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 Health. CPR has been working in the area of Health since the 1980s, with the noteworthy work of Meera Chatterjee on Health Policy and its implementation, and PD Malgavkar on Biotechnology. Through the years, CPR has partnered with organisations, governments and key players in the field, on various aspects of healthcare, access to health, health policy and most recently the Covid-19 pandemic.
Here’s a snapshot of our key work and impact in the area of Health over the years
CPR’s Jishnu Das conducted research on the quality of care in public and private hospitals and clinics. This eventually led the Government of India to formulate a health insurance scheme that allowed patients to visit both public and private providers. Subsequently, CPR worked with the GOI from 2007 to 2009 to build out RSBY (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana) rules and implementation, including the full architecture and design of databases. We worked with states as they started implementing the program and published an edited book detailing the experience with the early days of the program. This program was later expanded to become PM-JAY.
Starting in 2012, we developed the use of standardised patients (people recruited from the local community and extensively trained to portray the same condition to multiple healthcare providers) to assess the quality of clinical care. The methods were first used in India and then gradually expanded to multiple conditions and countries with help from our team in the development of methods, tools and training. They have currently been used in Peru, Tanzania, Senegal, Kenya, South Africa, India (multiple sites), China and Indonesia for more than 10 different conditions.
Jishnu Das was also part of a team that worked with the Liver Foundation, West Bengal, to evaluate a training program for informal providers. The published paper showed large effects of the training on the correct diagnosis and management of patients leading to the scale-up of the program to more than 80,000 informal providers in the state.
In 2003, we developed new tools for measuring the medical knowledge of healthcare providers. These methods were initially used in India and Tanzania and have now been expanded through the World Bank’s Service Delivery Initiative to more than 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa covering more than 20,000 healthcare providers.
In 2020, CPR published a study titled Two Indias: The structure of primary health care markets in rural Indian villages with implications for policy which was based on ground research conducted by a team led by Jishnu Das in 2009 across 19 Indian states. The paper assessed the role played by informal medical workers in rural India and the impact of changes in socio-economic status in regions in terms of the quality of health care accessible to citizens. Our results highlight the complex structure of health care markets, the large share of private informal providers, and the substantial variation in the quality and cost of care across and within markets in rural India. Measuring and accounting for this complexity is essential for health care policy in India.
CPR’s Work during the COVID-19 Pandemic
During the COVID-19 Pandemic, our faculty was engaged in some key research to decode every aspect of this public health crisis. Here are some highlights of our work on COVID-19:
In 2020, Jishnu Das, Partha Mukhopadhyay and Neelanjan Sircar were part of a study that assessed the heterogeneity in the transmission of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus. The data for this research was collected from contact tracing during the lockdown in Punjab. The study found that a sequential strategy in contact tracing would yield better results in resource-constrained settings like India. Our results highlight how contact tracing, an important public health measure, can also provide important insights into epidemic spread and control.
Jishnu Das and Partha Mukhopadhyay were part of the India Task Forceof The Lancet COVID-19 Commission in 2021. The Commission was created to help speed up global, equitable, and lasting solutions to the pandemic. The Task Force published on various pressing issues like containment strategies, managing India’s second wave etc.
In 2021, Yamini Aiyar was part of a team that authored a report for the Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System, which was launched to achieve Universal Health Coverage in 2020. Against the backdrop of the resurgence in COVID-19 cases in 2021, this report proposed eight recommendations for the central and state governments. Some of these points were voiced by authoritative voices in the country to chart out the immediate course of action, at the time.
Partha Mukhopadhyay authored a chapter titled Making COVID-19 Vaccines Universally Accessible in a book edited by Kanni Wignaraja and Swarnim Wagle, published by the UNDP. This chapter outlined the key challenges in making COVID-19 vaccines universally accessible, highlighting decisions that governments needed to make along the way to tackle the crisis.
This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with D Shyam Babu, a Senior Fellow at CPR, who has over the years worked on subjects as varied as nuclear non-proliferation and national security as well as socio-economic mobility among Dalits and the societal impacts of liberalisation.
Shyam Babu was first associated with CPR in 1989, after which he spent time as a journalist and then as a fellow at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, before returning to the Centre in 2011. After working on questions of national security in his initial years in policy, Shyam Babu shifted focus to look at social change, helping conduct a number of key socio-economic surveys that examined the impacts of liberalisation on the Dalit community.
He is the co-author of Defying the Odds, a critically acclaimed book that profiled the rise of Dalit entrepreneurs, as well as co-editor of a number of other books, including The Dalit Question: Reforms and Social Justice and The India Mosaic: Searching for an Identity… More recently, Shyam Babu has been working with CPR to conduct research workshops for scholars from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities.
In our conversation with Shyam Babu, we spoke about what it was like to work across two very different policy disciplines, why he thinks an understanding of society is vital for IR scholars and the ideas that led to his research and book on Dalit entrepreneurs. We also spoke about the need to challenge conventional wisdom on social justice in India, why he has looked more closely at the question of ‘social cognition’ in recent years and what role think tanks like CPR have to play in making the research world more inclusive.
If you prefer audio, this conversation is also available as a podcast here.
(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity).
I’d like to get a sense of your journey. Tell me a little bit about your early years as a student and a scholar. What brought you into the policy space?
I entered the Centre for Policy Research in 1989. At the time, I was a student in JNU pursuing my M.Phil-PhD program. My professor happened to be a friend of Professor Bhabani Sen Gupta, who was a professor at JNU, who then moved to CPR. When he came to give a talk at JNU, he asked my professor for someone to help him with his book as a research assistant. I happened to be next to both of them. My professor turned to me and said, ‘why don’t you go?’ That’s how I came to CPR in 1989. Actually, the salary I received as a research assistant did not come from CPR. It came from the publisher who published that book, about Rajiv Gandhi, by Professor Sen Gupta. But I was coming to CPR regularly to meet him. My initial formal association with Professor Bhabani Sen Gupta, and CPR was very brief, but very soon we became very good friends. I was almost like a family member at his residence. As he continued here – I think he retired from CPR somewhere in the mid 90s – because of that association, I was coming to CPR every once in a while.
Tell me a bit about your broader thinking at the time, did you know for sure that you wanted to go into this academic policy world?
I don’t know how far you can relate to the world of 1980s, before the Internet. I was in JNU, which was politically a very conscious place. At that time all the information, knowledge, wisdom we received was from newspapers and news magazines. All India Radio was there and Doordarshan was there, but since they were government entities, we never took them seriously. So my fascination with CPR was that, being a student of International Relations, I was reading the same people who are working in CPR in the regular newspapers – the Times of India, the Hindu, news magazines, and EPW. These are the places CPR faculty were using to reach a wider audience, like me. It was really exciting that the scholar I was reading happened to come to CPR, and I could meet him and he asked me to come and join him as an assistant. It was quite something. The kind of importance newspapers had, it’s very difficult to understand in the current circumstances.
I was working on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The very fact that I was working on that particular topic meant that I would be looking into how the government is articulating our own position on nuclear weapons or international peace or regional dynamics like our relations with China, and our relations with Pakistan. So, without ever sitting and deciding that ‘OK, I want to do policy work’, I understood that policy mattered not just for policymakers, like ministers or officials, but for common people like me. So it’s more the gradual realisation of the importance of policy, not so much coming to that conclusion.
What made you choose International Relations?
I was a student of political science in BA and MA and international studies fascinated me. I also had this habit of writing newspaper articles from a very early age. I started writing Op-eds, originally in Telugu, in newspapers. I was covering both domestic issues and foreign relations to the extent I could understand and reflect. Remember that newspaper articles are written by two kinds of people. One, experts like, say, a former foreign secretary or a diplomat to a particular country who would comment on a particular event or a policy that he knows very well. The other is informed opinion: You know enough to form an opinion. You may not be an expert. So at least I could understand the difference so that when I was writing on IR then I naturally applied for JNU’s MPhil PhD program and I got into development studies. Because my professor was interested in nuclear nonproliferation, he said, why don’t you do your M.Phil on that. Unfortunately I couldn’t finish my PhD, but it was also related to regional arms control in South Asia.
What followed? You spent some time as a journalist before making your way back into the policy space at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute. Could you tell us about that arc?
When I came to JNU in 1986, I had enough English vocabulary – I could read a book and understand – but both written and spoken English was very, very limited. I took about 3-and-a-half to four years to brush up my English to such an extent that I could start writing newspaper articles. By the early 90s, I started writing in English and I published my dissertation as a book. And from Professor Bhabani Sen Gupta in 1992, I came in touch with Professor Stephen Cohen, who was at the University of Illinois. He read my book and invited me to spend a year with him at Illinois. In all this process, instead of spending my time wisely on my PhD dissertation, I spent that time and energy in revising my M.Phil dissertation to publish. So in a way, I lost steam. I spent one year in Illinois and came back. I became a journalist for about 10 years. And then I joined the Rajiv Gandhi Institute Of Contemporary Studies. There also I spent about a decade, and then moved on to CPR. All through, I was writing my commentaries in newspapers and publications like EPW. That’s broadly my trajectory.
If I’m not incorrect, at one point you considered entering the services as well?
For my generation, not appearing for the UPSC exam means you’re some kind of a weird personality. I was always clear I would be in a space where I would be spending my time reading and writing. Reading I did quite well, but probably writing not as much as I would have loved. So I appeared for the UPSC exam and I got into the Indian Revenue Service. But I decided not to join. That is the year Professor Cohen invited me to spend time with him at Illinois as a visiting scholar. So I got into the service but never reported for duty.
As you enter the Rajiv Gandhi Institute, my understanding is your focus as an academic started to shift. You had been writing about national security, nuclear non-proliferation, and so on, but that changed.
For a decade, I was working on national security and international relations. That’s up to the early 2000s. I did a lot of activism also, during my JNU days. I was very much there when the Mandal Commission was announced and [in] all the agitation [that followed]. Because of that Dalit activism, with a couple of friends we got an opportunity from Madhya Pradesh when Mr. Digvijay Singh was the chief minister there. He asked us, ‘why don’t you tell us what kind of policies are needed to uplift Dalits and tribal people.’ He had this very nice policy of reaching out to each segment of the population and finding the right people and carrying out an extensive dialogue, leading to a good conference or a committee – meaning several people come together and give a policy framework for the government to implement. When it comes to the interests of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes or what we call Dalits and Tribals, we were asked to do the same thing. So in 1992, we did a huge conference in Bhopal. It was known as the Bhopal Conference of Dalit intellectuals, activists and academics. From throughout the country, more than 600 or 700 people came. I also published on that process, and Professor Sudha Pai actually wrote a whole book on the experience. We did give several suggestions and actually Mr. Digvijay Singh, to his credit, implemented many of them. Unfortunately, the very next year he lost power. After that, the process was never taken up by subsequent governments there.
