Publications
Publications
- 2017
- HBS Working Paper Series
Elite Ideas and Incremental Policy Change: The Expansion of Primary Education in India
By: Akshay Mangla
Abstract
This paper analyzes India’s recent enactment of universal primary education. Given the clientelistic features of Indian democracy, this programmatic policy change presents a puzzle. Drawing on interviews and official documents, I find that committed state elites introduced gradual changes to the education system over three decades. To put their ideas into practice, they used administrative mechanisms, layering small-scale reforms on top of the larger education system. As India embraced globalization in the 1990s, officials drew on World Bank resources to implement larger programs in underperforming regions, progressively extending them across the country. These incremental reforms supplied the institutional blueprint for India’s universal primary education program in 2000. As policies were introduced from above, civil society mobilized from below, using the judiciary to hold the state liable for implementing primary education. While reforms helped expand bureaucratic authority, they also generated new public demands for state accountability.
Keywords
Citation
Mangla, Akshay. "Elite Ideas and Incremental Policy Change: The Expansion of Primary Education in India." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 17-077, February 2017.