Hi, everyone, and welcome to the second panel discussion on the challenges of researching South Asia.
As you know, this is the modern South Asian Studies seminar series of the University of Oxford.
My name is Danica M. I'm the director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme,
and I'm absolutely delighted to be chairing this panel today on bureaucracy.
So for those of you who weren't present last week, just a quick word of the format.
Every panel member is going to speak for approximately 15 minutes on their own, you know, absolutely incredible research on bureaucracy in South Asia.
And then we've got to open it out for a wider discussion with the audience.
Please feel free to add your questions in the Q&A box that you see at the bottom there as we go along
so we can just take them up and sequence once about finished the initial opening thoughts on it.
OK, so with that, I'm going to quickly introduce the panel in the order in which they will be speaking.
So first up, we have Yemeni and Yemeni is the president and chief executive of the Centre for Policy Research in Dubai.
In 2008, she founded the Accountability Initiative at CBR,
which is credited with pioneering one of India's largest expenditure tracking surveys for elementary education.
Yemenis works at the intersection of research and policy practise.
Her research interests in the fields of public finance, social policy, state capacity,
federalism, governance and the study of contemporary politics in India. He also writes periodically this column in Hindustan Times,
which actually has done a lot for thinking about bureaucracy more publicly and sort
of the politics around bureaucracy in India after how many we're going to have.
My Hayat was a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame School of Public Affairs.
Dr. Doctorate works at the intersections of bureaucracy, law and the environment.
She completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.
Myra is currently working on her book manuscript, which is super exciting, which is,
I think tentatively entitled Ecology is a Water Governance in Pakistan, The Colony, The Co-Creation and the Contemporary.
We will then have Dr. Zehra Hashmi, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
She's an anthropologist and historian researching ID technologies in South Asia.
Her work explores the everyday workings of surveillance and securitisation in Pakistan
through the intersection of kinship migration and postcolonial and colonial bureaucracy.
My daughter, Zahra, received a Ph.D. from the interdepartmental programme in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan.
Quite recently, and then last but not least, we have our all very well.
Amongst them was Associate Professor in International Business at the Seed Business School in Oxford.
She has wide reaching Wide-Ranging research interests, which include a focus on public and private governance,
institutional performance and the changing nature of state society relations in India.
She has a number of interesting projects going on right now,
including a particularly interesting one on police in India, which perhaps he'd tell us a bit more about today.
Before joining Oxford, she was an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.
OK, so with that, I'm going to hand over to Yamani. I believe that's OK.
But you'd like to sort of get us started on this conversation with some of your own work.
Thank you, thank you for inviting me to be on this panel and for the opportunity both to engage with all
friends and to people who have been deep influences on my work and my picking on bureaucracy.
And as I was saying before we started, these are bureaucracy can't possibly be boring because two of my most interesting
and fun friendships have been forged on the back of conversations on bureaucracy.
And both of you actually an enigma here and really delighted to have the opportunity to learn
from others who are studying this really exciting stuff to the course of today's conversation.
I thought I'd sort of spend a few minutes at my opening remarks talking to you all about my journey with studying bureaucracy, why I came to it.
What I've learnt from it.
And why I think that in fact, it is one of the most interesting ways or entry points and understanding the state and its and in particular,
the dynamics of states citizen engagement, which shape bureaucracy, which we achieved democracy.
I guess in the Indian context, I in some in the early years of my career,
was deeply taken in by a lot of the discourse that was taking place in India in the early 2000s around accountability and transparency.
And much of that discourse was centred around the notion of the image really of the bureaucrat.
As you know, there's no nice way of saying it, but a bureaucrat being a rather nasty apostate,
the bureaucrat being corrupt, the bureaucrat being in discipline,
the bureaucrat being the key dispenser of state power and state patronage in ways that significantly undermine citizen rights.
And a lot of the framing around of the narrative around accountability and transparency centred firmly around disciplining this errant,
nasty individual that was in many ways,
dispense wanted to be a bureaucrat in order to be able to access state power
and then use that opportunity to dispense power in the most forceful ways.
And all and most often than not, at the cost of the poor and the most marginalised and the most vulnerable.
Now all of this is true. But are we any one that has had the displeasure of encountering a bureaucrat,
whether it's in the form of trying to get your driver's licence, your passport or any and or in any other form?
Rich, powerful or vulnerable ones experiences with the bureaucrat in many ways fit firmly within the stereotype of what the bureaucrat is.
And in more ways than one, the grassroots mobilisation that that was at the heart of the accountability and transparency
movement in India in the 2000s really was a response to precisely this reality.
I got involved both as a researcher and as a part time activist in some of these movements, particularly the movement around social audits.
In the early 2000s, just at the start of when the National Employment Guarantee Act in India was unfolding,
it was a very exciting and heady moment because this was this that the twin acts of the right to information that emerged out of a social movement.
The act of social auditing,
which was really one of the most pioneering innovative civic social movement attempts at holding the state accountable and in a very tangible way,
citizens taking donning the role of the state's citizens becoming auditors,
which is essentially an accountability function of the state, empowering themselves with information, asking questions of the state in a direct,
dynamic, tangible way and through a public hearing, asking questions and demanding direct accountability of the state.
Being part of those processes is one of the most exciting and deeply Gillard moments when you see democracy unfold.
And I was really privileged and extremely excited to be part of this of this experience.
And as I spent more time there, the one thing that I kept wondering was about what happens after we go through this process,
we push the bureaucracy to be responsive. But how does a bureaucracy respond to this and.
As one suspend a little bit more time digging deeper into this,
these were also times when a lot of a lot of what I learnt as a student of the value of participation in
in air and participation in governance as being at the heart of what makes for responsive democracies,
for responsive governance governments.
And the social order will be embedded in a range of efforts of the grassroots of creating formal platforms for citizens to directly engage,
whether it's in the process of planning or in the process of auditing, in the process of of monitoring different public services.
And through these observations, the one narrative that kept coming back again and again when we would have one on one conversations with
bureaucrats or you would engage with the bureaucrats was of these grassroots bureaucrats turning around,
saying, Well, I don't really have the answer. So if you're not getting your wages, there is a very strong chance because I'm siphoning them off.
But there's an equally strong chance that I'm actually I know that I don't actually know where those monies were released and what happened to them.
And so I can't answer the question for you. In some instances, in the social audits on the record that we were that we were involved in,
there were often occasions where errant officers were identified during these public hearings.
And a few months later, when you go back to these villages, you would find these people were reinstated.
And when you would talk to senior bureaucrats in the Rural Development Ministry, they would throw their hands up in the air,
expressing deep frustration, saying that, well, this belongs to this particular cartel.
Officers belong to a different service, and I don't actually have the power to do anything about it.
And for me, that contrast was really striking. Here we are citizens recognising that bureaucrats are all powerful.
That's why, after all, everybody wants a government job. And believe me, even today, everybody wants a government job in most parts of this country.
And yet, the narratives that bureaucrats were telling me when we confronted them with their
own failures of getting things done were narratives of lack of information,
of lack of ability to get things done. Of lack of power. And I thought I'd ask my work with the grassroots state expanded.
And over the course of the few of a few years down deeper,
I kept hearing bureaucrats constantly refer to themselves as disempowered cogs in the wheel and India, as well as those of you who study South Asia.
And Orwell is in many different contexts and countries all rolled into one.
So when you want to do comparative work, as Akshay did, you got you got him lots of positions.
One example in Uttar Pradesh and beyond as as as another example.
So there is a lot of variation in how government, how state governments perform across a range of of indicators.
Yet across these different states, the narratives of administrators that I would argue, remain the same.
And in fact, those narratives were the same.
Whether you were talking to the block development officer or the budget secretary or you went to, you know,
the beautiful colonial buildings of South Block and North Block,
where the most powerful bureaucrats sit, and they too would often say exactly the same thing.
What can I do? I'm just a joint secretary. What can I do? I'm just a secretary.
And all of this in the context of a moment when an effort was being made from the grassroots to make the
state more accountable and more responsive through mechanisms like social audits and participatory planning.
All of this at a time when an effort was being made to strengthen decentralisation.
This is the story of the 2000s and the story of 2014, so things are quite different today.
But that but. But it was fascinating to hear these narratives at a time when an attempt was
being made to prise open the state and make it more responsive to citizens.
Get those very powerful creatures whom we thought would be responsive to demands coming
from from below had a self-reinforcing narrative of lack of power and lack of capacity.
A few a few years later, in about 2010. We I began working a little bit more, narrowing my focus on one sector education.
And that's in fact around the time when I first heard of upshaws work and over the years followed it and found
his frameworks really useful to understand this narrative of powerlessness that I was beginning to feel.
