How some states deliver via bureaucratic norms

New Delhi: Over the decades, India has developed a reputation for having a strong society but a weak state. This bureaucratic, lumbering behemoth has especially struggled to deliver basic public goods like health, education, water, and sanitation. But a new book by the University of Oxford political scientist Akshay Mangla shows us just how some Indian states have managed to overcome these weaknesses.

Last week, Mangla joined host Milan Vaishnav on the Grand Tamasha podcast, a joint production of HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to elaborate on his new book, Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India.

Mangla points out that in some unexpected places, the state actually has succeeded in delivering quality primary education for its poorest citizens despite sharing the same institutional framework and often the same demographic characteristics of other, poorly performing regions. According to him, the difference can be traced back to bureaucratic norms; where bureaucracies are guided by deliberative norms, as in the case of Himachal Pradesh, they are flexible, adaptive, and responsive to citizens’ needs. But where civil servants rigidly attempt to follow legalistic norms, they may deliver schools on paper but educational outcomes lag behind.

“Norms are important because public agencies have a public mission. They have to fulfill the interests of citizens expressed through governmental laws,” explained Mangla. “But often those laws are vague, abstract, and cannot tell us every situation that would occur to apply the law. That’s where norms come in. They help officials do the work of making sense of the rules.”

Mangla used the example of police officers seeking to enforce the rule of law on the streets as a classic illustration of the power of norms. “Police officers every day are confronting situations and (they) can’t just go back and look at the rulebook. Whether I should respond as an officer to a particular complaint, whether I should go and investigate that event, or whether I should file charges — much of that is going to be based on what the police officer thinks are the prevailing expectations and the norms of the police institution of which he is a part.” In short, Mangla says, norms fill part of the gap between laws and their execution.

Mangla argues we need to play catch up on understanding the political dynamics that underpin the delivery of primary education in India. “If you look at normative political philosophy, a lot is written on education. In fact, education you can argue that — apart from the family — it is one of the first power relations we enter into,” explained Mangla. “And so, it’s puzzling that the power that is inscribed into the classroom does not filter into our thinking in political science. If you look at the history of the welfare state, actually, mass education was perhaps the first social welfare policy that virtually all major states instituted.”