With that, I started a move away from IR and started working on social justice topics. The same year I joined the Rajiv Gandhi Institute. There also most of my work was related to this topic. In a way for almost a couple of decades, I spent most of my time on matters related to social justice. We did two very significant projects. From the beginning, I was lucky and really blessed to have wonderful teachers and mentors. And also, excellent friends Mr. Chanra Bhan Prasad and Dr. Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta and so many others really, who helped me and guided me.
We did two projects. By the mid-2000s we realised that the [1991] economic reforms by the time had covered a whole generation and we saw several positive changes even in the lives of Dalits. So we wanted to measure what kind of positive impact or negative impact these economic reforms had had on the community. We had a very big project to look at two whole blocks in Uttar Pradesh, which we published as an EPW paper, reporting that economic reforms had in a way transformed social relations in the countryside, at least in the two blocks we studied. We also indicated that it’s a general trend through most of the Hindi belt. And subsequent to that, we also came up with a rough hypothesis that in the past 50 years, through affirmative action and through other means, there could have formed a Dalit bourgeoisie, who had some money. As a result of economic reforms, the public sector was shrinking. Earlier, those few Dalits who had education would get government jobs. In the 2000s, that was not the case. There were more and more educated people and fewer and fewer government jobs, and the number of jobs was actually shrinking at that time. So we thought it was possible that, because a couple of generations of affirmative action beneficiaries are in the system and their children might have been well educated and endowed with some resources – not necessarily a lot of money – and there are not many government jobs, obviously they wouldn’t sit at home. They would do something. It could be possible that many of them might be becoming entrepreneurs.
With that rough hypothesis, we wanted to go into the field and find them. Because the government had no data on this. The way we did it is, anecdotally, we find one or two Dalits who were in some kind of business doing well. They become rich in places like Pune or Faridabad or Jalandhar, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Lucknow. In all these places we found someone. We would go to one and try to get his trajectory, and asked him whether he knew anybody else similar to him, who had succeeded. That’s how we could track literally a few hundred of them. And in 2014, we selected about 19 or 20 of these entrepreneurs and we published a very popular book called Defying the Odds. It was received quite well.
Both of those projects are super interesting and we’ll come back to dig in a little bit more into how you went about it and what you found. But before that, one question comes to mind. The academic world can be quite siloed. In a sense, these two focuses of yours, the social justice side and the national security side, are quite far apart. I know in more recent years you’ve published a chapter in a book combining the two a little bit. But I wanted to know, at the time, did you find it hard to go back and forth between thinking about IR and thinking about questions on social justice? Did you make an active choice or was it just in terms of the opportunities that came up?
Frankly, to begin with, it was the opportunities that came my way. I just took them. But much later I realised that I did not take a U-turn. In a way, I made my intellectual enterprise much broader and much more curious. Because, if you are doing social justice in India, you can take gender, you can take class, or you can take caste. They’re not mutually exclusive. Sometimes all three could be in one category. But even in areas of, say, national security, caste matters a lot. That’s the point I was arguing in my latest paper, which you just mentioned. So to that extent, my intellectual concerns did not change much. From the very beginning, I was bothered by this phenomenon called caste and its deleterious effects not just on its victims like the lower caste and Dalits.
As long as you and I think that a particular problem is not our problem, we have no reason to attend to that. Like, say, corruption. In many other countries, for example, they talk in terms of taxpayers’ money. If a project is not done well, if a footpath is not built well, people say you wasted taxpayers’ money. But in India, we don’t have that concept. When we see badly done public work, you know it is a waste of public money, but you don’t really connect. That is the problem with caste. Most people tend to think that it is somebody else’s problem. But my point is, it’s not just somebody else’s problem. The whole system is affected by it. In my latest paper, I was arguing the same point. Even in terms of national security, why is it that India, with its rich history and civilizational pedigree, doesn’t have a coherent national security policy or an aspiration. What does it want outside its borders? What are its strategic aims in terms of what do you want to be after a couple of decades. In 2040 or 2050 where do you want to go? The latest example of a great power actually doing it is China. From 1978 onwards, they have been asking questions and setting deadlines, and a road map. They haven’t drifted to their current position, just like that. It was a very conscious policy. Their four modernizations, for example. They decided by the early 80s, these are the areas we are weak, so China must focus on these areas in a time bound manner to accomplish certain goals. We haven’t done that. Why? Probably people say it’s because of corruption, incompetence, or the ruling party is not interested or politicians are not interested. I do accept all of them there. I would say they’re only symptoms. Their real cause is caste. Caste would divide you. It would make you think small. That affects your national security. For example, when Ambedkar cited Metcalf to say that every time an invader came, Indian villagers didn’t really bother because they didn’t see themselves as a nation. I see all these different strands as one, affected by caste.
For the reader, we are referring to a paper called A Journey Without a Destination; The Cultural-Economy of a Great Power which appears in a book called How Realist is India’s National Security Policy, which was published earlier this year. In the academic world you point out that scholars in the IR space don’t think of these social or cultural issues, so was it a challenge to make an argument on these issues that in the Academy are kept in the sociology or the anthropology departments?
Absolutely, because international relations is not a standalone subject like economics or anthropology or sociology. It stands on the shoulders of other social sciences. For somebody to say that I’m an IR scholar, but I don’t really care about sociology or social aspects of the country or economic aspects or geographyit is not correct. You can’t be an IR specialist, if you have no grounding in Indian society. I’m not just talking about India. Be it Italy, Canada or the US, if you are not thorough with the social forces or economy. When you think of a nation and its standing or its foreign policy or security policy, what we must look at first is the so-called lay of the land. What are its capabilities? What are its vulnerabilities? For example, put in a very simplistic way, I would argue that say, I want to become a Wimbledon champion. I want to be playing for India in the Davis Cup. You might want to know my age. My physical condition. How much do I train? Did I really qualify for any domestic tennis matches? All that matters. Similarly, how a nation can position itself depends not so much on the declarative policies of its leaders but on its economy. Can the Indian economy underwrite our aspirations? Have we spent in terms of our National Defense to ward off any external aggression? Do we have sufficient domestic industrial capacity to provide equipment for a war effort? Do we have social cohesion, like the way Ukrainians have been demonstrating? When we’re at war, whether we as Indians come together and work for that war effort – these are the questions our IR scholars should be asking themselves. And to answer them, if they just talk about IR, how many times our Foreign Minister visited another country, what joint communique they issued, that’s fine, but these are the kind of dynamics we need to look into.
Given your arc of involvement with this from the late 80s onwards, do you see among either Indian scholars or scholars working on India, do you see a bigger recognition of this?
Outside [India] there is no problem. You know they cover the kind of concerns I just expressed in civil-military relations, for example. Most countries don’t have a caste system, so it’s not just about that. You have social aspects. There are economic aspects. Your industrial base. Is your population just monolingual? Is it multilingual? What are the social cleavages you have? All these things matter to your national security. Outside, these aspects are not ignored. It’s the bane of India, that our scholars, especially IR scholars, have ignored these factors. The few scholars who focus on caste and other aspects happen to be foreigners. My guru, Steven Cohen mentioned how caste and communal feelings were creeping into the British Indian Army by the late 19th century. Our scholars must have taken off from there to see how these things are happening now. What is the impact of caste or communal issues in the army, or police forces? Or what about our economy? How much can our economy actually support militarization? Militarization doesn’t have to be negative all the time because the kind of threats we face, we must be having a much bigger army, having a much bigger military industrial complex to produce weaponry for our own use and also for export. Those things are not happening because we are not focusing on that. We are not articulating demands. These are our needs. We are not saying that.
One of the threads in the work that you subsequently did on the question of caste was often a way to debunk certain ways of thinking of India’s caste problem even for those who are ostensibly anti-caste. So for example, in 2006 you had a paper that noted that although violence against Dalits seemed to be going up, the evidence almost suggested that it is because of social mobility within Dalit spaces that is increasing the number of atrocities. The paper that came out in 2010 shows that there have been quite big changes to the lives of Dalits after liberalisation, which is not necessarily captured in the way we talk about inequality increasing after liberalisation. So if I could get a sense of your approach to these issues as you started to write and think more about questions of social justice.
Caste is a reality. Any social marker is going to stay. We are not going to erase race. We are not going to erase gender or class or caste. What is the problem with all these markers? They tend to be too oppressive. While recognising that caste as a reality, what are you going to do about reducing it or rubbing off its rough edges? I put my entire work in that mode. It’s not so much about anti-caste. One of the biggest factors that has reduced caste inequalities is pure and simple good governance, rule of law. We haven’t been perfect, but certainly in the past several decades our governance has been robust enough to help the poor and marginalised. They could go to proper institutions of redressal like police or courts. And they can fight in the courts for their rights. These factors we don’t really give credit to. They all worked. Actually I should not say good governance, just pure and simple governance. Because we have a very good constitution, we have the IPC, we have the CRPC basically stipulating how we should manage our criminal justice system. With all the failures, it still succeeded in creating an environment that is conducive for the Dalits and Tribals to claim their rights. Over and above that, you can have some remedial measures like, say, affirmative action or special treatment or giving more scholarships. Those are the kind of things we should do to reduce these disparities and inequalities.
As you mentioned, in my paper of 2006, what we found is that it is not the poorest of the poor from the community but those who are sufficiently well off and upwardly mobile who were being targeted. It’s naturally a society’s response that when an oppressed group starts claiming its rights, you see backlash. You have seen the same phenomenon in the United States, where after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln, lynching started in a major way.
I want to know what your own experience was of working on these projects and actually seeing out in the field things that you may have thought about more in terms of a hypothesis.
