, I personally think that faecal sludge treatment plants are better than drainage-and-sewage-treatment, because to me it looks as if the current water and drainage systems take up too much water and too much energy to push the sewage across. Both energy and water are in short supply in a climate vulnerable world. Instead of cities doing sewage systems, we should be focusing much more like Metro Manila on doing a lot of septic tanks and faecal sludge treatment by design and not by compulsion. In a lot of places it still happens because they don’t have the money yet to move into a drainage system, but I’m saying don’t do it.

Some places, especially smaller towns, are taking it up very rapidly and that’s because people have invested in septic tanks and therefore the government is now responding by putting together some ways of servicing them and making sure they’re treated. How somebody treats shit sounds like a particularly boring question for policy, but it can actually be one of those big, sexy climate resilience questions that we all need to think about.

It’s a question of how this one is able to think through these processes, think about what is driving the incentives on the part of the government. Contractors will have the incentive of building large, huge pipes for the large construction contracts with lots of attendant benefits. Thinking about how people will respond, thinking about how the proposition is actually put forward, articulating the climate benefits properly – that’s the kind of dialogue that you want places to be immersed in and what engaging with people at CPR does is tell you that this is the kind of question you should be asking. We can help to answer some of them, there may be better people to answer others, but having this kind of structured thought process would hopefully lead to more sustainable and durable decisions going forward that you won’t have to unwind 5-10 years down the line.

What advice would you give to younger scholars who are trying to enter the policy space in India? Should they be focusing on their PhDs? Should they take the time to write?

Come work with CPR. We always love having smart young people around us. I think young people don’t realise how much time they actually have. Partly it’s the result of our parents, but they don’t realise that especially in places like CPR, a couple of years of investing in yourself will pay rich dividend and really doesn’t matter when you consider the fact that you’re going to have a 40-year career going forward. One of the things I will tell the younger generation is that it’s okay to take your time and explore a couple of areas that you’re interested in. You might find yourself getting excited eventually by selling soap, and that’s perfectly wonderful because somebody has to.

You might end up getting fascinated with how government works, how change happens, how people respond and are impacted by those kinds of changes. There is nothing better than spending time with institutions who are actually doing that before you settle on to whatever you want to do your PhD in. Our leadership at CPR, some of them do have PhDs, some of them don’t have PhDs, so it isn’t the sine qua non of being able to participate in these places.

For a curious mind like mine, I think it is a very useful disciplining experience to go through a PhD programme and that I think is valuable. But it may not necessarily be for everyone. But to try and figure out whether this kind of work is something that you would enjoy – and enjoy for a significant period of time in your life, not necessarily forever – is something that you can only decide if you spend time in it. I’ve had young people who have come while they were doing their undergraduate degree. I was very sceptical whether that would be a good decision. In a couple of instances, I was very, very pleasantly surprised and some of those people have ended up being great researchers. But definitely after you’ve done your masters in the discipline that you’ve liked, it’s a good place for you to come and check out whether or not you want to do policy work before you go out and acquire further academic qualifications.

I would strongly urge people to work before they commit to getting academic training in a policy area.

To narrow it may be a bit further than to your field – urbanisation, work, migration and so on – are there either areas of research or tools of research that you wish that you would point younger folks towards?

People tend to fall in quantitative and qualitative boxes and I think those are constraining boxes. It’s important for people to understand what data means and how that is analysed. Similarly it’s important for people who are working purely with data and numbers to actually be able to think through the processes that are producing those kinds of outcomes, to the qualitative structures. One area where I think there is a significant lack at this point in time is we still don’t have enough people who think spatially in the urban space. That’s important because in urban, location matters. We have enormous amounts of location data. Linking that to other forms of data and information and then trying to analyse what difference is the location of a particular kind of activity making is a question that, especially in India, could help with more researchers coming in. Because the people who get training in these kinds of places would be in hard geography or geospatial or geoinformatics labs where they’re just looking at it. They have the tools, but they don’t have the questions and other people have the questions, but they don’t have the tools.

Because eventually in any case, ChatGPT is going to do all your writing anyway. So what you need to do is to make sure that the empirical basis for what you are actually writing is supported.

For someone who has listened to or read this interview and is curious about your work, are there three things that you would point to – journal articles or op-eds or – that they can go check out next?

