Policy Drift in the Mass Expansion of Indian Education

• In Event: Comparative Perspectives on Bureaucracy in the Global South

Abstract

In the early 1980s, most school-aged children in India were as likely to be out of school as in school. Today, most school-aged children average at least six years of schooling and all households in the country live within one kilometer of a government school. At the same time, school quality in the public sector remains low and forty percent of households send their children to private schools. What explains the rapid expansion of education together with the chronically low quality and high levels of exit to the private sector? In this paper, I argue that the form through which India expanded education explains these joint outcomes. Top-down expansion quickly increased resources through external funding, but failed to engage regular citizens and public sector employees. This required the creation of parallel bureaucratic and administrative structures to circumvent citizen voice. These parallel governance structures were created to quickly hire teachers and ensure the flow of funds to the local level. These led to unintended consequences in the long run: administrative and legal demands from state and society on the legitimacy of these parallel structures. I undertake a paired case comparison of two large-scale state-level programs designed to expand education at the state-level and process trace the major national programs to expand education between 1986 and 2002. I leverage fifteen elite interviews with members of the World Bank, the Department for International Development, the Indian Administrative Service, civil society actors, and court cases challenging education programs in this period. The results have implications for countries attempting to rapidly expand public services and how to best engage societal actors in this expansion.

Author

• Emmerich Davies, Harvard University