One of the most talked about policy experiments in India in recent memory is the reform of government schools in the city-state of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Under the leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party, the Delhi government has implemented an innovative program to equip students with foundational literacy and numeracy. But while these reforms are much discussed, they have been surprisingly under-studied. A new book by the scholar Yamini Aiyar tries to remedy this gap.

Yamini’s new book, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi's Schools, draws on three years of ethnographic research where she and a team of colleagues were embedded in a cluster of schools across the national capital.

Yamini is currently Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia and the Watson Institute at Brown University. Many of our listeners will know her from her work with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, where she served as President from 2017 to 2024.

To kick off season thirteen of Grand Tamasha, Yamini joins Milan on the show this week. They discuss Yamini’s decade-long adventure studying India’s public schools, the core elements of the Delhi education model, and the mysterious ways in which the India bureaucracy operates. Plus, they discuss whether the Delhi experiment can travel beyond the national capital.

Episode notes:

1. “How Bureaucracy Can Work for the Poor (with Akshay Mangla),” Grand Tamasha, March 29, 2023.

2. Yamini Aiyar and Shrayana Bhattacharya, “The Post Office Paradox: A Case Study of the Block Level Education Bureaucracy,” Economic & Political Weekly 51, no. 11 (2016).

3. Lant Pritchett, “Is India a Flailing State?: Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization,” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP09-013, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2009.

4. Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and Milan Vaishnav, Rethinking Public Institutions in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017).