Interestingly, two really positive social changes I could report thanks to my friends, both Chandrabhan Prasad and Devesh Kapur, had nothing to do with state intervention in terms of helping Dalits and tribals. Economic reforms, let us say, introduced in 1991 did not have any component of social justice. That happened to be one of the core criticisms of economic reforms. They completely ignored social dynamics of inequality, poverty and all that. That being a legitimate criticism, what I want to tell you is through our work, we found that even though economic reforms were never intended or designed to produce positive social change, they end up producing this positive social change,coupled with somewhat rule-based liberal governments. Because of economic reforms and starting from almost a very low base, a little bit of economic activity in urban centres meant that the Dalits and other oppressed groups could find employment opportunities in cities. Interestingly, in areas where caste discrimination was not such a big deal, not many Dalits moved. The areas which we studied in Uttar Pradesh, where the feudal system was and is strong – oppression was very intense – Dalits started moving out into cities, creating labour shortages in the village. There were so many from each village, able-bodied men were leaving for work in cities. It created labour shortages, and within one generation brought about so much social change. I’ll try to put it as briefly as I can. Most able bodied men from a village moved to cities. They were in cities, as construction workers, maybe rickshaw pullers, whatever they were doing. But at least they created labour shortages in villages. How would landlords handle this? Nobody else was coming to work. There was no migrant labour.
So initially they thought technology would fix it. When we think of a landlord, you have this Bollywood image of a man having hundreds of acres, and he has his own car or a tractor. But if you go to the field you find the so-called landlords happen to be small and marginal farmers owning a few acres of land. And they don’t have labour to work in their lands. So many of them took bank loans to buy tractors. They thought that they could buy tractors and replace the human labour. It didn’t work because tractors were expensive and they bought them taking bank loans. And in a year, they could hardly use their own tractor for maybe a week or 10 days in their fields. What do you do with the rest of the year? How are you going to pay the EMIs every month? Then they started employing tractor drivers to go and work in other fields. Many found that it was not really economical for them to pay the salary for the driver, then the fuel expenses, then the bank EMI. So they started driving the tractors themselves. Still, they could not fix the problem. What was the final solution they took? They started giving their lands in sharecropping to the Dalits. Not only that, as Dalits started cultivating their land as sharecroppers, they would employ the same landlords to come and till their land using their tractors. So within a generation, what happened is, the same landless agricultural labour, some of them could become sharecroppers and engage their former landlords to till their lands using their tractors. That is the kind of social change that happened. It’s not some kind of a centrally sponsored scheme. This is not some kind of affirmative action, but nevertheless this is the result of economic reforms.
The second is the entrepreneurs. When we went into the field, our basic assumption was that these are the kids of officers. Since there are no government jobs, they might be coming into entrepreneurship. Almost all the entrepreneurs we profiled in Defying the Odds , did not have proper education. Most of them were first-generation entrepreneurs. Almost all of them did not seek government help. They found some collateral, went to the bank, put the collateral, took the loan, went and did their business and they succeeded. It is possible that there are so many other fields we did not study. But here also you don’t really find any government intervention. The point I’m conveying is that it is not always necessary that you need to have some kind of specialised programs or schemes to uplift the marginalised. Pure and simple good governance is enough. You know, famously, Mr Rajiv Gandhi when he was Prime Minister said that administrative reforms are the best anti-poverty program you can think of. Making administration work, making police do their job will have a far bigger impact on social change than any other targeted programs..
Some of the research also points, at least to me, as being important reminders to other people who are working in this space, that it’s not as simple as reducing things to numbers. More recently in a chapter called Reimagining Merit in India; Cognition and Affirmative Action, you draw attention to some of these aspects, which are not always captured in the way we think and talk about upliftment. One thing that jumped out to me in the earlier paper in 2010 was that Dalit households were moving away from the high-calorie content that tended to be eaten in poorer households to things that might not be as nutritional for them – but allowed them to ‘buy’ status. And again, in the Reimagining Merit piece, you say alongside affirmative action, we need to think about social cognition. Can you tell us more about this?
The credit must go to Chandrabhan Prasad. The way he postulated it is, for Manu (or many?) – that is the traditional Indian society – caste matters. There’s no way you can change your status. Despite all your hard work and all your success, your caste determines your place in society. But for the market, you can buy your status. With market I don’t mean urban areas. Even villages are markets now. The impact of the market is such that in a village, it doesn’t really matter what your caste is. Whether you have an iPhone or some cheaper Android phone, is a status marker. Some of our work is also informed by this concern. The dichotomy is between traditional society, as stipulated by say, Manusmriti, as opposed to the market whose laws which are stipulated in a much more rational way. This is in a way central to most of the work we have done over the past two decades.
As to social cognition, I’ll give you some anecdotal evidence. I’m sure if not now, maybe after a decade or so you will certainly find enough numbers to validate this. Those Dalits who moved to the Western countries, like the United States… let us say my contemporaries, who happened to marry here, then moved there so their kids were born there or when they were toddlers, they moved to the United States, so they grew up just as Indians,they attended the same regular schools as anybody else. They went on to colleges and universities and got their degrees. Some even ended up in very elite colleges and universities. They’re absolutely fine. You don’t really find much difference in terms of their academic accomplishments, compared to other Indians in America or other Americans. Our stress in that paper about social cognition is that your merit is not just a product of your hard work and your genes or your DNA. Those could be factors. My belief is your merit is a function of your social cognition. How are you conditioned to think ? How you understand your position in society determines your efficiency levels or your cognition.
Yeah, there’s a study that sort of brings this out very clearly, where Dalit students when they were told to spell out their full names…
Oh, yes, Karla Hoff and Priyanka Pandey. This is a very good study. They went to a north Indian village, I think in Uttar Pradesh. They went to a school. They gave a simple test to all students in the class. And they measured their performance. And Dalit students, it so happened, performed a bit better than the rest of the students. Now the second part of the experiment was, they asked each student to get up, mention their name and their father’s name and sit. After this exercise was over, they were again given a similar test. In the second test, the performance of Dalits literally plummeted. The explanation was that by reciting their name and their father’s name, they were reminded of their identity, which affected their performance. I 100% believe that. Why is this important in the context of merit? Because even the programs that were designed to help Dalits like, say, affirmative action, the way you implement them matters. For example, for my generation, when you get into a college, on the board, all the students that were selected will be there in one column, the next column they mentioned the SC students and in another the ST students. Or suddenly in the middle of a class, the school clerk would come with the textbooks and say that these are the free copies for the scheduled class students and scheduled tribe students.’ So you stand up and if you are scheduled caste, you get your copy. You could be happy. Others could be jealous . But the fact remains that. In a way all these gestures of the government with very, very good intentions did a different kind of damage. The way you can help in these marginalised communities is by either creating a completely neutral learning environment or do what is sufficient to help them to process their own thinking about this.That was our concern in the meritocracy paper.
I see it as part of that broader trend to nuance our understanding. Another example is a shorter piece you wrote in the Hindu a little while ago, arguing that far from seeing it a certain way that the Indian state should actually be quite proud that its policies have created a creamy layer amongst the most disadvantaged.
There’s one narrow context here, which is, when it comes to the appointment of civil servants, the judiciary talks about creamy layers, especially in the context of OBCs, that those whose parents income is above a particular threshold, they are dismissed as creamy layers and they are not given that job. My point was and is that if you are using public employment as a poverty alleviation measure, fine,there’s nothing wrong with that. Then you have to also remove the creamy layer from the general category. Why is it that the richest people can actually apply and get these jobs? Why are we using only this for the reserved categories? There’s a different concern as such, which is that we have caste differences which don’t go away. In any particular milieu, you know your caste and you also know everybody else’s caste. That certainly creates a particular dynamic. Now, our system, which was designed in a very laudable way to help the victims of caste to get into these spaces. But at the same time, you are removing their best and the brightest. Those, who could access quality education, whose parents have sufficient resources, who could bring up their kids in a good environment. By selecting candidates from these sections, who happen to be from the poorest of the poor households, you are putting these students, these candidates in league with the creamy layer from the rest of the society. Which is wrong.
Then, the quota category officer employees would not be performing their duties as well as the rest. So every generation, given the numbers, you keep on taking poor and marginalised candidates for reserved categories. And when it comes to the non-reserved categories, you are happy to take the creamy layer. I thought that was quite objectionable. It’s still a very narrow concern. But my broader point is, I’m old enough to remember that people get a kind of vicarious pleasure to say that we are not doing well. The whole world is collapsing, the heavens are falling. Nothing happened. I’ve been literally hearing, you know, three decades of independence, still we have so much poverty. Four decades of independence, we still have this much poverty. Now it’s seven decades, 75 years, we are still saying nothing happened. It’s absolute nonsense. The Indian state, with all its limitations and all its infirmities, incompetence and corruption has delivered tremendously. Even while articulating the concerns of the Dalits and Tribals, I would still say, yes, there are still problems, but let us not say that nothing happened. You know, because of economic reforms, millions of Dalits and tribals were lifted out of poverty. If you are in the space talking about issues of social justice and affirmative action, politics of quotas, legal litigation, there’s a tendency to be very negative. India is all about caste and nothing else is happening. I don’t belong to that view.
You mentioned things having changed over the years for the Indian state. Maybe if we look a little more closely at at the academic world or the think tank world, there is the contention for many that that spaces like CPR and other think tanks tend to to be elitist, to not also be open either to to individuals from from the lower castes, from Scheduled Tribes, or to not take seriously some of those issues. What do you think about this general sense about the think tank world and spaces like CPR?
Well, in general there is some merit in that point. Look, let’s not forget, in my case, I wanted to join CPRbecause it’s an elite organisation. For an individual like me from a mofussil town coming to Delhi and trying to find my space, even to publish an Op-ed, you send just your article to some newspaper without an affiliation, or you send it as a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, it makes all the difference. People tend to come to CPR because it’s in an elite place. I would say it is not automatically a kind of a disqualification or some kind of a pejorative identity. But what is a legitimate criticism is, these elite spaces only worry about elite concerns.At least in case of CPR, that is not true. We were very, very well focused on matters of administrative reforms and economic policies. During the past decade also, we have been working on social justice issues. But these spaces are not sufficiently open to the subalterns. Not just lower castes. Say, people from rural areas. Prima facie even I accepted that yes, places like CPR should be doing more to make the place somewhat more representative of the country. But there are so many structural issues that are not happening. But I would say in the past 50 years. CPR has done – I won’t say enough – but has done a lot not to be a kind of elitist organisation, only worried about elite concerns and hiring only elite.
