PVLF 2025

Interview with Yamini Aiyar, Author of ‘Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi's Schools’

A call to reform: Invest in frontline educators, drive change through engagement, and write with integrity for lasting impact in public policy.
on Jul 14, 2025

Frontlist: Your debut book brings policy research to life by focusing on Delhi’s school reforms. What motivated you to choose this case study for your first full-length work?

Yamini: I began my career at a time when the Indian state had embarked on a significant expansion in the welfare state. But this expansion confronted the formidable challenge of state capacity. The routine incompetence of the Indian state in delivering basic public services from health and education to social safety nets was now the biggest hurdle to improving the lives and livelihoods of most citizens. The expansion of the welfare state thus also saw the rise of civil society and social movements working from the ground up to hold the state accountable. In the early years of my career, I explored the challenge of state capacity from the citizen perspective, both as a researcher and active participant in the process of strengthening sites for citizen claim making and holding the state accountable for public services. One of the most important and powerful experiments I encountered in this phase was the Annual Survey of Education, Rural, spearheaded by the NGO Pratham. In 2007, I had the opportunity of documenting the survey process and through this work began a career long engagement with the school education in India. Through ASER, I got a window not only in how to bridge the gap between evidence/ research and citizen mobilization but also into the challenges of improving school education. Primary schools in India thus became my site for research and action. As a Senior Fellow and director of the Accountability Initiative, at the Centre for Policy Research, I spearheaded the first ever large scale public expenditure tracking study in school education in India in 2008. Years later, I led several research engagements on the intersection of governance and efforts to improve learning outcomes in different States in India. Over time, education became a passion project. I firmly belief that a country that is in the midst of a demographic dividend, improving the quality of education we deliver to all Indians is our biggest and most critical challenge. This is what all of Indian policy ought to prioritize.

In 2016, when the then Delhi government began to undertake an ambitious reform to improve the quality of schooling in the State, I had the privilege of documenting first-hand the real world of school reforms. My colleagues and I were in schools witnessing the challenges, resistance, slow change of perspectives amongst school actors to reforms and in the process learnt, through the voices of those charged with implementing policy, what it takes to change entrenched systems. These are stories rarely told in policy textbooks. But this is the real world of policy. It is a world that, I believe, needs to come alive in classrooms, in seminar halls and above all in the corridors of power where “policy” is debated and decided. This book is my effort at doing just this.

Frontlist: You challenge the common portrayal of public officials as apathetic or incompetent. What made you decide to center their voices in the story of state capacity?

Yamini: In policy circles, the world of research and most importantly the broader elite public chatter, the frontline Indian state is vilified. The corrupt, incompetent bureaucrat, who is keen on the power of the government job but seeks to amass power within, rather than serve the public, is a well recognized figure in India. The frontline government officer is potrayed as avaricious, drunk on power, who has nothing but a disdain for doing good and for the citizens’ in whose name he/she receives a salary. “Complete Rest in Comfortable Conditions” is how one of my interviewees in the book, described his government job!

There is a lot of truth to this. Most citizens’ have encountered the violence of the errant frontline. Indeed, the absent, corrupt frontline officer is well documented in scholarly research. Policies are made ( and research studies designed around these) to tightly monitor these officers, curb all discretion in a bit to “get them to work”. This has been the preoccupation of most debates on public services and indeed on State capacity more broadly. Get rid of the state as much as you can, because it is full of avaricious officers drunk on the power of the ‘lal batti’ gaadi. And where you can’t perfect the panopticon so that we can closely monitor them and force them to “work”. This is how most debate on the frontline Indian state have been framed.

Yet, in my encounters with the frontline, I began to hear a different story. A story of powerlessness, of being caught in a system that undermines their dignity and sense of worth. Where in the name of accountability, policy reform was making these crucial actors, their voices and their concerns illegitimate. I looked at the global literature on public services and bureaucracy and found it replete with theorizing worker motivation from the perspective of dignity and empowerment of workers. These ideas are missing in the Indian debate. Thus I chose the frame this research through the voices of the frontline both with the goal of bringing them into the front and center of how we in India debate the State and the need to “build” its capacity but also to contribute to the global scholarship on worker motivation and state capacity.