• The summary piece on subaltern urbanisation would be the one that’s come out in the International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, which is called ‘Subaltern Urbanisation: Indian Insights for Urban Theory’ with Eric Denis and Marie – Helene Zerah
• There is more granular detail in the World Bank working paper titled Understanding India’s Urban Frontier: What Is Behind the Emergence of Census Towns in India? with Marie – Helene Zerah; Gopa Samanta, and Augustin Maria.
• But the definitive collection is the book edited by my colleagues/co-authors, Eric Denis and Marie – Helene Zerah titled Subaltern Urbanisation in India: An Introduction to the Dynamics of Ordinary Towns published by Springer
• A piece in Seminar on ‘Formality and Functionality in Indian Cities’
• The book, co-edited with Rob Jenkins and Lorraine Kennedy: Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones, published by Oxford University Press
• A chapter titled ‘Beginning a Conversation on Chinese Urbanization. In Growing Cities in a Shrinking World: The Challenges of Urbanism in India and China, a book edited by Ashok Gurung, Brian McGrath, and Jianying Zha, published by Macmillan
• The Case for Direct Cash Transfers to the Poor with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian

And then there are the various committee reports!

We’ll be back in 2 weeks with another interview, stay tuned!

On 25 April 2023, India hosted a ‘Track 1.5’ discussion on the Myanmar crisis with government representatives from Myanmar’s neighbouring countries – India, China, Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh – as well as Cambodia and Indonesia, the previous and current ASEAN chairs, respectively. It also included think-tank representatives from these countries.

Notably, representatives from only the military junta in Myanmar, which calls itself the ‘State Administration Council (SAC)’, were invited to the meeting hosted by the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), a think-tank funded by India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). According to a report in Nikkei Asia, these were “midlevel” officials. The National Unity Government (NUG), the civilian government of Myanmar composed of elected lawmakers, was not invited.

The MEA hasn’t put out any official press release on the meeting, which was a follow-up of the first iteration hosted by the Thai government in Bangkok on 13 March. Much like the first one, the participant governments have deliberately kept the second edition under wraps. There was no public consultation or calls for participation in the run up to the meeting. A Reuters report rightly characterised the Track 1.5 as “secretive”.

Why was it convened?

The Track 1.5 may be seen as a joint Thai-Indian initiative to navigate the Myanmar situation. Alternatively, it may be see as an attempt by both to demonstrate their convening power in cobbling together an issue-specific regional coalition. At the outset, it is the outcome of growing frustration in Delhi and Bangkok with the virtual failure of the ASEAN Five-Point Consensus-cum-Special Envoy process, which remains awkwardly stuck between censuring and engaging the SAC. However, there’s more to it.

The meeting’s composition shows that the co-hosts seek to create an exclusive regional platform for countries that share a border with Myanmar and have been affected by the crisis in some manner. India, Thailand and Bangladesh have all seen the instability in Myanmar spill over into their territory in the form of stray bombs, fighter jets, and refugee waves. The crisis has also allowed transnational criminal networks to expand the ambit of their activities. For instance, the UN has reported a sharp spike in opium poppy cultivation along the India-Myanmar and Thailand-Myanmar borders after the coup.

At the same time, the dialogue’s narrow composition is instructive. With the exception of Indonesia, every single participating country continues to undertake routine diplomacy with the SAC in one form or the other. The two frontline hosts – India and Thailand – have, in fact, ramped up their own bilateral engagements with the Burmese coup regime over the past one year. While the Indian foreign secretary, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, visited Myanmar and had an amicable meeting with the junta leadership in November, the Thai deputy foreign minister, Don Pramudwinai, recently toured Nay Pyi Taw in what is being seen as a warm rendezvous with the Generals.

Similarly, China, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos too have refrained from calling out the SAC for its undemocratic conduct and brutality against civilians. Their officials continue to meet junta ministers using official diplomatic channels and participate in junta-hosted events in Myanmar. Beijing, especially, has significantly expanded its bilateral track with the junta with the aim of securing its strategic interests and resuming Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects.

Nikkei Asia, citing sources, reported that during the meeting, India “agreed with Myanmar to send a delegation to Naypyidaw to help push for a ‘full resumption of dialogue’ between the regional governments.” This is a pointed reflection of what the dialogue is meant to achieve: a broader legitimation of the coup regime. It remains to be seen if the rest of ASEAN plays ball, but it is clear that the whole dialogue, at a minimum, is designed to rationalise and formalise diplomatic engagement between the participating governments and the SAC. In fact, it reflects their desire to go around ASEAN’s arguably vague approach towards the junta and solidify their working relationships with the SAC to preserve their own political, strategic and economic interests. Indonesia, which received an invite only because it is the sitting ASEAN chair, remains an exception here.

What was discussed?

Given the secretive nature of the dialogue, the full spectrum of the discussions remains unclear. But, one report published by the Press Trust of India, citing “sources”, outlined some of the points raised. These include “reduction of violence, countering transnational crimes, national reconciliation, and delivery of humanitarian aid.” According to Reuters, the issue of “creating space for dialogue” was also discussed.