So for example, the work we have done here over the past several years, conducting research methodology workshops. It’s not just one or two. From former president Pratap [Bhanu Mehta] and [current president] Yamini [Aiyar] on, most of our faculty were actively involved. This is a ICSSR-funded project. Typically, scheduled caste and scheduled tribe scholars tend to go to rural schools, non-English medium schools. Somehow they crawl their way up and go and do PhD somewhere. And thanks to the quota system they get into universities as faculty. But their competence levels as researchers are not up to the mark. So is there any way we can have brief interventions to help them. We did five such workshops. Some of our assumptions were true. To a large extent, we tried to bridge that. Have we succeeded completely? No. We have done really honourable work. Most of those candidates, about 150 candidates whom we trained here, gave us the feedback that they were happy with that and many actually told me that because of our workshops, they could finish their PhD so well. And who knows, in future, some of them may end up being the faculty at CPR. But again, back to your question, yes, it’s not easy for places like CPR to simply ignore this criticism that they are too elitist and they are not sufficiently open to get the mofussil India into these places.
As you are meeting these younger scholars in these workshops, if they were to ask you for advice about coming into the policy space not, what would you tell them?
Well, I wouldn’t advise whether they should get into policy or not, but what I would advise is: ocus on your skill set. Brush up your language, especially the English language. Probably much of our work in the future, we might do in our own languages. But still I would insist that English matters. It will continue to matter. Because most of the knowledge of the world is recorded in that one particular language, much more than any other language. And on the other side, almost all our Indian languages do not have even the rudimentary undergraduate level knowledge in their languages. You cannot do even a BA in political science with only books from, say, Hindi or Gujarati or Telugu language. So focus always on English. Read widely as and when an opportunity comes. Just grab it. Be open, flexible.
Are there misconceptions about either of your areas of research – on the national security side or on the social justice side – that you find yourself frequently correcting?
Social sciences are subjective areas. They are not objective, like, say, physics or chemistry. Social science is all about people and their sentiments and their views. Despite that, we still insist on some method. Some acceptable way of validating a point. In sciences, you come up with a hypothesis and test it. Either you validate it or invalidate it, go to the next one. In social sciences, the biggest problem I have noticed – probably I’m also not really immune to that – is that first you come with your thesis and try to raise a hypothesis that would really prove your thesis which is your own prejudice. Why is it that almost 99.9% of the people who support, say, affirmative action happened to be the beneficiaries? Why is it that almost the same kind of percentage of people who oppose happened to be the non-reserved categories? Similarly, you go to a foreign policy seminar. People come and give their own country’s viewpoint and insist that that is the right point. I would really ask young scholars to be very, very tough when it comes to designing their own questions first. Are you already concluding, based on your own preferences and your own prejudices, and then doing the research and in a way, validating those prejudices which don’t really have any rational basis? I think this happens all the time. As I said, even probably I’m not immune to that, but at least we should keep that in mind.
Are there any of your own pieces over the years that are particularly dear to you?
The social cognition piece I really enjoyed because, in addition to caste and social justice, I could just dip my toes into cognitive dimensions of social existence. How much our cognition plays a role in what we do and how we think, how we react, which is a huge field, and very technical. I don’t have any academic grounding in that. But thanks to my friends and collaborators, Devesh and Chandrabhan, we did that paper. I really enjoyed doing that paper because anybody reading it, especially young scholars, can really take it forward. A lot needs to be done in terms of the cognition part of it, which is a kind of neglected dimension.
If you had to pick out three works or scholars that have influenced you over the years, what would you point to?
Well, the first one is, of course, Doctor Ambedkar. Not just influence. He gives you the framework, he gives you the language to unpack any issue. I would specifically recommend his Annihilation of Caste and his final speech in the Constituent Assembly and his book on Pakistan. I wouldn’t say influences, but I’m still fascinated by two authors, HL Mencken and GK Chesterton. Their style I so admire, and at the same time, there’s no way anybody can emulate them. But they still stimulate me. Reading them is a pleasure and I would highly recommend anyone who is interested in improving their language or their communication skills, I would say Chesterton and Mencken. Just treasures.
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 Public Finance. CPR has been working in the area of governance and public finance since the last fifteen years, through its Accountability Initiative, which was established in 2008. The Accountability Initiative has been working on strengthening transparency and accountability in governance by conducting research on state capabilities and factors affecting efficient public services delivery in India with a focus on public finance, public administration and governance, and state capacity. The initiative is operational in six states — Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, and Rajasthan with multi-sectoral research studies on budgets, governance processes, and public administration across social sectors like education, health and nutrition, sanitation, and even local governments.
Here’s a snapshot of our key work and impact in the area of Public Finance over the years:
The Budget Briefs have established themselves as the go-to source for information about the funding status and outcome progress of India’s major welfare schemes. The Accountability Initiative has 15 volumes of briefs and these are shared annually with all members of parliament, standing committee members, ministries and other government stakeholders.
CPR was invited by both the 14th and 15th Finance Commission to conduct studies on local bodies. The 14th Finance Commission tasked us to examine the structure of devolution of powers, responsibilities and finances by states to rural local bodies (RLBs) across all decentralisation models including the 5th Scheduled Areas and Sixth Schedule. Our report (also available on the Commission’s website) contributed to the recommendations of the Finance Commission to recommend increasing the amounts allocated to local governments from the divisible pool of taxes. Similarly, we worked closely with the 15th Finance Commission on two study reports looking at the impact of the 14th Finance Commission recommendations on devolution to panchayats and fund flows (revenues and expenditures) at the gram panchayat level.
CPR supported the Technical Support Unit (TSU) set up under the National Health Mission (NHM) in Uttar Pradesh, in diagnosing reasons for low utilisation of health expenditure and bottlenecks. The recommendations led to fine tuning of systems and processes and the analysis became an important tool for preparation of next year’s Project Implementation Plan (PIP).
Since January 2020, the Accountability Initiative has been working closely with the Planning and Finance Department of the Government of Meghalaya supporting them in streamlining their budget process, making real-time dashboards on allocations and expenditures and the production of the states first Gender and Youth Budget in 2022.
Along with the Institute of Economic Growth, we developed and reported preliminary findings on the application of a new method for “tracking and acting” to improve planning and allocations for the Anemia Mukt Bharat (AMB), covering 12 states. The study found that these methods helped in informing national and state governments regarding yearly trends.
In 2008, Dr. Partha Mukhopadhyay (Senior Fellow) along with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian, who later went on to become our Chief Economic Adviser, advanced the idea of direct cash transfers to people. Today, as digital payments technologies and identity programs have evolved, this is gaining widespread traction.
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 Sanitation in India. In 2013, CPR’s Scaling City Institutions for India Initiative (SCI-FI) started its research and policy action on alternative governance and technical approaches to improving public health outcomes. At the time, even though two generations of public programs had supported sanitation in India, it was still globally known as amongst the weakest countries regarding sanitation outcomes. The work done by the SCI-FI initiative since then has significantly changed this scenario and has driven policy and social acceptance of alternative sanitation models including city and state-wide urban Faecal Sludge Management and Urban-Rural Convergence.
Here’s a snapshot of CPR’s work on sanitation over the years:
Until 2013, Indian policies and public investments only supported underground sewerage as the singular approach to environmental sanitation and wastewater management in urban India. As a result, approximately only 200 large Indian cities out of the more than 4000 Indian towns had partial coverage of sewerage. CPR’s research in the area of Sanitation through its SCI-FI initiative focused on bringing this anomaly to the fore and engaged in significant discussions with the government to show that Safely Managed Sanitation target of the SDGs was possible with implementing citywide Faecal Sludge Management systems in small towns.
In 2015, the SCI-FI and Practical Action with the support from the Gates Foundation (BMGF) and Arghyam initiated Project Nirmal. This was in partnership with Odisha’s Housing and Urban Development Department (H&UDD), District Administration, and Municipal governments in two medium towns of Dhenkanal and Angul. Building on the success of these pilot projects, the Odisha government scaled up the efforts to all 115 cities and towns in the state (as per State MIS) and revised the Odisha Urban Sanitation Strategy 2017 and developed the Odisha Urban Sanitation Policy 2017 even before the national policy. Furthermore, as momentum around alternative sanitation grew, the SCI-FI initiative as a part of the NFSSM alliance, supported the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs to develop a National Faecal Sludge and Septage Management Policy, 2017.
In 2017, CPR started deep diving into research on rural areas and environmental sanitation. Based on these findings, the SCI-FI initiative introduced the concept and definition of “Large Dense Villages (LDVs)”. This was referenced by the former Secretary (SBM-G), Ministry of Jal Shakti, at an International Conference in Chennai ‘FSM4’ in 2017 acknowledging the growing importance of alternative strategies for liquid waste management including FSM in LDVs.
CPR and UNICEF, with support from the District Government of Dhenkanal, ULBs and Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) piloted a novel “urban-rural convergence” in Dhenkanal district and supported the preparation of the Odisha Rural Sanitation Policy 2020, one of India’s first state-level rural policies. Based on the pilot demonstrations, the Government of Odisha scaled up the model across the state. The urban-rural convergence model has received significant traction in the national policy owing to the uniqueness and replicability of this approach. The Government of India released a notification on 14th September 2021 urging all state governments to adopt an integrated approach by urban and rural authorities for convergent action on FSM and Plastic Waste Management (PWM).
Also, based on the successful approach where SBM Gramin funds were utilised for upgrading urban infrastructure to serve rural households in Odisha, the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Ministry of Jal Shakti advised state government departments responsible for the Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin to allow funds from the rural program to be applied to urban local bodies to serve rural panchayats. This is a path-breaking notification with possible long-term governance impacts, as India’s urbanisation proceeds.
In 2021, Dhenkanal Municipality was felicitated with the ISC-FICCI Sanitation Award for the ‘Best Faecal Sludge and Septage Management Model’. In 2022, CPR won the ISC-FICCI Sanitation Awards 2022 for ‘Best Non-Profit Engagement Model in Sanitation: Urban for spearheading the pilot implementation of the urban-rural convergence model in Dhenkanal’.