And I happened to be sitting as a fly on the wall.
In a in a meeting with the Bihar government's chief secretary, secretary of education,
and three a researcher that had studied an experiment that they.
Doing to improve the quality of primary education in this in the state and I and somebody from the NGO
that had been rolling out various education programmes to improve quality learning quality in the state.
We were talking about the positive impact of summer camps on improving learning outcomes,
and the discussion was really around how do we scale this up?
It was perhaps one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever had the opportunity to
be a fly on the wall in because it in the room where some of the most powerful people,
oh, by the way, the education minister was there too.
So in the room where some of the most powerful people in the state who had been voted in to provide good governance to their citizens.
This was in the hands of the Nitish Kumar government when good governance was in fact being rolled out in different places, in different forms.
And that was suddenly how the government was trying to build its legitimacy in the national narrative, too.
And yet these very powerful people the minister, the chief secretary,
the secretary of the department concerned basically ended the conversation two hours later.
In fact, the conversation was so in-depth that we, as the outsiders finally said, We can't go hungry and we want to go home now.
And that's why the conversation ended, not because the government was getting tired, but the Congress.
But at the at the tail end of the conversation, we everyone sort of scratch their heads from the government side and said,
Well, the thing with government is that we know how to do the pilots. We know how to get small things done at small scale.
But when it comes to embedding this in our everyday functioning, we just don't know routine make no huddle mushkil here.
We don't know how to do these things in the routine ways of doing the bureaucracy. And when it be both these things together,
the powerless bureaucrat on the one hand and the bureaucrat who is able to get things done when they go into mission mode,
but fears to get through things when it has to be sort of a routinised as part of the everyday functioning of the bureaucracy.
I felt that there's a lot more about bureaucracy that we don't understand,
and there's a lot more about our understandings of accountability and transparency
and grassroots mobilisation directly making or social accountability.
All of these were experiments or conceptual terms and practical grassroots experiments that had become popularised through the
decades of the 2000s and had moved us along in our understandings and experiences and practises of democracy significantly.
But one of them seemed to be hitting. I felt against a wall of a bureaucracy that wasn't necessarily just errant.
Of course, that's part of the problem, but a bureaucracy also that was simply unable to be responsive and didn't seem to have the tools to be able
to reorganise itself to be responsive to these demands that were now increasingly being placed on them.
So it was that that led me to say, I think we need to understand the grassroots democracy, the grassroots bureaucracy, far better.
But I also knew that the grassroots bureaucracy is shaped by the hierarchy within in which it's embedded,
and therefore you can study the grassroots bureaucracy without understanding its entire chain of command.
That's what led me into a deeper dive into understanding bureaucracy.
And as education was a sector that I had begun working in very closely and had a good understanding of that became the perfect site to delve deeper.
And over the years, we've been studying the bureaucracy through efforts to reform education systems and
understand how the bureaucracy from the grassroots to the top response to these efforts.
So what is it that allows the mission more to work well?
And what is it that prevents the mission mode from scaling into routinely in a routinised way?
Move the envelope of the bureaucracy. This has led me into a world of trying to better understand the sociology of the
bureaucracy as an organisation for which norms its its its rules of functioning,
its culture of shares. Work has been deeply influential for me in trying to interpret what this narrative
of a powerless bureaucracy does to how the bureaucrats view themselves,
how it legitimises the notion of a bureaucrat bureaucrat being nothing but a passive agent
responding to rules rather than an active agent providing public goods and services,
or being a quote unquote public servant.
Many cars work on the paper state led me into the deep, dark world of government circulars and government orders.
And what these circulars and orders do to shape the bureaucrats life of bureaucrats understanding of his or her role are bureaucrats understand.
Performance and the bureaucrats relationship with the internal hierarchies and citizens
in a recent paper that we've just finished studying education reforms in Delhi,
we found we had access to a database of over 8000 government circulars that were issued to schools in Delhi over a period of three years,
and we dived into about 2000 of them to try and make sense of what the circular does to the school child.
And I'll end with this quote, the schoolteacher says, I'm just moving from one circular to the next.
It's like if you're GPS and if the circular doesn't come,
I don't know what to do because it's like if your GPS stops working, you won't find your way.
No. That's how central the paper is.
The circular is to the everyday life of the bureaucracy, and I found that the best way of understanding the bureaucracy and this is something
that's a little bit controversial in terms of how one positions this work.
And often I'm often told that I'm missing something here,
but I find that we have studied the bureaucracy very closely by and by trying to look at the political economy within which the bureaucracy is placed.
And I understand that because after all, the political context shapes the bureaucracy and shapes how the bureaucracy,
particularly at the grassroots, build its relationships with shapes its contract with citizens.
But at the same time, I find that when we start, when we take politics as a lens,
we get distracted and we forget to understand the bureaucracy as an organisation.
So sometimes it's helpful to shave off the politics for a brief period is hard to do, especially when you're studying bureaucracy in South Asia.
But I think it's important to do because it gives you an understanding of what this organisation is with all its hierarchies,
its people, its rules, its norms and its its rebound spectacle.
It's Ray-Ban sunglasses and field bikes with which really shapes what the bureaucracy is.
Its files and its broken was and then put it back in to the larger politics.
Only then will we have a more robust understanding of the Indian state and perhaps some new
framework so that we can discuss reforming the Indian state and making it more accountable,
more transparent and more responsive to the citizens it claims to be solving.
Thank. Thanks. That was fantastic, allowed her to go a little like journey, these like 10 15 minutes,
we'll come back to some of the really important points you raised, I'm sure in the discussion. Thank you for that.
Record, I hand over to you. Yes, thank you.
Hi, everyone who is here, thank you for making time. And thank you and Annika for this invite.
So I will quickly walk you through the broad contours of my current project,
which is which is my which is my book project, and then I thought I'd give.
And then I thought I just outlined the four or five threads that I'm just beginning to pursue that kind of take off from dissertation work.
And at the end, I thought I'd talk a bit about the kinds of research methods I have used.
So my my current book manuscript,
which is based on my dissertation it it argues that its stake in the governance of Nigeria is the nature of governance itself.
And the manuscript is really it's a historical legal ethnography of a public irrigation system in Pakistan.
It examines the performer devotee of stage failure in enabling three sorts of things,
so one is God intervention to with corporate profitability and three is ethical liberal amongst bureaucrats.
And so the the entire analysis is organised around three axes along which public private distinctions are negotiated.
So there's adjudication, the valuation and then there's label. And I'm going to just say a few words about each and done so.
The adjudication bit is is really me chasing the enabling conditions for the declaration of a water crisis,
of a national water crisis to a history of environmental jurisprudence and the analysis
that regulates legal and environmental anthropology and histories of the Cold War.
The evaluation bids the Connect contemporary claims to public service by water
corporations to British colonial era conceptions of the public value of water.
And the hinge of that section is it's rooted in the argument that the two constituent variables water and land in the hydraulic
engineering concept of the duty of water were articulated by a hard hitting component that of that aggression is legal.
And so this section in your designs and technology studies colonial histories of South Asia and increasingly critical development in studies.
And then and then labour delves into irrigation bureaucrats, quotidian work and shows that.
Contrary to popular conceptions of the corrupting influence of private considerations, such as, for example, feet in public affairs,
bureaucratic attempts to be good Muslims can actually make them good bureaucrats and hence facilitate public service delivery.
And why I think this is important is because, I mean, for me,
what makes this particular bad exciting is that how bureaucrats navigate public private tensions,
I think, enables inside not only into ethical self fashioning, but because they are public servants.
It also demonstrates how they're ethically able to affect the large number of persons.
And here I'm talking about ethical nubile that's manifested in decisions such as blocking or rearranging floors.
Irrigation water isn't changing its velocity, those sorts of things.
So there and now there's some specific threads that I am trying to develop further.
One is I'm interested in rethinking the boundaries of the categories of of of the bureaucrat and the leverage and discharge.
I think my overall interest is in directing attention to the state as employers, the state,
as one of the largest employers in in many parts of the world, also particularly in Pakistan.
And second is my interest in the history of the histories of and the ongoing politics of
unionisation amongst government employees amongst in in government departments and at Holland is.
Oh, it is, it's this it's this examination of the conception of public office as a sacred duty, as a sacred trust,
and that it turns out there's a lot of litigation around this in in the higher courts of Pakistan.
And then a fourth is it started out with it.
Disinterest interest really began with a dissertation chapter that was titled Agenda of Corruption and Kyoto.
I'm interested in in examining the the gendered nature of ethically bush.
