Bureaucracies display large differences in their capabilities. In third world countries especially, bureaucracies are regarded as corrupt and bureaucrats are regarded as cogs who surrender their discretion to politicians. In Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India, Akshay Mangla investigates why some bureaucracies perform more effectively than others. He investigates the delivery of primary education in rural north India, an unlikely setting for public services to function well. Some states in the Hindi belt perform far better than expected, while others show sluggish and uneven progress.
India’s failure to provide quality public services is not for want of resources or an absence of political will. With economic liberalization in the 1990s, state control of the economy receded, but social programming expanded substantially in some areas. The Midday Meal Programme provides a free daily meal in more than 2 million government schools. The 2010 Right to Education [RTE] Act places a legally enforceable duty on the state to guarantee free and compulsory education for all children of ages 6 to 14 years. Not all developing countries have such progressive social legislation. Yet, there are wide variations in educational achievements between states.
In the Himalayan region, Himachal Pradesh stands out as a leader in primary education within India. It lags only behind Kerala. HP’s educational achievements are even more remarkable than Kerala’s in many ways. HP’s mountainous topography, harsh climate and low population density make the administration of services far more challenging. At independence, Kerala had a substantial lead in literacy (47.2 percent) over the rest of India, whereas HP (at 8 percent) was among the least literate states in the country. Since the 1980s, HP has surged ahead of other states, with educational gains broadly shared by women, lower castes and tribal populations. This is in contrast to the adjacent state of Uttarakhand, which has similar economic and sociocultural characteristics to HP. It performs much worse in primary education, even though it had a substantially higher literacy rate (19 percent) around independence.
You will be given explanations for such variations. It will be said that modernization and economic development lead to improvements in public service delivery. As an economy develops, the state accumulates resources and citizens acquire new abilities to demand primary education. You will be told that there is a virtuous cycle between growing affluence and good governance. Economic growth leads to increased social spending as well as improvements in bureaucratic quality.
Although social spending in India increased significantly in the 1990s, implementation of social programs is uneven. Several lower-income states in India have made substantial gains in primary education and other aspects of human development, outperforming wealthier states. An economic laggard like UP made notable gains in enrollment and infrastructure provision, while performing quite inadequately on other dimensions of implementation. Services in UP’s more affluent western belt is similar to that in poorer parts of the state. Economic development alone doesn’t explain these differences.
Another common argument will concern geography - villages further away from urban centers perform worse on many dimensions of governance. There is also an urban bias in development. But HP performs better than other states despite comparatively low urbanization and population density, scattered settlement patterns, unfriendly climate and terrain, making it costlier to provide services. On the other hand, Uttarakhand performs markedly worse than HP despite similar physical characteristics.
Another common argument is about the type of institutions present - the formal structure of constitutions, electoral systems, rules of federalism and executive power. Yet, formal institutions cannot account for variation in the performance of different state bureaucracies since they all operate under a common legal, fiscal and electoral framework.
It is also argued that different types of colonial institutions produce lasting effects on economic performance. So the author compares districts of HP and Uttarakhand having similar histories of direct British rule and military recruitment, but different contemporary patterns of education service delivery. He also examined districts of UP with different colonial land tenure systems, but similar implementation patterns.
The above factors – economic development, geography, formal institutions and colonial administrative legacies – are important, but they do not fully explain variation in how states in northern India implement policy. He finds that this difference depends on the informal norms that guide bureaucratic behavior. These norms guide public officials on how to interpret the instructions of their political masters and take appropriate actions. These norms influence how officials interact with individuals and groups in society which influences how the public views the bureaucracy.
As citizens gain exposure to the local state, their experiences condition future expectations and the collective monitoring of schools, impacting the quality of services. Bureaucratic norms have evolved differently across Indian states even though they have common political, legal and administrative institutions. He finds two types of bureaucracies - “deliberative” and “legalistic" - which have different mechanisms for policy implementation.
Deliberative bureaucracy encouraged flexibility in the interpretation of rules. Lower-level bureaucrats learn to discuss problems collectively with senior officials, transmitting local knowledge throughout the system. This enables officials to undertake complex tasks and adapt policies to varying local needs. It includes rural women, lower castes and other marginalized groups in the decision-making process which yields higher quality services.
In contrast, legalistic bureaucracy, encourages officials to strictly follow the rules resulting in a rigid interpretation of policy. Lower-level officials treat policy rules as binding constraints and show no personal initiative on how to apply policies in particular cases. It results in poor implementation of projects that require repeated state–society interactions. It creates administrative burdens for marginalized groups and tend to reinforce inequalities. Thus legalistic bureaucracy leads to uneven policy implementation.
These distinct types of bureaucratic norms produce very different implementation patterns and outcomes for primary education.
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