No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The post office paradox : A case study of the block level education bureaucracy
Abstract
Elementary education administrators at the block level primarily perceive themselves, or report themselves to be, disempowered cogs in a hierarchical administrative culture that renders them powerless. They refer to their own roles and offices as "post offices," used simply for doing the bidding of higher authorities and ferrying messages between the top and bottom of the education chain. Using the case of education delivery, this paper attempts to probe an administrator's perspective in resolving the implementation problem at the last mile and is based on detailed primary fieldwork in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh along with some quantitative surveys conducted in Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh. It endeavours to trace the "cognitive maps" of administrators by capturing how last mile public servants see themselves and their jobs, and how notions of job performance are internalised and interpreted within the administrative context of elementary education in India.
... While it is commonly recognized that SHGs are part of an interacting with local socio-cultural and power structures--indeed, this is recognized in the NRLM's own guidelines--there has been much less analysis of the nature of interactions. We emphasize that state actorsnotably the frontline actors that are so important to the SHGs-are embedded in a specific set of bureaucratic structures, incentives and norms (see work by Aiyar andBhattacharya, 2016, andMangla, 2015, described below). ...
... While it is commonly recognized that SHGs are part of an interacting with local socio-cultural and power structures--indeed, this is recognized in the NRLM's own guidelines--there has been much less analysis of the nature of interactions. We emphasize that state actorsnotably the frontline actors that are so important to the SHGs-are embedded in a specific set of bureaucratic structures, incentives and norms (see work by Aiyar andBhattacharya, 2016, andMangla, 2015, described below). ...
... Studies in the education sector provide further insights of direct relevance to rural development. Aiyar and Bhattacharya (2016) use organizational theory to study front-line bureaucrats. They use time-diaries and other qualitative methods to explore how frontline workers were structuring their work to align with signals from the top: "None of the officers observed found any time to review monitoring reports and provide feedback to cluster officers on what was learnt and done based on monitoring data collected […] And when BEOs [Block Education Officers] or their staff did go out into the field to gather data, they prioritized the hasty collection of information required by higher-ups on attendance, the status of infrastructure, or the delivery of mid-day meals over spending time in classrooms and understanding students' needs […] In summary the entire block office appeared to be geared towards implementing schemes rather than focusing on the learning and infrastructure needs of the school. ...
This paper, "Understanding India’s self-help groups: an organisational anatomy of functionality in a district in Madhya Pradesh", presents the findings of a qualitative research study on the functioning of women’s self-help groups in one district in Madhya Pradesh.
... But for all the trappings of power and scope for discretion, when it comes to the core public service tasks that bureaucrats perform, the narrative of "powerlessness", of being limited by hierarchy and being cast officers as mere "post officers" dominates. This is what Aiyar and Bhattacharya (2016) termed the "post office paradox". This narrative of "powerlessness" and being "post officers" is the dominant self-image that we repeatedly encountered in our interactions with the Delhi education bureaucracy. ...
This book seeks to illuminate the multifaceted challenges of introducing change and transition in low-capacity settings and documents the process of implementing an education reform in Delhi, India
... The underperformance of teachers' has prompted researchers to examine the factors such as poor quality of teacher education (Batra, 2014), administrative shortcomings (Aiyar & Bhattacharya, 2016), lack of teacher accountability (Pandey et al., 2008) and the systematic elimination of teachers' agency within the educational system (Batra, 2005). However, this paper contends that alongside these existing research agendas, it is imperative to closely examine the personal lives and experiences of teachers as well. ...
The purpose of this study is to highlight the insufficient understanding of the lives and concerns of government schoolteachers in India, who are often blamed for the deteriorating state of public schools in the country. It examines previous studies on the subject and contends that they have not adequately represented the teachers' perspectives and voices. In order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the Indian teaching workforce, it is crucial to conduct research that delves into the personal lives and experiences of Indian teachers. To this end, this review paper adopts a hermeneutic approach to select relevant studies for analysis. We explore the evolution of research on the lives of teachers as a distinct field of study, and introduce several prominent studies in this area to provide a foundation for future research in the Indian context. Ultimately, we identify several key questions that can be addressed through an examination of the lives of Indian teachers.