So these are the directions in which I hope this look really cool in in the in the in Daniel, in the near future.
And I thought I would end with. Just very quickly walk you through the modality.
The primary research modality of of this project and then ananich in response to your two questions.
The earlier ones about what what got me into this? So other methods did or the how of all of this, the how of the research I have.
So I've drawn on archival research in Pakistan and then just very little also at the India Office Archives at the British Library.
And it's mostly ethnographic research and in Pakistan, Pakistan's Punjab.
I also did. I've also done research a shorter results statements that incorporate in development of water across across some sites that,
you know, kind of took me outside of Pakistan. And so this includes the Czech Republic, Sweden, Tajikistan and even and even the US.
And really what I was trying to do through this, you know, sitting around or through this jumping around really initially,
initially in the initial days of fieldwork was was really chasing the flow of water.
That's that's really been how I started the project, tracing the flow of water from development organisations,
country plans and corporate boardrooms to state sanctioned water distribution schedules in Pakistan to organise and pumps onto
farmers fields into illegal water channels and via seepage into the aquifer when disputed records like when it becomes a case,
when something becomes a case. And Judy,
what I wanted to show was that at stake in the politics of water flow and productivity was far more than was far more than crop years at stake,
which I'm sure was a mediation of water access by ethnic and religious sectarian differences.
The structural violence of power differentials between landed in the nanny extensions,
the interruption and even reversal of the violence in bureaucratic dispute resolution in July.
And really, what a post-colonial politics of provision of public goods is.
And so what gets me into this is, you know, growing up in Pakistan, bureaucracies everywhere,
at least at least the way that I grew up, bureaucracy is everywhere. Condemnations of it are also everywhere, right?
Whether it's whether it's academic or non-fiction writing, whether it's news media representations, dramas, you know, whatever you have.
Stereotypes of all the bureaucrats of certain bureaucrats.
And this is, of course, not to say that those stereotypes are not are often not accurate.
And so and also in particular, this this entire genre of, you know,
fiction by by bureaucrats and about bureaucrats, which has, I think, also very interesting colonial lineages.
And then, you know, this particular gone by in a wartime bureaucracy.
I think I'd see that this is sometime in the summer of summer of 2012.
I was transitioning from an earlier project.
And the newspapers in in the hope that that somehow we're talking about how prime agricultural land in parts of Punjab under the
government was planning on releasing these two corporations and some governments in the Middle East and not much more was being set.
But to me, it was interesting because as somebody who kind of, you know, still remembered textbooks from many levels in in in Pakistan,
you're going to, you know, started with Pakistan is a semi-arid to arid country and we only get this.
This is a range of rainfall, right? And we basically rely on this massive irrigation network.
And so I just thought it was really interesting to think through, well, well, what really is happening here?
What sort of export is this? What are what are we exporting by allowing this kind of agriculture?
It's really about water like it's land because it solved because it is not Asian water.
And so I think that really is is how I got into it, how I got into water and bureaucracy, and I'm going to end here.
I hope that's helpful. And I don't. And I just love to talk more about about all of this and spider.
Really fascinating and so excited to read your book, you know, the articles that come out of it in the near future.
Thank you so much, and I can already see some really interesting battles or conversation points with what you just said.
So yeah, looking forward to that. Should be one to zero if that's OK.
Thank you, Nick. Yeah, so I'll I'll just start with talking about what I work on.
It's Pakistan's biometric based national identity database, and I look at how it intersects with questions of surveillance, citizenship and kinship.
So NADRA is the national database and registration authority, and this is for most.
South Asians will know either NADRA or Aadhaar.
So it's basically Pakistan's version of Punjab or predates it, but by many years, actually.
So NADRA is a techno bureaucratic organisation, and it manages and produces Pakistan's biometric based ID card, and it just to give some background.
It began its operations in 2000.
It launched this computerised national ID card, and it's now one of the largest centralised identity databases in the world.
So it has 176 million registered Pakistanis, and its significance really is in its ubiquity.
So the card is used for banking, for paying bills, for property transactions, for voting, and the list goes on.
And it has custom made software, so it produces its registration and identity database in-house,
and it verifies data from Bullets family unit and from individuals. And in part, it does this to determine who is a Pakistani citizen or not.
So one of the differences from my day is that it is tied to citizenship entitlements, and as part of this process,
it sometimes even changes individuals and families status from citizen to quote unquote, alien.
So I originally came to this project with an interest in surveillance and the Pakistani security state,
which is which is a very, very ubiquitous presence in and of itself.
But I was keen to going into graduate school who was keen to move away from the
security studies paradigm and especially its assumptions about places like Pakistan.
And I wanted to get at the phenomena of security and surveillance from an ideological and historical
perspective to see how security infrastructures were intersecting with social and political life in Pakistan.
And then during an early preliminary fieldwork, my first summer back from graduate school,
I was working in Bristol migrant neighbourhoods in Islamabad.
So these were informal settlements at the time, and I was working here as a researcher,
but also organising around housing rights in Islamabad and the the Pashtun migrants who were in this settlement came from the northwest of Pakistan,
so many from the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, and part of the reason they did come in waves of migration.
But they had experienced multiple displacements as a result of the war on terror.
But and Pakistan's military operations in that area bordering on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
So early on during this fieldwork period,
I learnt about what was called this blocked identity card and this was happening as
people were complaining about this as local government elections were approaching
and a large number of these migrants weren't able to basically vote for their for
their local representatives because NADRA had placed them under citizenship.
Reverification, essentially, and this was showing up in the form of the blocked card.
So the blockade meant that either couldn't use their identity cards, even if it was still physically as a document in their possession.
They couldn't use it for a range of activities, like buying a SIM card for their cell phone or enrolling their children in school or so on.
But B, they had to really indicate their identity as individuals.
So, you know, I am Zehra, but also as Pakistani nationals.
And for this, they needed to collect a host of identity documents.
So paper documents that could evidence that they or their families had been in Pakistan had been residing in Pakistan prior to 1978, which is after.
That's the deed after which a large number of Afghan refugees came to Pakistan.
And simultaneously, these documents also had to evidence and authenticate their their kin relation.
So the fact that they were truly related to who they said they were as if they're saying X is my father,
this document had evidence that that was true. So in this moment, like many people who looked at any number of infrastructures, in one sense,
this was appearing to be like a classic moment of breakdown where the insides of the systems and its assumptions and logics become visible.
In this moment, but as I looked closely realised that actually this wasn't the moment of breakdown,
the blockage of the of the identity card was in a failure,
but it was this technical bureaucratic system doing its job or enacting a feature of its design.
And the design I'm speaking of is is a design, a structure of the identity database, which in fact incorporates of this design,
incorporates a long standing capacity to document kinship and fat and the family as the means of establishing identity for purposes of governance.
And it was this reliance and kinship that, of course, growing up in Pakistan, it obviously knew about.
But in this moment it really caught me as I found, as I started looking into NADRA and speaking to people at NADRA,
there really is a kinship was guiding bureaucratic protocols for identity registration,
and Wooroloo was conditioning the possibilities for how those who get blocked out of the system can then negotiate free entry.
So when I started researching the implications of NADRA on the lives of those that it impacted most and disproportionately so with migrants,
they emphasised the sense of collective punishment that they felt. And of course, this is a much longer history into the colonial period.
But when one family member was blocked frequently, this would spread to the whole family.
And in fact, it would move across households through the documented included connexions between family members.
And so kinship was uprooting. Is this almost contagious element?
Not because of an essential shared quality of some sort, but because of how the aid system was configured.
So it began to look at this question and really design my research from the perspective of Western migrants,
but then eventually also nadra because I saw how and why and what just looking at it from other.
I began to see how and why the ID regime includes blood, blood relations or biological relatedness to construct individual identity.
And this involved examining the relationship between the domain of bureaucracy and that of the family,
both as information and data, but also as lived experience.
So I did this through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research into bureaucratic information systems,
so to speak, really quickly to the ethnographic part.
First, I spent time at the NADRA Registration Centre, the mega centre that opened 24-7 in Islamabad, so you can go any time.
And here I shadowed data entry operators who would basically do the work of identity registration,
and this includes those who are coming in to register for an identity card for the first time,
as well as those who are making changes to to their existing identity record.
And this goes from registering divorces to correcting spelling mistakes.
And here I also spent time with assistant managers who were basically in charge of the approvals of each registration case and
who as a little bit of another they think is different from kind of a conventional bureaucracy because there is heralded,
maybe somewhat similarly, toward high as this kind of new,
new and fancy and shiny bureaucracy that is actually quite efficient, that uses technology well.