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 Urbanisation. When K C Sivaramakrishnan, former Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development, and subsequent chair of our Governing Board, joined CPR, he brought with him a perspective that continues to inform our work today. This was based, first, on his unshakeable faith in the legitimacy and effectiveness of local representative democracy, embodied in his role in crafting the 74th amendment to our constitution, documented in Power to the People? The Politics and Progress of Decentralisation(2000) and second, on viewing the urban, not just as cities, but as an unfolding process of national transformation as he argued in The Future of Urbanisation: Spread and Shape in Selected States (2001).
CPR continues this tradition of focusing on governance and this process of transformation, the manner in which it is influenced by policy and the implications it has for policy, in various forms – its work on special economic zones, on ground-up urbanisation in smaller urban centres, on megacity governance and differential access to services within cities, and the myriad forms of migration engendered by & engendering this transformation.
Much of the work at CPR on this transformation has been done, with deliberate intent, as part of national and multinational networks, the work on SEZs, Subaltern Urbanisation, Cities of Delhi, the Tacit Urban Knowledge Network, BRICS, SHRAMIC, et al., building on relationships across institutions like CSH, TISS, IIHS, HUL, IGIDR in India, and institutions like CESSMA in France, Brown University, the India China Institute and CASI in the US, LIRNEasia in Sri Lanka, Universities of Johannesburg and Witwatersrand in South Africa and Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in China. The work has been generously supported by a variety of funders, the Government of India, ICSSR, Google.org, Tata Trusts, HDFC, Ford Foundation, IDRC, and others.
Here’s a snapshot of CPR’s work on Urbanisation over the years:
In 2005, CPR contributed to restructuring Delhi’s bus system, most clearly visible in the orange buses that ply in Delhi today. It innovated a new contractual structure, a gross cost contract, which has recently being expanded nationally for public electric bus contracts, under the FAME scheme of the Government of India.
In the latter half of 2000s, CPR engaged with two big questions of that time – the Special Economic Zones and the governance of our megacity regions, an issue that continues to engage us today. The work was published in two major books, Power Policy and Protest (edited by Rob Jenkins, Loraine Kennedy and Partha Mukhopadhyay) and Governance of Megacities: Fractured Thinking, Fragmented Setup by K C Sivaramakrishnan.
A core contribution of CPR’s work on urbanisation through the years has been the focus on the spatial and economic transformation processes unfolding in India, particularly the important role of smaller cities and Subaltern Urbanisation, a framework which is being increasingly used in analysing urban India today. Contemporary schemes of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs no longer focus on metro cities alone, but cover statutory towns of all sizes. CPR’s research on census towns has contributed to a growing policy focus on developing rural clusters, via the Ministry of Rural Development’s SP Mukherjee Rurban Mission.
CPR engaged with civil society organisations on migration, working with them to broaden the policy engagement and discourse as part of the SHRAMIC initiative, across multiple locations. Closer to home, was the Cities of Delhi project that brought out the people’s view of the city into the broader policy research discourse, later supplemented by work on how citizens engage across the various borders that emerge in cities.
In December 2015, in responding to a request for comments on a draft urban rental housing policy by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (then: Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation), a team of CPR researchers, including fellow Mukta Naik underscored the need to include the informal rentals segment in the policy. This submission sensitised the Ministry to rental housing needs of unorganised workers, including migrants, an exercise that supported the quick deployment of the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) scheme during COVID, as a component of the PMAY in 2020, in response to the COVID migrant crisis.
In 2017, Dr. Partha Mukhopadhyay chaired an inter-ministerial working group across different ministries on migration; its secretariat comprised many CPR colleagues with technical knowledge on migration. The report’s thrust on migrant inclusion, especially in social welfare and protection, was particularly useful to policy actors when India was confronted with the COVID migrant crisis in March 2020.
At the time of writing, CPR continues to engage with the Smart Cities project, along with the NIUA and housing and contribute to major international reports such as the UNESCAP’s report on the Future of Asia Pacific Cities.
This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with Mukta Naik, a Fellow at CPR, whose work focuses on informal housing, internal migration and what these subjects can tell us about India’s urban transformation.
Naik is an architect and urban planner, who works with the Initiative on Cities, Economy & Society at CPR. Prior to joining CPR, she worked with a social enterprise – Micro Home Solutions – on community-based interventions aimed at improving housing in informal settlements. Naik is a graduate of the School of Planning and Architecture, and has a Master’s Degree in urban and regional planning from Texas A&M University.
In this conversation, we spoke about Naik’s pathway into the policy space, the importance of ‘boundary-crossing’ when tackling subjects like migration and urbanisation and her work on the Small City Dreaming project, looking at the aspirations and lives of young Indians beyond the big cities. We also spoke about how Covid changed the conversation on migrants in India, whether the learnings from that time are taking root, what it means to look at cities and urbanisation from a Global South perspective and why she advises young scholars not to over-define their career pathways.
If you prefer audio, this conversation is also available as a podcasthere.
(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity).
You’ve had a more unusual journey into the policy world than others in the field, a winding one involving architecture and media and other things. Could you give us a sense of this journey?
When I finished my Master’s and came back to India in the early 2000s, that was really a boom time for real estate and construction and all things in the field of architecture and planning. It just made sense to explore some of that. That exploration took its own wild path. At the back of my mind, I think this desire to do research remained and it was channelled into more journalistic writing. But it did remain and eventually when I realised that I really missed being out in the field, I joined an NGO that worked on housing and informal settlements in Delhi and Ahmedabad and found myself actually getting my hands dirty in the field of planning and housing. That just organically led to CPR because it was a Delhi-based organisation and the findings that we had from our various interventions needed a policy outlet, and so we were constantly talking to people like Partha Mukhopadhyay, who we interviewed earlier on CPR Perspectives and Shubhagato [Dasgupta] to guide us to the right policy spaces where we could feed our findings into. When I realised that research is what I wanted to do long term, I used that network to connect into CPR. It was long and winding, but it was a thread that I was following through non-research pathways and then ended up being in a policy research space.
To step back a little bit: College was the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. And then you had a graduate degree from Texas A&M and at this point what did you have in mind?
Interestingly, my Masters’ dissertation actually studied Asian Indians in Houston and their housing choices. So housing was a very clear area of interest and so was migration. Unfortunately, I had a personal situation because of which I couldn’t continue straight into a PhD program, or even explore job opportunities in the US. I had to come back to India where the networks that I had from SPA led more into the architecture and construction and materials world.
But yes: Housing and migration and the idea of how cities actually form and what are the kind of problems that entrants into cities face was the broad thrust for what I wanted to do. So in 2011, when I finally found my way back into ‘mainstream’ urban work, I chose to work for a housing NGO which worked in informal settlements in Delhi and looked at issues of experience, design, architecture, infrastructure – that bucket of things.
When did you decide research was for you?
Even while I was doing this job with micro Home Solutions, I had applied for an independent research grant. We were working in resettlement colonies and did a survey of homeowners there, within which there was a subcategory of rent. The idea [was to look at] renters in informal settlements: Who they are, why they are there and how long do they stay? So I wrote a research proposal which got some independent funding. But the guides that they assigned were mainstream architects who hadn’t fully engaged with the informality. I felt like I needed more robust guidance. So I would start showing up at CPR and catching whoever I could. Picking Partha’s brains and saying ‘I’m doing this, I find it really interesting. I need help.’ It was because we had this relationship with them when they were helping us find policy pathways for our intervention. That’s how it started. And then I basically realised that this space feels really comfortable and I requested Partha to consider me if something came up by way of an opportunity and eventually, the Tata Trust-funded project on Migration did come up and then in 2015 I was able to switch gears completely into research.
You came in with many years of work experience, yet started off as a Research Associate. You’ve said there was some element of self doubt, and of having to convince yourself. I’d like to hear a little bit more about that process for you personally.
I had been working with this organisation that did really interesting experimental intervention work and yet found it so hard to speak to the policy world. I was quite convinced that my research skills are good and needed honing, but I was really confused about how that actually leads into policy. When I came into CPR, I had a cohort of people who had very clear ideas about their career trajectories. They were people with master’s degrees, knew that they were in CPR for a few years of experience, and then going on to PhDs. I wasn’t sure that was my pathway at that time. But I had a lot of field experience so I could instinctively understand and grasp things. I had project management experience so I could get projects running on the ground. I had no hesitation in public speaking, reaching out to partners –, the nuts and bolts of getting projects up and running came easily to me. But the intellectual rigor, the theoretical background of research was not something that I had worked at in the intervening years between my Master’s and joining CPR, which was basically 13 long years.
So I did feel a little under equipped to do that part of it. But I have to say that CPR was a space that provided adequate mentorship, where everybody was jostling around trying to get the best work done. It was a very multidisciplinary team. So you did see people with similar problems. [For example], lawyers who were in CPR, not quite sure whether they wanted to go back to practice or look at policy. So there were others, even though they were much younger than me, in a similar boat. We all found some common threads and managed to work around that. We also had a lot of freedom because the kind of projects that we were doing were two-year, three-year time frame projects which gave a lot of time to make small mistakes and then bounce back and find better ways to do something. You would just learn by doing. You would collect data, come back and then present it, and somebody would tell you that this is missing and then you go and redo it with the requisite rigor. You had the freedom to learn things, not in an educational atmosphere, but in a more learn-by-doing sort of way.
As you enter CPR, you end up doing lots of different things, which we’ll try to put into different buckets for this conversation, and dip into each. So initially what were you looking at?
I started with a Tata Trust-funded project called Shramic, which was about internal migration in India. It was a partnership with the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research in Mumbai and NIUA. We also had a lot of NGO partners. At that time, there was a lot of research on labour – labour mobility and problems of labour – but migrants were not really researched as a category by themselves. But there were a lot of civil society organisations who had been helping migrants, especially at source, and beginning to see the problems at the urban destinations. Our interest was really to collate the knowledge that NGOs and civil society had and sort of see how to develop a more rigorous research program around that. It was an easy entry for me because I understood the NGO world already and I was able to build those collaborations and we actually were able to publish papers in a special issue of Urban India, which were entirely authored by NGOs.