Frontlist: Having led policy think tanks and worked closely with governments, what personal or professional risks did you navigate while writing such an honest account of bureaucratic dynamics?

Yamini: Staying true to the evidence as one see’s it, being responsible to truth and integrity of the rigor of research and ideas is the primary responsibility of any actor who sits at the intersection of policy and research. This is an enormous responsibility for it is our ideas and the ways in which we represent the world as we see it, from the bottom up, that contributes to the ways in which policies are designed and implemented. This means having the freedom to engage and critique, unburdened. There are inherent risks, especially when you work closely with government in that the temptation to “become” the government is high. But policy thinkers and think tanks must stay independent, else they are not doing their job. I have always been cognizant that as a policy scholar and a think tanker, our job is to speak truth to power but ultimately, the process of making policy has to be a transparent and politically negotiated bargain. Through my work, I seek to lay bare the realities, as I see them through the rigour of scholarship. Not to “make” policy. I don’t think of this as a risk, I think of it as a duty, especially if you speak in the name of the poorest citizen.

Frontlist: The book discusses reform efforts in terms of both adoption and resistance. How did you ensure these complexities were fairly and accurately represented?

Yamini: I was blessed with a fantastic team of young and enthusiastic researchers. In the year we spent in Delhi’s schools, we tried our best to regularly share our observations with a variety of actors, in order to ensure that our biases were corrected and that we were giving as accurate a representation of what we saw, as possible.

Frontlist: In your experience, why does the narrative of state failure often dominate public discourse, and how does your book offer a more nuanced understanding?

Yamini: There is no doubt that the Indian state routinely fails its citizens’ on the most basic terms of the social contract. The appalling levels of incompetence in everyday public services is the lived reality of most Indians who are now used to seeking these services through the poorly regulated private sector rather than the state. This basic failiure of accountability has preoccupied citizens and policy makers alike. Explanations abound. But missing in much of this is the perspective of the frontline workers. Their lived realities, the oppressive, hierarchical culture within which they work , a culture that strips them of agency, dignity and purpose. I argue that any effort to hold the State accountable for improving the delivery of public services needs to recognize and acknowledge these realities. Empowering the frontline state in ways that embed frontline actors with a sense of mission and purpose toward the goal of public service delivery holds the key for improving state capacity in India. This is the lesson that Delhi’s schools hold for debates on state capacity in India.

Frontlist: Despite the book’s relevance to governance and public service delivery in India, do you feel it received the visibility it deserved? Why might serious policy books struggle for attention?

Yamini: This is a difficult question to answer. Of course in the age of social media and quick ‘tik-tok’ takes book’s that seek to problematize reality from a scholarly perspective ie by speaking to existing academic literature will always struggle for wide reach. But they may well “reach” the right ears. For me the primary audience for this work are classrooms where the next generation of policy thinkers and scholars are being trained. I’m hopeful that this work is being read there.

Frontlist: From a policy scholar’s perspective, what’s the most urgent lesson that education reformers and administrators across India should take from this book?

Yamini: Do not dismiss the frontline. Invest in them, engage them and expose them to the possibilities of change. No system will improve, if the frontline is not part of the solution. The Delhi experiment, as I lay out in the last chapter of my book, offers some learnings’ on what this mans tactically. Constant communication, investing in teams of mentors and ambassadors from the frontline for reform ideas and finally a consistent infusion of mission’s that expose resistant actors to the possibilities of change, helped shift mindsets of teachers, whose initial resistance transformed over time in to engagement and active participation in the broad goal (even if they differed in terms of process) of the reform.

Frontlist: What advice would you offer to first-time authors in the public policy or academic space who are trying to write for both impact and accessibility?

Yamini: Be brave, be true to your research the disciplinary practices that you are anchored in. Do not fall for the temptation of taking short cuts and the glamour of quick takes. A book has a long life. Good ideas and rigorous evidence, written with integrity are the pathways to making real impact.