And all of these things. So there's, of course, a lot to say about, you know, who these people were at the front line bureaucrats,
how they fit into the bureaucracy at large, how the cultural and political dynamics play out, particularly in a place like a soundbite.
But I limit myself now to just seeing that. What ultimately I found really fascinating was the very process of establishing identity.
So this was not Dyadic relationship between the citizen who comes in and applies for an ID card and the data entry operator.
But this dynamic interplay between registration software, biometric equipment and multiple family members,
so people just show up with it with a different, a different members of their family.
And this was because this was required to actually authenticate one individual as a religion,
as a as a relation of someone who was already within the database. So one of the arguments that emerged in my work from from this time spent at the
registration centre was and the examination of relatedness and interaction as it
plays out here was to dissenter biometrics as the source of producing the authenticated
individual and instead to foreground the relational logics of the database.
And what? Preceded it. And so to understand the logic of this beautified Khan network,
I also did field work at the technology and development department in the projects division at Nasra.
And of course, given the really highly securitised nature of NADRA,
my access here was very limited and I'm happy to speak about this more, but, you know, managing that precarious nature of access itself.
But I was able to through this work, I was able to contextualise the use of ID technology within the design of various governance projects.
So from flood relief to welfare payments to preventing fraud in bank transactions.
And I looked at how ID technology and biometrics, such as NADRA systems like maladroit, get used across domains.
So in fact, they even get repurposed other than into functions other than what they were built for.
We're seeing this now with COVID, and this is a lot to do with, of course,
institutional culture and how some institutions become especially powerful in shaping other parts of the bureaucracy.
But I think it also has something to do with how they're built in ways that enables a certain kind of agility.
So ensured a significant part of understanding Nadella's identification protocols for me in the present meant looking at how it came to be.
And this is where you know that historical questions really emerged and following this was involved,
you know, research in National Archives and Colonial Archives.
But in fact, a lot of what guided my my queries was informed by the Bristol migrants I was spending
time with simultaneously who were navigating Nagios procedures of reverification.
And they were their own. They were their own archivists, basically of sorts,
both trying to understand like what would make a strong case of proving identity and then also collecting document dossiers from across various
locations from their family members from across generations to produce this authentic genealogical Vinicius account of their belonging in their camp.
So being in the archives and then watching archives in action in Bristol neighbourhoods in Pakistan,
I saw what happens when an identification technology basically goes back and forth between being digital and non-digital.
So between the database and paper and the documentary process of citizen reverification
basically brought out the historical components of my project to the fore.
And one of my central questions was about this history of of identification and identity
documentation was about what allowed specific kinds of bureaucratic practises of
individuation is what I it introducing the individual and and the documentation of family
relations to keep emerging and persisting in the age of biometrics and database technology.
So to follow this history of identification is looking at a set of really diffuse practises for making
individuals before these practises congeal into technological objects that then the bureaucracy picks up.
So to do this attract would lead up to Pakistan's first national identity registry, which was made in the 1970s,
but then also looked at the role of vital statistics and identity certificates and property deeds in colonial South Asia.
And I don't have the time to go into details of all that,
but I want to emphasise that it was actually doing ethnographic work on bureaucracy that led me to ask
specific kinds of historical questions and read the historiography of South Asia in a different way.
So what I mean here is that we're we often I mean, a lot of anthropologists, a lot of people everywhere, historic eyes.
But I think we, we we don't think or at least I didn't think through the kinds of historiography shifts that
an ethnographic approach can actually produce by virtue of the kinds of questions we ask,
but by looking at the bureaucracy in the present.
So for my project, for instance, looking at the persistence of kinship and the use of relatedness in a in a contemporary identity database,
let me just see the history of identity documentation and even colonial identification practises in in a different way,
basically by by seeing the importance of how the the state used relations between
persons as the means of governing them beyond a kind of simple continuation or rupture.
So as Doug, there things are like really fascinating insights and you know how the graphic
needs historical research and also this relationship between something that
both you and I have talked about the colonial bureaucracy and present forms of bureaucratic functioning in South Asia has to be explored bit further,
like the two of you are doing. I also really appreciate the use of.
Foreground kinship in this story, because often when it comes to studies of bureaucracy,
kinship is sort of left out, and that's an important way to bring it back in through NADRA.
Thanks so much for that, Xiao onto do you?
Thanks. And it's a real pleasure to be here with with all of you.
I've learnt so much from from the work here, especially from their own Yamani,
and I'm really, really glad to learn about my valuable work in the area as well.
Fascinating stuff. So a bit about my own interest in bureaucracy, how I kind of came to study it.
Then I'll say something about my my book project on education, then a Segway into the police reform study.
And perhaps, you know, leave some questions that are kind of open in my mind about bureaucracy.
So I didn't plan to study bureaucracy when I started doing research.
I was actually interested more in civil society.
So I was working with UNICEF in. I was in Uttar Pradesh looking at child labour interventions and the really big thing,
and this is kind of building off with Yamani was talking about the notion of participation, decentralisation, local accountability.
And with that were a set of ideas around communities and social capital.
So the idea being that the centralised top-down bureaucratic command and control state is not capable of addressing so many problems.
Likewise, markets are impersonal and often fail to provide essential public goods and communities, and society was seen as a potential solution.
The way to kind of get around that. And as I did a field work and I was in rural U.P. and I observe collective action by communities so
very much in line with what Yamani was saying that the dominant in view of the corrupt official,
there was efforts to kind of work around that.
So officials in the Labour Department were seen as extracting bribes rather than addressing the root causes of child labour.
And so in response to that series of initiatives in Eastern Europe,
Asia merged to kind of work around from a bottom up approach to get communities
to provide the public goods that could ensure that children were not working.
So providing alternative schools and health centres that supported children.
And what I found was that there were all these forms of collective action happening in these villages.
Yet they always hit a roadblock, which is when they wanted to scale up,
when they wanted to actually demand that school teachers come to those schools
when they wanted to ensure that nurses actually provide health services.
They had to negotiate with bureaucracy.
And it was precisely at that interface that I found a lot of what we demand of civil society seems to be exceeding considerably what it can do.
When I look at the fact that the local officers did not feel beholden to many of the communities that they were supposed to be serving,
so that got me interested in understanding those officers. Then I did some initial fieldwork with the education bureaucracy again in Uttar Pradesh.
And, you know, I initially was struck by the fact that just as the army was saying,
officers often describe constraints and that was first and foremost, they talked about what they could not do.
At the same time, I found it quite impressive that everyone around them thought that they could get everything done.
There is a sense that the bureaucrat, you know, by moving her pen is like God, quite quite frankly.
And so this this sort of disconnect between public expectations,
aspirations of the state and what the state could actually do with state capacity was available was really the motivation for my work.
And the other, I guess, piece of motivation comes out of just the philosophy of a few based evidence we have on on on bureaucratic agencies.
So very much again, in line with what Yamina is saying, I feel I could have just I could just echo, you know, all of Yamina talk here.
I've very little to add, but you know, I'll just say that there's a tendency to sort of treat community in all of its richness.
And we see that in social sciences and anthropology and sociology and increasingly political science to take account of diversity,
to take account of a variation in norms in hierarchies and so on.
But when it came to bureaucracy, it was almost treated as a as a unitary actor,
as if there isn't variation in how bureaucracy behaves and understands its duties.
And I found quite the opposite. So my work on education across northern India, I branched out of you,
looked at other states both in in the kind of hill based areas like Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, as well as U.P. and Bihar.
And across these states, I saw quite significant variations in how public officials understood the rules of.
The game. And really spending time in frontline public agencies is how I came to understand this.
So I looked at the universal primary education programmes in India.
This is a service had gone right to education, mid-day meal programme and related schemes.
And these are federal programmes and the rules are very detailed.
Actually, if you go into them, state governments have to fulfil certain standards and obligations, and they're legally bound to do so.
Yet when you go down to the field of practise, you see dramatic differences in how officials understand their duties.
And quite often it's informal norms, and that's the real punchline of my book.
It's actually the unwritten rules of the game that are driving the different types of behaviours that we're seeing across Indian states.
And so, you know, what I basically did in the book was that I not only spent time inside, say,
a local education office or the District Education Office going down to the Black Education Office.
It was actually important for me to look above that office and below that office,
and this is where I think it's really important logically to place Line Street
level bureaucracies within their broader set of institutions to which they,
you know, with which they interact.
So the local education bureaucracies, we're often responding to pressures and demands coming from Inupiat would have been Latino in Himachal Pradesh,
Shimla and they're going in and partner. So they're getting this kind of pressure coming from senior level officials.
But at the same time, they have Baltimore pressures that are coming from society, whether it's in the form of of of of local collective action.