This boundary crossing between the world of civil society and practice and the world of academia was what that project focused on. We generated a lot of knowledge, collated a lot of existing knowledge and so on and so forth. I was parallelly doing a project on informal rentals. The first paper that I published in 2015, which I wrote while I was at CPR. The data was collected in the pre-CPR days but CPR is what actually gave me the confidence to put it out as an academic output. That sort of simmered because the field sites were based in Gurgaon and I live in Gurgaon and I’m sort of embedded in the city’s life and civil society networks and activist networks. It just felt like a life project – everybody has that pet field which they keep going back to from time to time and mine is the urban villages of Gurgaon.
The way our team works in CPR is while yes, people are assigned to projects, it’s more like everybody’s working on everything. So while I was looking after this project, I was also pitching into other projects. This flagship project called Cities of Delhi which Partha and Patrick Heller led was finishing around the time. When I joined, I could come in to collate the last bits, organise the dissemination events and help out in that sense. That my previous organisation had sort of helped out in finding field sites for CPR also helped because I had an insight into what that project was doing. The informal rentals work got an opportunity because we had a long-standing partnership with a French research institute called IRD and Veronique Dupont and Marie-Helene Zerah (from IRD) were already CPR visiting faculty. They co-wrote a grant with CPR and brought in money to study urban-rural boundaries and informal settlements and with that grant, I got the chance to deepen my work on informal renting.
I like the idea of boundary-crossing on the back end of your work, because it shows up so much in the research as well. So tell us more about this pet project in Gurgaon?
When I first started looking at this, I had a more architect-planner gaze and was thinking more about people building – they’re adding floors, not for their own family expansion but to generate rental income. The idea of rent as a source of livelihood – which is true of a large part of the global south – we didn’t really understand the mechanics of it. It was sort of consigned into this space of informality. But when I delved into it, I realised that there are a lot of social dimensions. It was very intrinsically linked with the process of urbanisation. In the case of Gurgaon, developers –but in the case of other cities, the government – comes in and acquires agricultural land for the purpose of urban development, but leaves the abadi [residential] areas of these villages in zones of exception, saying ‘we don’t know what to do with you, so we’re going to leave you alone.’
These are the areas which go on to become dense suppliers of informal rentals. This was a fallout of a methodological innovation that I had to make on field because this [rental] work is informal and not entirely legal in the sense that these are not spaces that can take those kinds of densities, these are not spaces that have high levels of services, so landlords are very hesitant to speak to researchers. So you would have to become friends with them and as a woman going into an urban village and talking to Jat, Yadav, Gujjar landlords meant that you needed to spend the time to introduce who you are, what you’re doing, win their trust. Often first spend time with their women folk and then slowly get to talk to them. What ensued was a whole lot of life history interactions, where they would start from the point at which whoever it was in their family – their father or their grandfather – sold their agricultural land. So their identity as agriculturalists, and how they’re trying to hold on to it in a rapidly urbanising world, and the links of that identity with, with caste – whether they were from dominating or backward castes – all of those things just organically came up in the research.
I didn’t set out to do it, but many of the questions it answered for me were questions that I was originally grappling with way back in 2002 when I was thinking about city formations and transitions and how do cities actually come to be. That really excited me and continues to. This is something that I’ll keep returning to from time to time. Rental housing was also something that was repeatedly a failure of policy in the sense that the Indian government and various states had tried experiments with rent and housing, which had almost never worked. So it was this problem area that the formal policy sector didn’t want to get into. So, in 2016, when the formal policy space started worrying about things like rent, this research was available for them to speak to or absorb.
What did the research itself tell you? What were you looking at, and what did you manage to find out?
The crux is that there is a class of people who are temporary occupants of a city. They are coming not with the original intent of living long-term, but they are foraying into the city and testing grounds. Rental housing is an important asset class to make that possible. Because many of them are poor, low-skilled and therefore not do not have high disposable incomes and can’t pay higher rents, they gravitate towards the cheapest housing available, even if there are conditions of congestion and poor service. The crux of this is that the informality that allows them to do this, even with oral agreements and substandard services, is a really important service and an important infrastructure for cities if they are to absorb labour that eventually will go on to become long-term residents.
That links it through with my subsequent interest in looking at migrant communities, because I found that people were living in rental housing and remained itinerant occupants of the city for many decades. This was really the disturbing part of it. The structural transformation one imagines, where you come and then, intergenerationally, there is some sort of a progress and an embedding into the urban fabric, wasn’t really happening for many, many people. And that’s something to worry about. Later the World Bank and others have picked up phrases like messy urbanisation and hesitant urbanisation, which precisely refers to the inability of Indian cities to absorb labour in a long term and an integrationist sense. The main theme of the rental housing work was worrying about this question of, if economic development is going to happen through urbanisation and the movement of people out of agriculture, into service and other kinds of jobs, and cities are not able to really enable that transformation, then how do we actually solve that problem? In my view, focusing on rental housing and informal settlements and upgradation of those parts of the city would be one really good way to enable those transitions.
That takes us to bucket 2 – migrants and smaller cities. The small cities terminology, according to my understanding, covers everything from census towns all the way to satellites of major cities. You’ve worked on understanding these spaces and the wants and desires of people within them. Let’s stand with the spaces. What is migrant intensity?
CPR already was part of this large project called Subaltern Urbanization, which has resulted in a book and in fairly well-acknowledged and well-cited articles. Here they were arguing that India’s urbanisation was the opposite of migration. They were arguing that India is not urbanising because people are moving en masse from poor rural parts of the country to relatively rich urban parts of the country. They were arguing that the poor rural parts of the country themselves are transforming. Not just because they’re getting denser, but also because of economic transformations. They were doing field studies in Eastern India at the time and I was sending people out there and then reading their field notes and attending all these ‘Suburban’ conferences and getting a fairly good idea of what’s happening at that very small town level.
But I had a long standing partnership with another organisation called Just Jobs Network and a friend of mine, Gregory Randolph, who had a more economic geography thinking on this. The economic transitions in these really small spaces are very informal in nature. But what happens to slightly larger cities where some agglomeration effects are there, meaning that there is an industry, there is some service cluster, some artisanal cluster, there’s already some existing urban agglomeration that may have been there historically or at least has been there for the last 50-70 years? What’s happening there vis a vis migration, because even now, we’re still talking about the largest metropolises – Bombay, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai? The statistics also show us that a lot of the migration is actually happening into other kinds of urban areas in India.
So we deliberately did not go to the smallest ones and and of course avoided the largest ones and tried to focus on the middle layer, somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 people. These are already cities. They’ve been cities for some time. They may not feel like the cities that you and me live in, but they are cities nevertheless. And it’s not just India. Many developing parts of the world have this category of town which doesn’t get adequate policy attention. So what’s happening there? The idea of migrant intensity was not just to think of places as receiving migrants, but because they were so small, or also sending them away. Because they are clusters of education, they are clusters of small-time accumulation by the rural lands. We looked at migrant intensity as a measure of places that both send and receive migrants. I can’t say it was very sophisticated data work because we are not sophisticated data scientists, but it was a very simplistic exploration. And what it did was help us highlight which geographical spaces to look at, which districts and which states have these interesting things happening. And that paved the way to select case cities and then do deep work – both survey work as well as qualitative work.
The animating question there was really to understand – what kind of jobs are young people getting? How uneven or even is that landscape of employment, both in terms of getting access to employment as well as the experience of it? Gender was a big consideration here, I think a little bit before the question of women’s workforce participation became the most urgent question on the policy landscape. We weren’t looking at it from a FLFP [Female Labour Force Participation] perspective, we were looking at it just simply as young people, and caste and gender were the two angles that in the Indian context were important to consider. We wrote a project around that question and then went into two cities in India and two cities in Indonesia to deep dive and try and answer some of that.
What you found was that the spaces that were most migrant intensive – both sending and receiving migrants – were not the mega cities, but often rural or semi-urban spaces.
Absolutely. And when we did go turn up at these places and start talking to people, we realised that because India’s economic geography is so specific where the northern and eastern parts of India are poor, populous and labour-sending and the eastern and southern parts of India are labour receiving, the common understanding is that in smaller cities, the catchment area of migrants is also smaller. That you would only attract migrants from the region. But in India’s case, that’s not true. If there is a cluster of employment, then labour is going to come from UP and Bihar and West Bengal and Assam and all of the labour sending areas, because that’s how the recruitment networks work. There are caste-based networks. The third thing is that the improvement of highways in India has meant that it’s not just migration, but one has to see it through the lens of mobility, because people are commuting to work. We really found that in these smaller towns, the local and regional transportation networks were absolutely key, whether it was young men’s families insisting on bikes as dowry because that was a really important asset for these young men to get to travel that one hour or 1.5 hour to find sustained employment from their rural locations. Or in the case of Mangalore, really high quality privatised bus transport networks that local elites really supported because it got them this large catchment area of workers from the towns around. Because Mangalore is just 15 kilometres away from Kerala and these are places with high education levels, they were able to use this rural or small town labour for services – healthcare, hospitality, retail and those kinds of industries too.
Those two cases – Kishangarh in Rajasthan which is a marble cluster, and Mangalore, which is this coastal town with both industry and service sectors – provided us very fertile fields to explore many questions of what was happening.
This is connected to the Small City Dreaming project and a separate paper you worked on about the aspirations of women and the way they learn how to navigate small cities. You said it helped you integrate your idea of how cities work. So how do they work? What did you learn?
The first thing I learned was that planners need to be taught sociology a lot more than they are because this project took a completely sociological turn. Very clearly, gender, caste, and economic class are what allow those avenues to unfold for these individuals. Their household backgrounds are really important and because we were not just doing interviews in the city, but actually trying to move out to see how these rural areas and cities were connected, we were able to hear the voices of a lot of young women who could have done those jobs but weren’t allowed to, or could not even form aspirations because they were so conditioned to believing that they could only do XYZ kind of work or that they couldn’t work at all in the case of Kishangarh.
This self censorship and self-control that they had exerted on their own aspirations was really interesting to me, but also that even within those boundaries they were negotiating quite hard – for better marriages, for more education. There is a very strong aspirational pulse that we found, especially among young women. Among young men the pressure to earn, to give back to the family unit in terms of income was very, very high and that almost stymied ambitions, and became drudgery.
