Events

The Centre for Policy Research invites you to a talk on:

Weak but Working: Bureaucrats, Patronage, and Public Services in Indian Cities

Wednesday, 19 August 2026, 2:30 PM IST

Speaker:
Bhanu Joshi,  incoming Lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University.

Discussant:
Yamini Aiyar, Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), and a Senior Visiting Fellow at Brown University’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia and Watson Institute.

Moderator:
Arkaja Singh, Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR)

This event will be held in a hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room and online via Zoom. Please register below to attend.

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About the Talk

Bhopal and Lucknow are large state capitals operating under the same constitutional framework, the same civil service structures, and broadly similar fiscal rules. Yet in 2022 Bhopal was ranked India’s sixth cleanest city, while Lucknow, despite recent improvement, had ranked as low as 269th only five years earlier. Formally identical jurisdictions producing sharply different services is a pattern found across the global South, and it sits uneasily with theories that explain state capacity through wealth, Weberian bureaucracy, or institutional design.

This talk, based on Bhanu Joshi’s dissertation, locates a large part of the answer in the middle of the state. Drawing on an original face-to-face survey of 3,754 households in the two cities, archival research, and fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2023, Joshi argues that governance outcomes hinge on conditional autonomy: negotiated professional discretion exercised by meso-level bureaucrats and tolerated, at times supported, by political leaders. These officials, positioned between elite generalist administrators and street-level workers, can coordinate across departments, levels of government, and political actors in ways that create pockets of effective delivery even where patronage persists. Comparing trash and water further shows why patronage performs unevenly: personal networks can secure threshold delivery of simple, visible services, while complex, infrastructure-heavy goods require sustained coordination that patronage rarely supplies.

About the Speaker
Bhanu Joshi is an incoming Lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. He received his PhD in Political Science from Brown University, specializing in comparative politics and political economy with a focus on South Asia. His research examines state capacity, bureaucratic politics, patronage, and electoral accountability in Indian democracy. He is particularly interested in politician-bureaucrat relations, urban governance, and the institutional conditions under which states deliver public goods. He is also a co-founder of the Data Action Lab for Emerging Societies (DALES), an independent research collective producing data and analysis on Indian democracy.

About the Discussant

Yamini Aiyar is a scholar of contemporary Indian politics and public policy whose research focuses on state capacity, welfare policy, federalism, governance, and political economy. She is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), and a Senior Visiting Fellow at Brown University’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia and Watson Institute, where she is researching welfare states in the Global South. She previously served as President and CEO of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi (2017–2024), and founded its Accountability Initiative. Her latest book, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines the institutional and organisational foundations of effective state capacity.

About the Moderator

Arkaja Singh is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. She studied law at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and has a LL.M. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her work focusses on the interplay of institutional design and state practice, how law shapes, and is shaped by the work of public administration.