It could be legal action, it could be village education committees.
These are kind of designated formal bodies in charge of schools,
but actually even more frequent in my work I found was informal groups and in the case in the villages,
I conducted fieldwork and it was actually women's associations that were often not even recognised
by the state that were doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of village collective action.
And what I find is that bureaucracies respond to these demands very differently
across different states or into the norms that that guide their behaviour.
So I have a framework I develop in the book, which really builds on a whole lot of organisational theory,
institutional theory and public administration work on bureaucracy.
And on the one hand, I identify a series of of behaviours and patterns that coincide with what I call liberalism,
which is a kind of a kind of rule adherence.
Looking at a policy as a script and trying to behave as close to the script as possible and not diverging from that versus an alternative type,
which I call, which I call it a more deliberative bureaucracy, which encourages flexibility and problem solving and discretion.
And it's interesting because if one looks at the literature on bureaucracy, there's an overwhelming support for rule following.
So I mean, this is there's a long history to this and there's very intellectual threads behind this.
But perhaps the most forceful one is given by Max Weber the notion of the rational legal norm within a bureaucracy.
So you should limit the room for negotiation. You should limit the amount of political interference and societal input, and it's in its extreme.
You should actually have a different social world with the bureaucrat is effectively cut off from influences from the outside.
Now there's, of course, been, you know, all kinds of modifications to this.
There have been arguments that you need to combine elements of the Iberian state with also some degree of what sociologists call embeddedness.
So some amount of having the state interact with society.
But what I found, actually, there's a lot of tension between what these different sorts of ideas die.
So just to give a couple of practical examples from the field, you know, take take the midday meal.
And so I sort of trace the process of monitoring the mid-day meal from the state capital down to a village primary school.
So there's a kind of script that this is what you have to follow.
Ensure food grains are provided, ensure that that you're monitoring student attendance,
ensure that all of the different inputs, apart from grains and payment to the cooks is made so on and so forth.
And in different agency, you see these same foods being understood very differently.
So in Uttar Pradesh, I literally have officers telling me in interviews that we view this as an accounting scheme.
So effectively there's the funds being transferred from New Delhi.
We're transferring those funds to the.
The district and we need to, in return, get data to demonstrate that the funds were utilised according to the rules, right?
And what else happens at the school is someone else's problem.
And it's not that these officials don't care. In fact, they think that by by focussing on the accounts of the midday meal,
they can ensure that the programme is actually delivered going down to the district level.
I found when when underprivileged groups actually had problems getting access to the meal,
they would seek support through village education committees that would go to the local education bureaucrat.
And they would say almost identical things that we're accounting for the provision of the food grains,
and we're enforcing certain standards, such as hygiene standards.
And what I found is that actually, with this kind of rule,
following disempowers the least advantaged and hygiene in one particular village where I conducted extensive fieldwork work.
This worked against Dalit women who were trying to monitor the programme.
So, so when the food grains were not arriving and when they actually went and demanded that the school do something about it,
they were basically pushed away when they went to the District Education Office.
They were again told that you should largely complete using our official grievance procedure.
We're going by the rules. What happened in the end was that the school's headmaster and also other village
elites conspired and basically put the case against them for for misusing the funds.
So these women who were involved in cooking the food and they actually charged them with with with
tampering with the hygiene of the food and this this notion of hygiene actually had a double meaning,
of course, being Dalits in U.P. village. They were already seen as being polluted and many didn't want them actually to even be cooking the food.
But then this had the backing of a legal and administrative process.
So this is one example of how officials who are actually doing their jobs and employing the rules that were given to
them effectively disempower accountability at the local level and really prevent citizens from from participating.
So over time, these same groups then learn not to engage as much with schools.
And this is a kind of critique of a lot of the literature which argue that parents
or households in this part of India don't care about school or education.
So if you look at some surveys, if you look at cross-sectional data you may find from these that there's actually
not a lot of civil society mobilisation and a lot of the work that's been published,
say out of the World Bank, has drawn in big differences between states like and states like Kerala,
you know, the latter having the right type of civil society mobilisation.
What I argue and this is a methodological point, is that you really need to trace the process of collective action over time and look at the
different points in which the front line states may intervene to influence that collective action.
And so in these villages, actually, it was initially quite actively engaged in monitoring the mid-day meal programme,
and over time, they learnt to disengage to their interaction with the bureaucracy.
Very different results, by the way, that I observed in other states, in other places, and particularly in Himachal Pradesh.
But I also looked at the Mahila programme in U.P. So this is a dedicated agency for women's empowerment embedded within the education department.
And you really see a countervailing set of norms that actually push against this conventional rule following that was so prevalent in U.P.
So, you know, that's a bit about the book and I extend these arguments.
I actually think that there's a kind of more general argument that we can we can potentially test in other countries beyond India.
So I have a chapter that looks at education in China, France and Finland.
And I do see interesting variations across these countries that in many ways resemble some of the differences I observed across states within India,
France being a highly centralised and legalistic state where you have very high levels of education inequality,
Finland being a state where you have a much more deliberative engagement and customised education which responds to individual student needs.
And China's an interesting example. This is kind of I'm drawing on secondary literature in this chapter.
It's not the core argument of the book, but there's a growing amount of work on deliberation inside the Chinese state.
And this is just the kind of push us to think a bit harder about how bureaucracies work from the inside.
And so I'll just say if I were. Not a minute. If that's fine, I'll just say something about my my latest work, which is on police reform.
So the police, in some sense, are possibly the toughest nut to crack.
If you want to get inside and understand how an agency works, organisationally to have a strong culture.
There's a strong insider versus outsider dynamic, probably similar somewhat to it that I was mentioning with security.
More generally, security agencies and forces broadly have this kind of I mean,
one does the practical aspect that you cannot get access to information because it's deemed as a part of the state's coercive and security apparatus.
But there's also an organisational culture that that that that connects with that.
And this is probably where, you know, linking contemporary bureaucracy to its colonial history would also be useful
because that notion of the US versus them that I observe within the police,
there's a long history to that, you know, within South Asia. But what I what we're doing in in in in this is in the state of modern finished.
We're looking at a series, a series of reforms to actually address some of the accountability challenges that
and some of the responsiveness that that that the police is trying to improve upon.
So we're looking at an intervention to improve police, the basic handling and responsiveness of women's cases.
And in this, we basically found that and this is a kind of large scale study.
And here I've gone with a series of co-authors, both at University of Virginia, who are combining ethnography with a large scale asked.
And this is kind of trying to mix methods a little bit to understand how you know,
what is the impact of having dedicated services for women in the police station.
So this is of programme is called irja and there's a dedicated women's help desk in the
station and that help desk also provides training and also encourages community outreach.
And we also look at the impact of having women as officers in that desk and what
impact that has on women's reporting of cases and subsequent crime registration.
We find actually that the desk increases outliers by women significantly, but in particular,
when there's women officers in charge of the desk, I can say a bit more about what why that could be happening.
But one one, one hypothesis we have and we're putting together our qualitative research.
We've kind of looked at the two years of this intervention qualitatively in select set of police stations in Madhya Pradesh.
What we what we're observing is actually having senior officers highlight the contributions of women in the police.
Women are only a minority. Seven percent of the police force in India are women, so it's a very small minority.
But highlighting this work has actually kind of raised the status of working on crimes against women.
So prior to the intervention, actually, when I would talk to people in the K.W. Branch Crime Against Women branch,
they inevitably referred to their posting as a punishment post.
This was not where you wanted to be working, and this intervention, we argue,
was actually making changes at the top of the police, which is having an effect further down on the front line.
So I'll stop there and we'll pass it back to you.
Brilliant. Thanks. Super interesting. And you know, again, another book to really look out for.
We're eagerly awaiting this the whole bureaucracy world of the South Asia world,
but also really, really interesting work on your your new project on police reform.
Well, I'm waiting for people to sort of, you know, just to say it, everybody.
If you want to pop a question into the Q&A box or if you want to ask a question,
please just raise your hand and I'll just give you the right to speak.
Sort of say it and you can ask it. But why are we just waiting for people to sort of collect their thoughts?
Could I just have a sort of a follow up question to the four of you?
I mean, there are lots of things I want to ask you, but perhaps just to begin, you know,
what I find interesting was that all four of you actually do deploy at some graphic methods
in different ways like you and coming from different disciplines or different worlds,
or to see whether it's a policy world or it's anthropology and history and anthropology or archaeology due to a period in politics or in business.
Sorry. Sorry, politics, yeah. OK.