It is noteworthy that this meeting comes just weeks after the Myanmar junta’s air force bombed Pazi Gyi village in the southeast of Sagaing Region, which borders India. According to The Irrawaddy, 175 people were killed in the aerial bombing, making it the bloodiest single incident of mass murder by the junta since the 2021 coup. The junta claimed that the bombing targeted an NUG-led opening ceremony of the People’s Defence Force (PDF), the civilian government’s armed wing. It justified the huge civilian casualties by linking to those killed with the PDF and by arguing that the bombs hit a “weapon’s storage”. The Irrawaddy estimates that between just 20 March and 18 April, 210 people were killed and 60 injured in junta air strikes “targeting civilian populations” in Sagaing Region, Bago Regions, Chin State, Kayah State, Kachin State and Karen State.

It is likely that the Track 1.5 participants brought up these airstrikes, especially the Pazi Gyi massacre, given its scale and proximity to the Indian border. However, it is unclear how strongly, or whether at all, the government and think tank representatives condemned it or demanded any accountability from the junta. None of the discreet “sources” quoted by the Indian media so far have mentioned the airstrikes, either because it wasn’t discussed or was done so in passing. It is noteworthy that none of the participating governments, except Indonesia, has issued any official condemnation of the deadly bombing so far. The spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, during a recent press briefing, only called for a halt to violence “by all sides” when a journalist sought his reaction on the incident.

The participants also reportedly “felt Myanmar’s capacity to fight transnational crimes need to be supported.” The implicit subtext of this position is that the governments agreed to work with the SAC to check the spike in transnational crimes after the coup. This is despite evidence of SAC-linked elements – such as the Zomi Revolutionary Army-Eastern Command (ZRA-EC) and the Karen Border Guards Force (K-BGF) – themselves being involved in transnational criminal networks along the India-Myanmar and Thailand-Myanmar borders.

Will this dialogue work?

In itself, the idea of creating a joint coalition of ASEAN member states and Myanmar’s neighbours under a Track 1.5 discussion format is a good idea. For long, countries like India and Bangladesh have only passively watched the crisis unfold next door. So, this initiative marks a refreshing turn of imaginative and proactive diplomacy. But, in its current form, the dialogue process is rife with serious contradictions, structural faults and a damaging lack of transparency.

One source familiar with the meeting told Reuters that the initiative will “not supplant” and “only complement” ASEAN. However, by inviting only certain ASEAN members while leaving out others, the dialogue risks subverting the Southeast Asian bloc’s centrality and in turn, widening internal differences over the Myanmar crisis. This is especially because except Indonesia, all the other ASEAN invitees are amenable to engaging the junta despite the latter’s non-compliance with the Five-Point Consensus. This may not sit well with other influential members of the bloc, such as Singapore and Malaysia, who remain averse to working with the junta. In fact, it may also disrupt relations between Delhi and ASEAN, which might feel blindsided by this parallel process.

Further, if the idea is to really help ASEAN implement the Five-Point Consensus, then the Track 1.5 should have included all stakeholders from Myanmar, including the NUG, which is what the consensus stipulates. By including just the SAC, in fact, the dialogue negates, not complements, the ASEAN-led Consensus. There is little sense in putting together an informal gathering of government and non-government stakeholders to facilitate freewheeling discussions on a delicate regional crisis if a major party with direct stakes in that crisis is completely left out.

Reuters, citing yet another “source”, indicated that the participants hoped to officially rope the NUG in at some point. Yet, it remains unclear how they would do so given that the junta has designated the NUG as a “terrorist organisation” and continues to actively, sometimes violently, persecute the democratic opposition. In any case, the NUG has on several occasions indicated that it is willing to talk to its neighbours to end the crisis in Myanmar. So, one hopes that they are invited in the next iteration of the dialogue to be hosted by Laos.

Most of all, the core intent of the dialogue facilitators remains suspect. Currently, it appears that they are more keen on using the Track 1.5 format to build bridges with the junta than foreground the aspirations of the Myanmar people. They seek to justify their engagement with the junta through specific pivots of cooperation – most prominently, delivery of humanitarian aid and transnational crimes. But, both these issues require multi-pronged engagements, not one-sided diplomacy with the military regime. The junta, which has its own predatory interests to protect, cannot be trusted to either crack down on transnational criminal networks along Myanmar’s borders or ensure equitable humanitarian aid delivery. We don’t know if the participants talked about ways to diversify aid delivery networks in Myanmar to allow non-junta actors to participate without the fear of retribution.

Finally, the overall opacity around the process is detrimental to the initiative’s credibility. It diminishes the space for public engagement and accountability over a serious political and humanitarian crisis that is harming the lives of real people, fuelling geopolitical volatility, creating economic uncertainty, and destabilising an entire region. By shrouding itself in a cloak of secrecy and keeping out Myanmar’s democratically elected representatives, the coalition ends up looking like an exclusive, elite and self-interested clique of governments and individuals who have no real interest in listening to the voices of the people most affected by the situation in Myanmar. One hopes this changes in the next iteration.