A Call for Empowering Frontline Workers and Leaders to Increase State Capacity in India: Ethnographic Study of Education Reform in Delhi

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The voices of India’s frontline bureaucrats — teachers, health workers, district, and block level administrators, charged with delivering a vast array of public services to citizens — are dismissed all too quickly. Public debates generally view them as corrupt, apathetic, incompetent, and in urgent need of tighter monitoring and discipling. But is there another way to view their role, and thus reframe approaches to the challenge of building high-performing public sector organisations and improving state capacity in India?

This talk draws on an ethnographic study of an ambitious effort to improve the quality of government schools, particularly their ability to equip students with foundational literacy and numeracy skills in the city state of Delhi, India. In so doing it captures the complex ways in which bureaucratic hierarchies, processes and belief systems shape state capacity.

Lunch Opens at 12PM
Lecture from 12:15 to 1:15PM

Center for Global India | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Center for Global India (OWNER)

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