So, you know, I mean, it's really interesting to think about methods,
and I wondered whether we could have like a bit of a discussion, which sort of meant that,
you know, what do you find most useful as an insight into the study of bureaucracy,
but also a question on access because something that you know, I see really,
it's getting harder and harder to know if it was right in a given sort of the political situations in different states and South
Asia to actually really get into the inner workings of bureaucracy in the way that perhaps was a bit or places like certain places,
it's really impossible to get into it in some places because I wondered whether we could just have a quick sort of thought on
the court as to access some of these sites and one of the challenges you might have faced or did you find it surprisingly easy?
And some of them, but also just in terms of, you know,
what kind of methods of your big dope have you changed your methods depending on the project you're working in?
So like, you know, actually you mentioned our cities and your police reform book,
but I guess I'm assuming you don't use our cities previously or Yamani the kind of mix of
methods you've used because you had very big studies and then you had smaller studies as well.
Or you know what, my friends and you both talked about actually going back to the colonial archive that you felt compelled to go into that,
given what you have some graphic what we're throwing up.
So I wondered a bit about, you know, that's sort of the mix of methods that you deployed for your question.
Mean, would you like to? Jump into this.
We can't kill you. I don't think it is all. Yes, we can hear you. Yes, that's my laptop, a screen and I suddenly began a life of its own.
I didn't know. OK, I think so.
I think my own foray into studying bureaucracy is somewhat different to to the rest of you in the sense that I entered that world from the past,
from from my position, it was different. I entered that world as somebody who sat at the intersection of to begin with activism and research,
and over time, a lot more straight jacketed policy and research.
And in some senses, therefore, I myself found that I was embedded in that in that world, and my own embeddedness led me to our set of questions.
And for me, it was never it was just the most natural thing to then draw on ethnographic qualitative tools to be
able to rigorously study some of the intuition that I was picking up from being part of that world.
And, you know, we considered subbing and what we did was we use survey tools when we wanted to understand trends.
So one of the initial things that we did when this sort of narrative of powerlessness got me,
got my attention and I felt that there was something that we needed to understand.
We began to as we try to identify levers of power within the bureaucracy.
And it was pretty clear to us, from talking to bureaucracies,
bureaucrats and from being part of the policy discourse that the budget or how money flows through the
system is an extremely critical measure of where power rests within the hierarchy of the bureaucracy.
And every conversation that we would have with bureaucrats always ended up in, you know, I don't have money.
I don't know when the next tranche of release of funds will come, etc., etc. And so we felt it was important to try that became a useful entry point.
And the best way in which to understand that was by actually trying to trace the budget.
So when the finance minister makes a grand announcement and, you know, 20000 crores are being allocated the education budget,
how does this actually translate into bureaucratic action of implementation all the way down to the grassroots?
And by the way, even the social auditing is very much linked to that budgeting process, which is this you know, where money comes from,
how money gets used was both part of the narrative of what accountability is Humira before Humira has all our money.
Our accounts was a critical mobilisation point of framing how to think about accountability.
And so I was already sort of thinking about some of these questions just by virtue of being embedded in that context.
And we used to what we were working very closely with Prudhomme that had started doing these large scale surveys of learning outcomes.
And so it seemed to be a natural place to place these questions about how money flows through the system.
For us to be able to better understand where power rests and whether there is variation in
different districts and different administrative units and states through large scale survey.
And that survey was designed not. That's how we started doing expenditure tracking.
And the idea was not just to build a deeper academic understanding of what was happening,
but also draw from that knowledge that could contribute into the discourse and policy.
So because that dynamic was very much embedded in how we began to do our research,
the engagement with the bureaucracy was part and parcel of the process, and we realised that some questions are better answers to these surveys.
And by the way, there was a great irony here because we were basically trying to pull out government
documentation through the mechanism of our as and ideally these should be available to you.
You shouldn't have to go and survey to find information that was already lodged somewhere in between is just that it would never be aggregated.
Nobody saw relevance in it or used for it, and it was from there that we felt that do understand now.
So we understood some things.
We understood that money's only reached the grassroots towards the end of the financial year to reach them in ways that disempower the grassroots.
But what does this mean, then, for the local bureaucrat?
How do they then do what they're supposed to do or respond to demands of accountability as they're generating from from the bottom up?
And the only way for us to do this was to actually position ourselves.
They observe and understand, but we couldn't be everywhere.
And there were some things that we realised we couldn't do effectively just.
Just by being outsiders coming in, because what inevitably used to happen is we'd come in and, you know, the BDO would say,
Oh, look, there's somebody that believe Ali Madumere has someone has come from Delhi, so I'm not going to talk to you.
I'll just talk to this, madam. And that was both problematic for we wanted to observe and understand how bureaucrats behaved,
but also deeply disturbing from a policy and activism point of view,
because the whole point of studying the bureaucracy was to ensure that they could do their job better,
not prevent a citizens who had come all the way to the lodge their grievances.
So we had access to grassroots feel colleagues who had been in these places for a long time,
who had been working with us to do these expenditure tracking surveys and we felt would make better observers
because they also gelled much better with the context and what didn't fall into the trap of the madam,
the madam from Delhi. But, you know, they were not going to they were not skilled to be good.
Qualitative research, as they were better had been quantitative researchers. And that's when we hit upon with a colleague, Shahana Bhattacharya.
We were we were doing some experimental work, and she had used time.You surveys to study how women use time inside households.
And we deployed the pool of time you surveys to have our female colleagues just document
literally hour by hour for periods of time that they were sitting in these offices.
What was happening. So it was easier for them to document this without building narratives.
And we were able to then access that data to better understand what was actually going on inside these offices.
That led to its own problems because very often when our colleagues were in these offices documenting what was happening,
they also sort of acquired a sense of power of knowledge over what the bureaucrats were doing and and their own sense of superiority.
So, you know, they would often when we would chat, they would say, Well, you know, I call up this office.
I had nine 30 and he wasn't there and I told him, How could you not be there at 9:30?
That's what I was supposed to be, and we would be like, No, you, you have to separate your role as an activist or your role as as as as a policy,
as somebody who is sort of trying to shape or move policy with your role as a researcher and not allow your own position, ability to influence.
So, so you know, at one point we tried to do this three months in a row, and we felt that that was causing too many problems if we broke it up.
So we learnt by experimentation. And I think that that helped us recognise that this mixed methods is a useful way of really understanding.
Some things are more amenable to certain forms of data collection than others and also because we were always there.
It helps it at some level.
It helps us get deeper insight because you are actually observing and participating in things that you're studying and writing about.
It also means that certain kinds of biases do creep in.
And so the surveys help to ensure that are across verifying all the information that you're getting,
so that it's also a way of weeding out your own internal biases.
We are right now doing a survey of the office as part of our state capacity initiative.
The idea was it's part of our long term study of maybe one to sort of capture
what we're calling very ambitiously the moral economy of the bureaucracy.
This is specifically focussed on the elite Indian Administrative Service and wondering what we want to try and understand their own perceptions
of integrity of ethics of trust basically capture the value systems within which they are embedded and because these are senior officers.
We know that every time you go and interview them, you are going to get stock answers until they leave.
And when they leave, they become the biggest activists for bureaucratic reform.
And that's not helpful either, because it's easy to preach when you're outside.
And what we want to understand is the internal dynamics of the system and also given the nature of their jobs,
they would not be amenable to ethnographers observing, writing, etc.
So after a lot of sort of thinking, we narrowed it down to actually doing surveys.
These are perception based surveys. They have their limitations, but they are still a useful starting point for us to understand,
and we've used COVID as a way of trying to understand this.
We did one round of surveys last year through SurveyMonkey had about 500 of its 400 plus
officers that we interviewed some former some and as a result created a mixed sample.
And we interviewed them in August after the first lockdown, when India had decided that it had over the August 2020.
So India had decided they had overcome COVID in the Soviet run through August, September, October.
And you know, while some of it is the typical stock answers you can read between,
so there's some very interesting things that we learnt about how the bureaucracy viewed.
The role of stigma in shaping that ability to expand testing, for example, at that point,
the expansion of testing was critical to how the bureaucracy viewed the role of the media in spreading misinformation or in enabling awareness.
The role of politicians and our idea is that we do a whole series of these over a period of a few years.
So we have a sort of long range that would then give us a more detailed understanding of what the bureaucracy is doing.
So it. So I I think that mixed methods are really important,
and I think that as policy practitioners being embedded in that ecosystem can be very hard one day,
just because our own instinct and insights into engaging with bureaucracy come into play.
But of course, it brings it brings its own biases in so constantly being reminded of that and constantly engaging with all of you as academics
who ensure that you put us back to the rigours of academia in our analysis and makes a huge difference to what we do.