Mangalore was a much more aspirational space. We could see migrants coming in from as far as Maharashtra, even Assam, working in service sector jobs and then getting a lot of data and insights from the cosmopolitan nature of the city and forming new aspirations like going abroad for instance, because a lot of Mangaloreans, aspire to go to the Gulf. So those aspirations transmit and then you work back to see how you can build your skills and your networks to meet those aspirations, whether they actually take place or not. I suppose we need a lot more work to make sure that those pathways are more legible for young people, and I think some of that is already captured in the work on skilling. But we cannot just think of skilling as an aspatial intervention. Where are you providing that skilling? Is it in the village of origin? Is it in this sort of intermediate space where the person has already come and formed some aspirations? Our skilling programs would not allow somebody coming from Assam to Mangalore to access the government skilling programs because they would not be domicile residents of that city or that district. Then they would have to rely on private skilling, which is more expensive and then they would get into a debt trap.
There are a lot of misalignments in policy that the project revealed that we tried to capture in our policy writing, but there’s a lot more to unearth. We finished collecting data in 2019, just before the pandemic and then during the pandemic, of course, the entire migration conversation took a very different turn, and that led to data collection about different sets of things like social protection and social welfare of migrants. And now, sitting in 2023 and trying to look back at all the data that I’ve collected. I can see that there’s a larger story in which all of these pieces connect, which can then influence policy in some ways.
At the centre of it, I keep coming back to the city and its governance and how a lack of capacity of urban governance is actually a roadblock to many things. It’s not just poor water supply and traffic congestion and air pollution that you and I experience, and that the lay public would cite most commonly as examples of poor urban governance. But it’s also all of these really important things for connecting the aspirations of rural people, the kind of labour that cities can benefit from and giving them the pathway to make all of that happen. Housing, of course, is also a very important component. Where do they stay? They have to make choices between decent living and remitting money home. And that’s a really hard choice to make. Are the elite who take governance decisions in the city in a position to even think about this or are they cognizant about the kind of trade-offs that a struggling young person in a city is making at this point of time?
As you finished the field work, you started to think more about the governance of these spaces, and of the pathways through them for migrants. Covid in particular made it very clear that India looks at migrants in a certain way. In one paper you write about how governments use territory as an organising principle and that fails to acknowledge the mobility of goods and people that is fundamental to everyday life. Where did that work take you?
In the Small City Dreaming project, it was very difficult to understand who you are going to feed your policy ideas to. Because city governments would listen to us and say we agree that these are the problems, but we don’t have the solutions and we don’t have any budgets or any real power to take these decisions. State governments were not sure about how exactly to work on this. Parallelly, the Ministry of Housing – the urban poverty alleviation division, which later the ministries merged and became Housing and Urban Affairs – started this working group on migration. The motivation for that was this idea that migrants come to cities and don’t find decent places to stay and live and work in substandard conditions. They constituted this interministerial working group which Partha chaired, so all of us who were working with Partha at that time got very deeply involved with the drafting and the thinking behind this report. That actually gave me the exposure to think about migration in policy terms.
Because these were completely divorced areas of policy. If you thought about migration, it went squarely into the domain of labour. And if you thought about cities, then that would instantly prompt keywords like housing, transport, infrastructure, water, sanitation, waste, solid waste, but never migration. And even never labour, really, except for labour rights organisations. These intersections weren’t really happening in the policy space. So this working group was almost an anomaly in the sense that the demand came from things like, why are there so many vacant houses in urban areas, 11 million vacant homes? And that was a parliamentary question. So there were all these disparate sort of trigger points that led to the formation of that group. That report, I think, for the first time was able to articulate the links between migration and labour. And all the different policy areas that need to act together to actually be able to facilitate labour migration in the country. We submitted the report in 2017. And then it was sort of lying there and germinating.
When COVID hit, we had all this knowledge and we had already spent a lot of time thinking about it in this abstract sense and then we had a very unfortunate use case to apply all that knowledge. When people were asking us questions about why is this not happening and why is that not happening? We literally could reel things off of that report, saying, this is why the data is not there or this data is there and that data is not there.’ In that report, the idea of the lack of portability in social protection or the idea of how domicile provisions actually inhibited migrants from accessing what were otherwise fairly universalised forms of social security was already articulated, conceptually. So during COVID, we had a framework to make sense of what people were telling us.
And how has that played out? You’ve written in a recent paper for CPR that “we may be seeing the beginnings of a transition away from a centralist model of migration governance.” Are we actually seeing that? Or has Covid and the migration problem been forgotten?
What happened during Covid – the pain that the migrants felt – the memory of that pain very much lives on in the source areas. Destination areas are able to forget because the governance of migrants in destination areas is pretty much outsourced to employers. Cities don’t necessarily take responsibility for labour migrants as such, unless they are using city services or are more integrated into the city. But we saw during Covid that that the vast majority of the people who really suffered were living on work sites, on factory floors and were not permanent residents of the city anyway. They were in some form of circulation all of the time. And the governance of those folks for cities is the employers’ headache. I mean frankly there is really no data and no way that the cities can currently even really do anything to help unless there is a big thrust and a big push to do that. At the source areas, migrants came back and they remained there for a long time. Because the return to the cities happened gradually and unevenly, depending on which industries were able to get back up and running first. Women and children were the last to come back. They were left in the villages when families went back home. So in the source states, this question of the problems of the migrants and the kind of miseries that they face was animated for a much longer period of time.
There is a statewide survey happening in Jharkhand. There’s another one happening in Odisha. There were always initiatives by states who were sending out migrants. Odisha, for instance, has always been proactive in this space. But these initiatives are not institutionalised. They’re one off. One civil society organisation learns how to do something really well. That gets embedded into one state department, but they’re only able to do it with certain destination states, not with others. They have bilateral agreements between state A and state B, but the same kind of bilateral agreement doesn’t really get replicated among other states. I wouldn’t say there’s a sense of urgency, but in source states, there is a simmering issue that poverty and distress is linked with the migration issue and so they will have to get a sense of how many migrants do we have? Where do we have them? What work do they do? Where do they go? So that we’re in a good position to negotiate with the destination areas when they face problems.
There’s a subtle shift from the language of ‘stop migration, don’t let people go,’ to ‘we can’t help people leaving because we don’t have the kind of opportunities here, they have better opportunities elsewhere, but we should know enough to be able to negotiate with employers and state governments elsewhere, if we need to.’ Because Covid gave them that experience. When they had to transport migrants home, they were talking. The principal secretary of one state was talking to the principal secretary of the other state and giving numbers on how many migrants, how many buses, how many trains. That sort of bilateral activity really increased. And it remains to be seen whether the Centre will also step in to facilitate and smoothen some of this. That’s still a work in progress because there isn’t that much pressure and you’re right that there’s a narrative that we’ve done what we needed to do to deal with it.
One of the things you’ve said is that you’re interested in feeding migration and small cities research not just into the Indian discourse, but also the international discourse on urban planning. I found the focus on India and Indonesia in the Small City Dreaming project very interesting. Could you tell me more about this?
Both Indonesia and some sort of exploratory work that we did under the aegis of the India China Institute at the New School in New York, which is comparative work in the Chinese context. I also had the opportunity to do something briefly with a Vietnamese anthropologist on the rental housing space. There are uncanny similarities in the sense of the processes of urbanisation among all of these countries. Of course, the specifics differ. Especially in terms of the kind of decentralisation of governance that has happened. India really for its size and its stage of economic development is an outlier and an exception in the sense that cities are so remarkably unempowered. But largely cities are less empowered in large parts of the Global South as compared to the Global North, where a lot of the migration theory and migration and development thinking is happening.
There are all these theoretical ideas [from the Global North] that cities can solve problems. You can only solve problems of integration at the local point where you actually have to negotiate the brass tacks of who will get water and who will be able to attend primary school and so on. And that has been taken up as the solution for a lot of things. What my research is trying to say is, wait a minute, that’s not the context everywhere else. Provincial governments may be really powerful and larger cities may have different powers than smaller cities, and it’s very uneven and resource constrained. You need different kinds of policy levers. Internal migration needs to be thought of in a different way and not in as securitized way as global migration. So the contributions are more in the sense of, is there, in the large body of work on global migration, something to learn for those of us who are interested in internal migratory movements, especially in large countries like India and China, or even parts of Africa where you know there are lots of within country movements? And conversely, in studying the integration and inclusion of migrants in urban contexts in the Global South, do we have something new to say in these relatively unempowered city contexts? What can we say to the larger body of knowledge on migration governance globally? Can we unsettle it a little bit?
I’ve already taken plenty of your time, but I wanted to go back to a couple of things you did before CPR, and how you evolved as a writer and researcher. I wanted to ask especially about Rambling in the City and your project to write every day for a year. Tell us about that.
It’s always good to have an opportunity to talk about your pet projects. Basically, I felt like my training in urban planning was not fully utilised in all the various different things that I was doing through the decade from about 2002 to 2010 or so. I decided that I needed to think more about cities and I set myself a target to write every day about cities and the blog that I ran was called Rambling in the City, which was literally anything about cities. A lot of that writing is really short snippets, very descriptive. It’s very emotive. But even though I made this transition into a policy research institution which has a very strong academic bent of mind, I think at the core, I still enjoy and I still think it’s really important to write in a way that a large number of people can understand what you’re saying about cities. I really feel that there is a tendency to jargonise and make everything too academic and too illegible to the majority. Especially problems of urbanisation are close to so many people because the urban experience is everybody’s experience, even for people who live in villages and visit cities.
The city is a spectacle. It’s something to be experienced and everybody has an opinion about, the nearest town or sheher. There is some part of this research that needs to feed back to people who are actually living and experiencing cities, especially because I really do believe that a lot of the future lies in some or the other form of bottom up claim making from residents.. So if we have to shape the quality of those claims and the content of those claims, then as policy researchers writing to a larger audience is really important to me. So Rambling in the City prepared me to do that and and through the CPR journey also there’s been a constant attempt to write Op-Eds and lighter pieces which synthesise the research. Retain the rigour but interpret the findings for a wider audience. And that’s also what I hope I’ll be able to do going forward.
If you could give advice to younger scholars or people who aren’t in a research space but are thinking about entering it in some way or the other. Are there tools or or or lenses that you would recommend?