... Civil servants work in systems with deeply embedded norms of governance, complex tasks and outcomes, work overload, and different partners such as civil society (Dasgupta & Kapur, 2017;Mangla, 2015;Pritchett, 2014). Norms of hierarchy and bureaucratic processes can stifle innovation even among highly-skilled workers (Aiyar & Bhattacharya, 2016). In short, the culture of the bureaucracy has important implications for the performance of individual civil servants. ...
... Ironically, however, as we have elaborated in this paper, such platforms end up reinforcing, rather than disturbing, hierarchies. People at the bottom of the ladder end up mindlessly filling forms, struggling to balance their priorities and doing their best to comply with the data demands of the higher-ups (Aiyar & Bhattacharya, 2015). Indeed, without the reinforcement of hierarchical structures, a juggernaut such as U-DISE could not be mobilised. ...
... RPs in the SSA period felt the detrimental routine was setting in, perceiving themselves negatively as "couriers," loaded with administrative work (Nayantara et al. 2010as quoted in Gol 2011. Moreover, lacking administrative authority, these resource persons felt that teachers were not responsive, not taking them seriously (NIAS 2007;GoI 2011;Aiyar and Bhattacharya 2016). But teachers report that CRRPs rarely enter classrooms to observe practice (Parul 2019). ...
The chapter reviews the current status of teacher development, with a specific focus on continuous professional development (CPD), in three South Asia countries: Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The view taken is that CPD is a process of supporting teachers and their development, and is inclusive of the range of approaches, modalities, and institutional arrangements operating in the region. The school structure of the three countries is presented first as CPD has largely evolved historically from inspection and around a deficit model of the teacher. The structure is based on administrative units of schooling and responsive to its demographic changes. The next section reviews the evolution of CPD, and it is argued that this is intimately linked to the political economic history of mass education, and specifically to the emergence of international aid driven activities from the 1990s onwards. The extensive presence of nongovernment agencies is
noted. The third section discusses the dominant forms of CPD: the cascade model of training and teacher resource centers. The chapter concludes with reflections on the challenges of funding, quality, working at scale, absence of coherent policy, and emerging trends in usage of ICT.
... Ironically, however, as we have elaborated in this paper, such platforms end up reinforcing, rather than disturbing, hierarchies. People at the bottom of the ladder end up mindlessly filling forms, struggling to balance their priorities and doing their best to comply with the data demands of the higher-ups (Aiyar & Bhattacharya, 2015). Indeed, without the reinforcement of hierarchical structures, a juggernaut such as U-DISE could not be mobilised. ...
Mapping India’s vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India’s Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuade actors in India’s 1.5 million schools to regularly upload trustworthy data to populate the database. A range of actors must be cajoled into becoming data-informed, to plan and strategize, and to enforce accountability. This paper traces how U-DISE attempts to impose its desires on a range of distributed actors, and how these actors respond to its overtures. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and based on interviews with the designers of U-DISE, central and state government officials, school-level data coordinators and NGOs and activists, as well as policy documents and government websites, we argue in this paper that, to realise their ambitions, digital platforms not only aim to be ‘user friendly’, but also engage in efforts to make the user friendly.
... 1 Some of the other occupational stressors observed in various occupations are non-scheduled duty hours, family negligence, irregular eating and sleeping habits, absence of entertainment and leisure activities, issues with seniors and below average living and working conditions. 2,3 Since such studies have been mainly done in law enforcement officers elsewhere, 4 there are little scientific studies that show the stressor effects among various professions in a developing country like India, where bureaucratic practices and policy implementations are inherently political. Pressures on bureaucrats by politicians are based on the logic of electoral politics. ...
Full mouth rehabilitation of natural dentition that is worn severely with pseudo maintenance of vertical dimensions of occlusion pose challenge in diagnosis and need to be identified for treatment varies with different conditions of vertical dimension alterations. As more number of patients turn up in a dental clinic seeking treatment for their grossly non carious destroyed dentitions, this case of a 58 year old patient presents a case of a full mouth rehabilitation with metal-ceramic crowns where existing vertical dimensions were not altered since one sided palatal incline of canine was untouched by wear and it was thus easy to reestablish the previous anterior guidance. The article also highlights the issue of occupational stress among bureaucrats in developing nations like India.