Early on Thanksgiving, many would like to jump in next.
Myra, would you like to go ahead? Sure. Yes. OK, so.
This is really this is really helpful. A lot of what you said because I think a lot of of the of these things that the best shared
Neitzel questions around position ality and the research was how the research was viewed by whom.
What? What sorts of self perceptions are we comfortable with and which ones do we not want to cultivate?
Or further? Why were you uncomfortable with certain impressions, etc.?
So and I and I see something about how I fell into this space or model of the World Bank, madam, and why that bothered me so much.
But but for us, they just want to see, I mean, honestly, the first few months of just figuring out access that I was going to be,
why I wanted to be at particular sites, at particular offices, I just started adding to the archives because it felt much more tangible and doable.
When, you know, constantly calling and trying to set up meetings with officials wasn't wasn't going anywhere.
It felt that this was just the org. I'm doing something right. I have this brand and I have this limited time and I have to make the most of it.
So. So it was this. So I started out feeling feeling a lot of pressure and feeling like, Oh my god, I'm here.
But you know, what am I? What am I? How am I going to do this? And then I think one of the things that helped me was that the irrigation bureaucrats
that I ended up spending most of my time with the you could see the law in the mid-year,
although I kind of did it across two years. But most of the law in mid-year it held that they were really in office.
So they were they were in the field a lot of the time they were in court,
a lot of the time either fighting corruption proceedings against them or being asked by
the senior bureaucratic lawyers to be the department's representative in a court summons.
And so that sort of mobility needed easier for me to, you know, also insert inside myself.
The other thing that helped me was initially trying to understand more than one office or department.
So, you know, initially if, if, if my understanding was a very simplistic one of what our bureaucracy,
irrigation, of course, I just want to be at the irrigation department, right?
But I mean, of course, the irrigation department itself is if you're just looking at one city, Lahore, there's so many offices today.
They have different rings as a headquarters, as field offices, the engineering being the revenue wing where you want to be.
And so trying to get a sense of these various offices and then also the interactions of the irrigation department with, for example,
the provincial planning and development department held that the irrigation department dinner works
closely with the Agriculture Department also help because then I felt like one wasn't going anywhere.
I felt like there were these other avenues to explore the World Bank, madam.
Yeah, so. So you see this. This is this space is a very, very extensively and long researched one.
There is a lot of scholarship on irrigation in Pakistan.
There isn't much by by anthropologists or by qualitative researchers, but there is a lot of scholarship like there's a lot of engineering work.
There's a lot of economists who who walked.
And there's also a lot of studies that organisations like the World Bank and ADB and Giger, the GI Guys,
the Japan International Cooperation Agency, which is also which is very central in this space because they've been one of the biggest donors.
And so when I when I when when you when you were going to when a woman like myself shows up,
it's the familiar model is of the World Bank model because that's how these models show up.
They kind of then come and they do what they wanted with the surveys. They want to collect data.
And so for me, the struggle was, no, actually, I'm not that sort of boss on.
I'm not getting World Bank funding and I'm not here. After a large data said there are different things I want to understand.
And that was really helpful for me. Also, you know,
constant convincing because it it forced me to become curious about why I was getting so uncomfortable with that kind of your you fit this slot,
right? And it, I think, also really helped me undo and question a lot of the slides that I had in my mind when when I came to work,
when I was when I was new to this. And it also, I mean, it wasn't easy and a lot of people would, you know, see also.
Yeah, but most of these researchers who can be, you know, get their data, they kind of take what they need and then they're gone.
It seems like you're a really slow learner waiting to come back again.
And so there's something very humbling about that.
But I think over time and, you know, done that, done efficiently, it was it's been it's been very, very rewarding.
The other thing and this is kind of linked to the World Bank model issue was all,
but you're not an engineer, you're not an economist, you're not working with these big datasets.
You can tell us about trends or what use is your anthropology.
And here it was also this interesting kind of reversal of the poor what is exotic to whom?
Because a lot of people like anthropology, that's so fascinating.
Tell us more that there was this perception of, yeah, anthropology is kind of soft and it's, you know, it's not serious, but it's just fascinating.
So let this, you know, let this city woman do whatever the [INAUDIBLE] she thinks she wants to do next.
So that sort of attitude I got, especially, I think, from some of the body was again,
it ended up being helpful because if a lot of people aren't taking your work too seriously,
it gives you freedom on the way to kind of figure all things out. And, you know, just just be on your own.
And then, you know, again, the fact that this is a very, very masculine space,
the engineering world, the irrigation world and bureaucracy are very, very masculine space.
That was its own. It came with its own set of of of questions and questions that I had.
And, you know, so so for example,
like this whole chapter that's trying to understand if there's something to probing the gendered nature of ethical labour and bureaucratically.
But that's not a question I went into the field with right for me when I started fieldwork.
Gender was very much in my head, just something that would get in the way and that was getting in the way and it was always getting in the way.
Right. And so there was this. There was this fantasy of immediate access or, you know, all these guys,
they hang out the hefty and the kind of dog and family, I want to do that because how else would I understand?
And then also that over time and like after the off the first five months, I was kind of pushed off to this one woman,
the only woman at the time who who was part of the revenue wing and right,
and that was part of the effort by some of the male officials to try to get me away from their offices,
which is also, you know,
something that I that I understood and kind of also respected because there's also a lot of there's there's a politics of class privilege,
which is reflected through stories and, you know, rumours such as Jessica just Gajendra.
It was Starsky. Such a great idea for somebody who comes with a short while.
It's easy and you know, it's easy for you to say, I don't get it.
I can ignore all of this.
But for people who thought of that of that bureaucracy and kind of have to stay in it, I think those are dams made me aware of Osama.
Those dynamics also. So yes, I hope that gives you some sense of.
Where I've been, how I've been and the challenges, totally, I think we should try to join people in the middle for up to three,
but from the World Bank or from the legal problem, you know, it's like, what is the madam do there?
Yeah, thanks. Bye, Rosetta. Would you like to weigh in next year?
And then we have actually quite a few questions coming in five so far.
So yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I totally. I think the gender question is very interesting because I felt that very strong data was always in the way.
And how do you just normalise something that is interesting? I think about now there is this kind of spatial.
I think some of these things are so, so spatial and architectural, almost.
And one thing that really helped me and so micro, but was that Nader is open plan, right?
So all the data entry stations are set up and then even the assistant managers have just like a fibreglass wall.
So I could shadow and be there and everybody seeing what I was doing.
And so it actually. And of course, as I'm thinking about surveillance, that's really key.
But and I think the surveillance isn't just in terms of what's happening with the speed and securitisation, but also for corruption.
So to make sure that nobody jumps the queue, there's a queue matic going.
If you do, everybody sees. So that actually really helped me because they could see what I was doing.
I could see what was happening and what the dynamics were. And in a weird way, it worked out.
But I think the other the other part that I've been thinking about in terms of the institutions,
how bureaucracies are connected and moving between spaces.
So in a way that the registration centre became more of a site than I had originally
planned and learnt how to code in the hope that I would understand the database.
So I went through all this pain. But of course, you know, it was naive of me.
It's it's an identity database, even the kind of access it got to software engineers, it would be willing to speak to me there.
And this is what's interesting in terms of other bureaucracies, because most like out of hat,
I imagine that there are people who would be working at a hedge fund or in Silicon Valley or in start-ups in Pakistan,
and they end up in these spaces because it's an exceptional kind of bureaucracy that allows
them like innovation and to bring sort of new kinds of technologies into this space.
And so many of the software engineers I spoke to were like, we would never work further ocracy if it weren't for this kind.
So they were they were super helpful to speak to,
but I wasn't able to do that kind of deep cleaning up because it was very much it, very different in the red zone.
It is in Islamabad, so you actually need very special access to go in and out, need somebody to call at the door every time.
So my space there was limited, but similar to what I was describing in the projects division.
I spent some time with people who work with the who was then called the Benazir Income Support Programme, and now it's called the resource.
And that and even though it wasn't very interested in welfare,
I think it is in ultimately became compelling to think about it because so much of other the other
ID reduced biometric regimes through the World Bank are so tied to welfare payments in Pakistan.
That's a very minor part of what neither does, but it does do it.
But looking at that connexion between the projects division that manages welfare payments and other really helped
me understand how the how the whole system works and how how data is used and constructed within the system.
So only once married or ever married, sorry, ever married women can receive a welfare payment within within based within this welfare programme.
And so NADRA has to share that precise data that they have been made their woman and their,
you know, been best has its own kind of poverty scoring that it does.