Research is a part of so much work that is happening even in the practice space, a lot of the consulting work involves some form of research. When I speak to young people, I find that the career pathways are over-defined in their minds. They imagine that policy research is a specific and very rigid career pathway, which it clearly is not, if you see my example or the example of the people you’ve interviewed, even just from the small bunch of folks you’ve spoken to at CPR. So I would say that you need to pick up the tools to do research. And a lot of it can be self taught, by looking for opportunities to be parts of teams that are going out and finding things. And it doesn’t have to be called research. It can be just ‘okay, we are curious and we’re going to find out stuff’ or it could be that you’re actually trying to work on a solution, but instead of reading five reports and writing something about it, maybe you can step out and talk to five people as well. It’s hard. It requires a certain amount of confidence and interlocution and that means that you have to go and ask someone for help. Which is daunting for a lot of people. But I would advise you to ask for it and it might actually turn up like it did for me when I needed it.
That’s great advice. Are there misconceptions about your area of work yourself having to correct all the time, not just from the lay public but even fellow scholars?
Research is not very well understood in the sense of, what does it do. There’s this idea, and I think Partha spoke about it as well, that researchers do some abstract stuff. It’s a bit of an ivory tower and everything that I’ve done is anything but an ivory tower. The uncertainty that researchers, especially policy researchers have, is often that the avenues of feeding your findings into the world of policy are not direct at all. It’s not like somebody in a decision-making position has commissioned you to do XYZ research. You go out, you find the answers, you tell them and they take it or leave it, or they adapt some of your suggestions. It’s really not as straightforward as that. It’s a feedback loop that we have as researchers with all kinds of actors: other researchers, academicians, talking to students and changing the way they think about their own training is also a method of policy impact. Civil society is a huge space which I think we derive information from, but also give back to because they are interlocutors in the policy space, whether they are NGOs, whether they are RWAs, whether they are local, informal community leaders or frontline workers, whoever those actors whom you are speaking to.
Closing the feedback loop has been the most gratifying part of the job and I think coming back to the misconceptions a lot of people I speak to don’t really even see that as something that policy researchers would be doing. They just assume it’s a linear chain that starts with the generation of a question and ends with the answering of that question. But actually it goes back to the start where your answers have to be fed back to your interlocutors, and that generates a new set of questions. And I think Avani [Kapur, who we spoke to earlier on CPR Perspectives] really brought that out well when she was speaking to you. So I would say that that’s also true in my domain. We never find clear answers. It’s a continuously evolving space.
Is there any of your work that you would like to point readers to? And can you tell us what you’re working on now?
I really like reading back the work that I did during Covid, explaining the migrant crisis, whether it was, you know, the newspaper op-eds in Indian Express, which came out in 2020 and 2021, or whether it was blogs on the India China Institutewebsite because these were not pieces you had four years of research and and time to to write. You really had to speak to the situation and a lot of new generative ideas come out sometimes when you’re put against the wall and asked hard questions and you have limited time to answer them. Those are really pieces that taught me that when you’re pushed against the wall, actually there are a lot of creative solutions out there. Like what happened during the migrant crisis and how people responded and how hyperlocal chains of response formed and what that means for state-society relations and for urban governments broadly. That’s an idea that was generated in that time and it’s in this particular piecethat was published in Urbanisation but it’s an idea that I’m going to come back to over the years because it’s seeded a certain chain of thoughts which could be important for the policy imagination.
Our final question, what 3 works would you say have influenced you over the years?
While I’ve derived a lot of knowledge from serious academic writing, interestingly, the writing that’s really inspirational and that makes me feel that policy research or researchers can actually make an impact is the more accessible sort of work. So for instance, a recent publication that I really liked was Metronama: Scenes from the Delhi Metro by Rashmi Sadana. She’s an anthropologist and it’s about life in the Delhi Metro which probably weaves in years of really rigorous research, but is breezily told and very nuanced. I also like a lot of non-researchers’ work about cities, so for example Aman Seti’s A Free Man was one of the texts that actually propelled me back into the world of thinking about the urban. It made me feel like all the stuff that I was doing for various clients as a consultant was not as meaningful as actually engaging with hard questions of poverty and labour and and rights and so on and so forth. Similarly, I’ve really enjoyed Amitava Kumar’s writings, whether it’s on Patna or his book on Bombay–London–New York, which again is a non-academician, non-urbanist writing about cities. But I really feel that those insights are super rich in terms of how cities are experienced. And I feel like policymakers and policy thinkers have a lot to learn from those kind of texts, not just from hardcore research.
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:
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)
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).
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.
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.
(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.
TOPSHOT – French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during the closing session of the New Global Financial Pact Summit, in Paris on June 23, 2023. (Photo by Lewis Joly / POOL / AFP)
As global temperatures inch beyond 1.2C above pre-industrial levels and countries witness increasing instances of record-breaking heatwaves, storms, droughts, floods, and forest fires, 2023 is shaping up to be a critical year for climate action. Climate is on the agenda at the G20 Summit, the SDG Summit, the World Bank Annual Meetings, and COP 28 (including the first Global Stocktake of progress since the Paris Agreement), among others.
Fundamentally, climate action needs to be facilitated by large amounts of finance and investments. Some estimates indicate that the world needs up to USD 130 trillion in total to decarbonise by the middle of the century, with additional finance required to build resilience, adapt to unavoidable impacts, and deal with loss and damage. Currently, the amounts of finance flowing towards climate action, particularly in developing countries, fall far short of these needs[1]. Further, as many – led by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley – are pointing out, developing countries are also facing a cost of living crisis and a debt crisis, in addition to the climate crisis, and the global financial system is not currently equipped to adequately address these interconnected problems.
Responding to growing calls for change, one crucial event this year was the June 22-23 Summit for a New Global Financial Pact, hosted in Paris by France and Barbados, together with a broader steering committee. It was presented as an opportunity to build a new contract between the global north and south, and was ushered in by a joint statement by 13 world leaders (including those of the US, Germany, France, EU, and Japan) committing to use the Summit to accelerate progress towards the SDGs.
What did the Summit cover, and did it achieve any of its objectives?
Discussions largely fell under three broad and interrelated themes. The first was on reforming multilateral financial institutions (MFIs), such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provide financial assistance towards climate, development, and macroeconomic stability. These MFIs – set up 80 years ago when most developing countries didn’t exist and guided by the priorities of the largest shareholders – aren’t seen as being fit-for-purpose, often offering high interest loans that are conditional on opening domestic markets to foreign competition and on increasing fiscal austerity. Progress however fell short of the ambition of creating a new ‘Paris Consensus’ to reform MFIs. Against the developing countries’ calls for a complete overhaul of these institutions or the creation of new institutions, developed countries offered only moderate changes. Calls to increase the capitalization of MFIs were resisted, and MFIs are only expected to modestly increase lending capacity through tweaks to their balance sheets. The World Bank launched a Private Sector Investment Lab to help remove barriers to private climate finance, although private finance mobilization is not a new – or uniformly desirable – ambition, and in place of more concrete outcomes, the Summit was at best able to issue a statement supporting a call to action to evolve MFIs.
A second set of discussions was around easing indebtedness. The high levels of developing country indebtedness (with an average debt-to-GDP ratio of 207%) and repayment burdens – aggravated by the higher interest rates they face – reduce the resources available towards climate and development action, and become an additional burden in the event of other crises. Discussions on indebtedness saw comparatively more progress. Among initial proposals such as offering ‘debt-for-climate-action’ swaps (which provide debt relief in exchange for progress on climate objectives), a notable development was the widespread agreement on the need to introduce climate-resilient debt clauses – which would suspend debt repayments in the event of disasters – by the end of 2025. Additionally, the IMF reached a target of making USD 100 billion in special drawing rights (a reserve currency) available to climate-vulnerable countries to ease their immediate liquidity requirements.
Discussions on fostering greater flows of climate finance witnessed the widest variety of proposals and the least tangible outcomes. Much of the focus was on the usual promise of carbon markets, and a Call to Action for Paris-aligned Carbon Markets – expanding carbon pricing coverage to advance progress towards the objectives of the Paris Agreement – was launched. Other proposals included lending in local currencies to reduce exchange rate risks, establishing catastrophe bonds to provide emergency liquidity during crises, mandating big corporate polluters to set aside a percentage of profits for climate finance, and introducing a financial transaction tax to fund climate action. A potentially promising idea, to introduce a carbon tax on shipping, will be debated at an International Maritime Organisation meeting this week.
Overall, the Summit – while recognizing key limitations of the current financial system – was thin on tangible outcomes, and points towards incremental progress rather than a systemic transformation, illustrating the lack of consensus that persists around the way forward. Although it was attended by the heads of state of over 30 countries, the leaders of the biggest economies – China, India, and the US – were also notably absent from the stage, with Finance Minister Sitharaman representing India at the discussions.
Nevertheless, the Summit has infused a sense of momentum and urgency into these critical discussions, proposing a roadmap of actions to take conversations forward, and the symbolism of a global conference on financial reform attended by several heads of state should not be underestimated. President Macron is to be commended for sparking this conversation and creating a platform for such north-south engagement. As attention turns to advancing the roadmap through future global events, this Summit can be seen, at the very least, as a necessary political stock-take of how much remains to be done.
[1] Financial flows from developed to developing countries were reported at USD 83 billion in 2020 – itself a disputed figure. In 2022 in contrast, global fossil fuels subsidies were USD 1 trillion, and the combined profits of the top five oil companies were about USD 200 billion.
STATEMENT
January 17th, 2024
On 10th January 2024, CPR received a notice from the Ministry of Home Affairs cancelling its FCRA status. The basis of this decision is incomprehensible and disproportionate, and some of the reasons given challenge the very basis of the functioning of a research institution. This includes the publication on our website of policy reports emanating from our research being equated with current affairs programming.
During the tenure of our suspension, we sought and obtained interim redress from the honourable Delhi High Court and will continue to seek recourse in all avenues possible.
This cancellation comes after a decision to suspend the FCRA status in February 2023. These actions followed an Income Tax “survey” that took place in September 2022. The actions have had a debilitating impact on the institution’s ability to function by choking all sources of funding. This has undermined the institution’s ability to pursue its well established objective of producing high quality, globally recognised research on policy matters, which it has been recognised for over its 50 years’ existence. During this time the institution has been home to some of the country’s most distinguished academics, diplomats and policymakers.
CPR firmly reiterates that it is in complete compliance with the law, and has been cooperating fully and exhaustively at every step of the process. We remain steadfast in our belief that this matter will be resolved in line with constitutional values and guarantees.