... To understand the circumstances of such slippage and examples of positive links of resources and information for implementation, detailed study of the roles and incentives affecting actors at the state, district, and cluster levels is needed. Such a study-essentially a multi-site ethnographic study of the roles, responsibilities, daily constraints, and incentives affecting the work duties of all education staff at the block and district level offices (which are respectively responsible for hundreds and thousands of government schools in India)-was recently conducted by Aiyar and Bhattacharya (2016). Both in-depth interviews and time-use studies (conducted through a series of half-day visits to block and district staff) showed that block-level staff focused almost entirely on conveying higher-level directives to lower-level staff, and on hiring and union issues, rather than on using monitoring data from lower levels to inform higher-level decision-making. ...
With decades of evidence to support early childhood development (ECD) programs and policies, investment in ECD has expanded worldwide. Currently, over 70 nations have national ECD legislation, the majority in the last 20 years. However, with these increased investments comes evidence that the capacity of policy systems to support ECD-across health, education, social protection, and other sectors-is weak, with unfulfilled developmental potential a serious consequence within and across countries. This report aims to develop a research agenda on the systems-level factors-at national, subnational, and local or municipal levels-that may enable or constrain program site-level implementation. Two types of scale-"small to bigger" and "big to better"-are described, as well as the specific challenges of these processes in the field of ECD. Systems factors are reviewed at the three levels, with implications of each for measurement. Finally, methodological challenges and directions are discussed with the aim of informing a research agenda to support national policy progress in early childhood development.
This paper explores the nature of interactions between the state and village society in rural India within a major community-based development program. We perform a qualitative exploration of multiple perspectives within an interacting system of institutions. We use guidelines of the state and transcripts of 90 interviews and focus groups amongst representatives of actors of all major groups in this system in one geographic area of the state of Madhya Pradesh. The program of focus is the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, which aims to expand the well-being and empowerment of
poor, socially disadvantaged, rural women, through the formation of “self-help groups (SHGs)” that are linked to credit and market related services as well as support systems provided by the state. It seeks to do this through a blend of state action and community involvement, including recruitment of “community resource persons (CRPs)” who both work for the state and “represent” the community. This is supported by the creation of federated clusters of SHGs which are supposed to take on support functions. We argue that in design, and even more in implementation, the program exemplifies
two substantive tensions: between a top-down, “engineering” approach to state delivery and a stated intention to mobilize community and create “institutions of the poor”; and between primary reliance on existing village hierarchies and the goal of
empowering poor women from disadvantaged social groups. Both tensions are intensified by the political and bureaucratic pressure to achieve measurable targets, such as the number of SHGs created. We argue that these tensions generate an internal logic to state functioning that leads the SHGs and their federations in our
sample to not function in all of the ways laid out in the NRLM design. Some policy implications are explored in a companion study; this paper is mainly concerned with presenting the empirical material within a theoretical frame appropriate to this complex system
My study on the need for a public health cadre in Rajasthan as part of the Thakur Foundation's work draws on my approach to looking at the organizational context of bureaucracy to understand opportunities and pathways to reform. For this study, I combined quantitative government data on personnel and budgets to establish the current approach in human resources in the health department and identify key gaps such as vacancies in key public health positions and less than adequate funding for hiring and training. I coupled this with insights from interviews with current officials at different levels of the health system in Rajasthan, and key current and former health policy makers in the state to understand their perceptions of the need for a public health cadre to strengthen public health access and delivery for citizens.
The chapter begins by describing the content of the micro and meso levels that make up the ecosystem necessary to promote learning. In the past decades, knowledge generated on quality education has led to “discrete and disruptive” interventions with manageable and disaggregated components that fit into the worldview of the mostly distant donor (a “hawk’s eye” approach). An organically integrated approach is constructively worked out, which provides a framework for analyzing micro and meso levels (a “turtle’s feet” approach). The conceptual framework that structures this knowledge generation includes three areas that define micro and meso institutions: composite history, tangled milieus, and embedded mindsets. This research framework allows for the design and implementation of interventions that fit the ecosystem in a country that drives how things work on the ground. The chapter argues that such a shift in knowledge generation will help to design interventions that enable meso institutions to intervene for consistent and effective teaching and learning to take place in schools in developing countries.