So understanding that was it was a really key part of figuring out the system as a whole.
And there was a woman there who managed the projects division.
Everybody told me really off knock, you know,
but she was actually just great because she told me who all the sexual harassers were around and like I had, you know, I knew who to avoid, basically.
And so it sort of worked out. But what it really speaks to, actually what she was talking about was the legalism and norms and the social,
the very an idea of bureaucracy, which however, finally even a very oppositional to it does come up and said, Well, for me,
it came out in two ways to think about, you know, rules as opposed to code.
So how people were managing registration software and the rules of registration as they negotiated with.
Who'd come in to do most of the time to sort of help them get through the process even if
they were missing some things or their biometrics weren't working or things like that.
So how how that and this is happening increasingly, I think with the use of technology across the board, across bureaucratic systems.
And the other thing I was thinking about is it, you know,
this rule of kind of social of embeddedness and how and how that plays out, particularly in the realm of identification.
So while I was there, there changed its rules. Still, you can now apply in any district for an identity card.
It doesn't have to be very urgent reside.
And and that was creating a new problem for people in Islamabad because you have, you know, famously, no one is from Islamabad.
So there were people from everywhere and there's so many migrants and of course, upon refugees who have a standing presence.
And so they had to register people.
But they would always say that local knowledge people who are local or regional, not their offices would actually understand this much better.
And so there's that and this I saw in the colonial archive in the post-colonial like the the fifties in the sixties,
as I didn't see documentation was becoming the thing that,
you know, knowing who someone is and who they are related to was really a key part of being able to,
you know, be able to identify in a in a bureaucratic setting.
And, you know, I think this point to it is about space is so important of the open access of this point is really, really fascinating.
I would love to talk more about that, but I would have a chance, maybe have six questions now.
So we will try to run through them because the really great questions that are coming up.
OK, sure. Yeah, thanks. So, yeah, how I study what I do in the methodological choices.
So I'm a political scientist by training. My work is speaking to core arguments in political science about state capacity, development and so on.
My My book is in a comparative politics of Education series, yet I also find myself at various moments frustrated with my home discipline.
And I think this is partly based on a broad reading of, you know, what factors drive bureaucratic behaviour.
I mean, one can not only look as as nominee mentioned, you can only look at the political economy.
You have to understand bureaucracies as institutions with the social life of their own.
And I think there was at a time of political science that did that.
But over the years and you know, you see it in this kind of, you know,
the the separation of public administration as a separate discipline in the sense,
I think that's really weakened our understanding actually of bureaucracy within the field of political science because those who are studying
bureaucracies as institutions are often not engaging with political science for sort of a series of speed and development and vice versa.
Those are studying institutions are often treating them as unitary actors and the very
sort of abstract and broad brush stroke way without getting into the sort of social life.
So my my approach to this is really to use a variety of methods and so in the education book and
combining different qualitative field methods which provide different ways of understanding not.
So one one set of tools is to interview officers, and they would often start by interviewing officials at a senior level,
you know, within the state to understand how they think of their own duties,
what turns to what categories are they using to describe their own ideas of what their mandate is and and accordingly,
then trying to see if these ideas are consistent?
Do they vary across officers? And so that is a kind of big interview sort of component to do my research.
But I also found focus group discussions quite helpful because often it was concrete examples that made it that brought an idea to life.
So hearing an officer say this is how I actually addressed a particular case, and that might snowball into another official sitting there saying,
Oh, that also happened in my, you know, in my district or that didn't happen in my district.
And so even the conflict between different ideas or different sets of of of of ideas about what
the rules are was actually really helpful for me to arrive at what I could call much more robust,
stable patterns of what I was seeing, but I didn't think that was enough.
I think it was really important to see officers, officials block official the district officials carry out their work.
And so I would spend a lot of time just sitting at a district education office or sitting
outside a block education office until I could get a moment with the block education officer.
And maybe that person was on the way to visiting a school and I would join them on a monitoring visit.
And, you know, as one one public administration scholar had said, So this is Evelyn Brodkin at Chicago.
She's written a lot on on on public administration in the United States.
She says that this kind of moving between interviews and participant observation allows
you to establish links and contradictions between what people say and what they do.
And I think that's been really important for me to actually establish what's a normal and what's maybe someone's aspiration.
And the two can often be different. The third piece of evidence that I thought is really important is actually the citizens
perspective of the state because ultimately a lot of services and I'm working,
I've been working on education for the for the book there co-produced.
It's not just the state providing the service of plot their goals, education.
Actually, you need communities.
You need parents, households and children to participate in that process to produce that service that gets rendered as education.
Right. And so understanding how citizens see the state,
so what is their experience when they interact with frontline officials, when they talk to the schoolteacher?
So that involves sitting again. A lot of sitting takes place in my work at a school.
Sometimes I would just I would be the only other person, so the teacher might have asked for my help to teach something.
It could have been that sometimes I was just, you know, I was there, you know, with a group of parents who were there to monitor the mid-day meal.
And so these sorts of, you could say quotidian observations inside a school really opened up for me, the citizen perspective on the state.
I also get a bit of participant observation outside of school.
So looking at, for example, the panchayat and how the village, the village elected council,
how often does education even come up when it's problems at the school?
Do they view a panchayat elections as a forum to actually talk about these issues?
And what I learnt actually from that perspective was that electoral politics is far removed from service delivery.
And if anything, it could be have much more to do with culture like the spending side, like how we used up the funds, but not about outcomes.
And, you know, are our children learning? And so that disconnect came out to through these different methods.
But the other piece methodologically, that I think is important now I'll just reiterate,
is really tracing policy implementation over levels of the state. And I think this just requires a lot more work.
That's both the multilevel and is also comparative. So comparative could be within the same province or the same district and looking,
say, across villages or across sub unit, or it could be even across states.
One strategy that I think is quite promising is to look at bordering districts in different states.
So the state level is kind of apparatus can be different or you can also think about countries, by the way.
So I've been toying with the idea of maybe one day doing something on the Nepal side of the border with Uttarakhand, for example,
where you have very different political economy conditions, but you can control for things like like local norms at a village level.
So these are the kinds of strategies I try to draw from political science, the kind of ID, but apply it to qualitative field research.
Because I think there's opportunities to build bridges there in the police research I've combined with my with my colleagues.
A large scale asked along with surveys.
So we did a survey of 2000 police officers pre and post the intervention and qualitative process tracing where we took eight eight pianos,
eight police stations from from from about twenty eighteen till about twenty twenty just before the COVID lockdown in India and
just observed over time that having a women's help desk inside the comma changed anything about police attitudes towards women,
their understanding of their duties vis a vis women. The kinds of cases that came up and what we found is actually so the RCD could
show us a pattern and show and demonstrate a credibly demonstrated an impact,
but it could not tell us why or how that impact was reached. And in fact, we had thought there would be no impact.
And in fact, there's quite a lot of teams that don't report all the facts.
And I think that's a big problem because we could be learning a lot about why
things don't work out rather than just presuming it's all about corruption.
Precisely the very new thing that we just presume that bureaucrats are shirking or they're corrupt or they're misusing their their their power.
It could very well be that there's a whole sort of set of constraints or gloss or kind of, you know, different forces working at cross-purposes.
Would you have to open up that black box of that institution to understand that?
And so through the qualitative work, we found that that that having the desk could,
for example, raise the status of crime against women's work within the police station.
There's a side by side, an informal set of practises called paramours.
This is counselling or they call it, sometimes depending on where you are.
So this notion that you kind of counsel families and potentially counsel women out of filing a case is happening side by side, the formal law,
which requires the registration of the case,
and it was only the qualitative work that would have brought that out of the city would never have done that.
So I think there's probably some really good opportunities to do these methods,
recognising that there's also trade-offs in what one human being or a group
of human beings can actually do with a finite amount of time and resources.
So I'll just stop there. But but really interesting stuff to hear about the different methods.
Oh, sorry. One last thing I just mentioned, like everyone else, I do think embedding the bureaucracy historically is really important.
And so in the sort of next round of work,
I'm doing one of the reasons just looking historically on how did this concept of law and order become central within the police?
And, you know, primarily looking at police in India. But I imagine police in Pakistan have have absorbed a similar or have has a kind of similar
starting point where the emphasis is on crowd control and controlling public space,
rather than responding to individual citizen concerns responding to to particular crime cases.
And you know, one one way to do that is probably to to go into some of the archival work and also look at circulars,
you know, going back to to do the work that is done,
lot gets written down in a lot of communication within these agencies is happening to who,
you know, formal formal letters and they kind of take a life of their own.
So anyway, I'll just stop there. Thanks. Thanks, Akshay.