The paper analyses how mid-level bureaucrats in sub-national offices navigated political considerations when trying to fulfil their roles and responsibilities in the post-conflict context of Nepal. Utilising interview data from a wide range of stakeholders, I focus my analysis on perspectives from district level officials who were called on to fulfil multiple roles in an increasingly decentralised context. Their views reveal an acute awareness of the intensification of challenges and patronage politics that resulted from the conflict and prolonged uncertainty. At the same time, several officials found ways to navigate these political waters, and provided insights into what they think can help in ensuring educational success in such conditions. These assessments are likely to remain relevant today, as other local officials begin to take the responsibility of education governance in Nepal’s new three-tier governance structure.
Staff meetings and central office meetings of the school principal or principal meetings are noted across literature, considered necessary and occasionally frustrating, and yet they remain a relatively overlooked phenomenon in educational leadership scholarship. The question guiding this article is: Are principal meetings necessary and, if so, what purpose(s) do they serve? To answer this question, principal meetings are conceptualized as interconnected sensemaking episodes to analyze evidence from a five-month mini-ethnographic case study of the meetings of two elementary school principals in India. Findings show that principal meetings are necessary for providing focus and coherence to the performance of administrative responsibilities. Findings shed light on how elements such as ambiguity-clarification and task-repetitions may be a doubled-edged sword that makes meetings effective but also contributes to frustration and boredom. Principal meetings highlight that leadership effectiveness must be tied to the context and physical presence shapes meaning-making. Principal meetings are non-trivial sensemaking nodes of leadership infrastructure encouraging reciprocity in thought but may also create a reality that prioritizes administration over instructional improvement. Implications include considering meetings less as tools in need of improvement and more as conceptual and analytical phenomena to study and nuance educational leadership practice.
How do states realize social reforms for marginalized groups in settings of entrenched inequality? This article argues that reform implementation is a conflict-ridden process driven by the institutional activism of street-level bureaucrats. Through an ethnographic case study of Mahila Samkhya, a novel government program for women's empowerment in Uttar Pradesh, India, I find that local fieldworkers committed to reform promoted girls' education by mobilizing marginalized citizens and mediating local conflicts. Organizational processes of gender-based training and deliberation enabled fieldworkers to challenge village patriarchy and exclusion and forge programmatic ties with lower caste women. By altering rules to address the practical needs of households, fieldworkers effectively integrated disadvantaged girls into the education system. Institutional activism also engendered conflicts over rules within the bureaucracy, prompting senior officials to advocate for marginalized groups. The findings suggest that institutional commitment to activism is critical for agencies working on the front lines of reform.
Using official statistics, bureaucratic registers and ethnographic material collected from the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) from six districts across six Indian states, the article explains under what conditions the capacity of last-mile bureaucracy matters for the performance of pro-poor welfare programmes in the Indian federal polity. In seeking to address the presence of heterogenous welfare outcomes in the districts of India, the article underscores the salience of last-mile bureaucrats and the extent to which the politicization of redistributive struggles might contribute to local state capacity to deliver welfare services, a hitherto under-researched aspect in comparative social development research. Challenging the conventional thesis that only a strong autonomous state succeeds in implementing welfare programmes, the article further argues that effective policy implementation can occur within the peculiar environment of relatively low-capacity last-mile bureaucracies even in the face of adverse socioeconomic circumstances. In short, the article shifts attention to the understudied relationship between the capacity of last-mile bureaucracy and welfare outcomes in India.
Research on implementation of basic services points out that the upwardly mobile seem to be exiting the public system for private alternatives, straining the capacity of the public system to serve the poor. But is this national narrative representative of implementation across the various states in India?
Based on questions of school choice from a national survey, we argue that respondents’ choice of public or private service seems to be affected by state-level patterns that are obscured by both individual background characteristics from below and the national narrative from above. We argue that background characteristics do explain current school choices but do not fully explain ideal school choices. If ideal school choices are considered akin to the demand side of implementation, then our study shows that both societal and state-level patterns matter as we identified certain underserved populations that still aspire for public services, and who typically get obscured by national-level explanations.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.