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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the second panel discussion on the challenges of researching South Asia.

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As you know, this is the modern South Asian Studies seminar series of the University of Oxford.

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My name is Danica M. I'm the director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme,

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and I'm absolutely delighted to be chairing this panel today on bureaucracy.

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So for those of you who weren't present last week, just a quick word of the format.

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Every panel member is going to speak for approximately 15 minutes on their own, you know, absolutely incredible research on bureaucracy in South Asia.

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And then we've got to open it out for a wider discussion with the audience.

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Please feel free to add your questions in the Q&A box that you see at the bottom there as we go along

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so we can just take them up and sequence once about finished the initial opening thoughts on it.

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OK, so with that, I'm going to quickly introduce the panel in the order in which they will be speaking.

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So first up, we have Yemeni and Yemeni is the president and chief executive of the Centre for Policy Research in Dubai.

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In 2008, she founded the Accountability Initiative at CBR,

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which is credited with pioneering one of India's largest expenditure tracking surveys for elementary education.

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Yemenis works at the intersection of research and policy practise.

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Her research interests in the fields of public finance, social policy, state capacity,

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federalism, governance and the study of contemporary politics in India. He also writes periodically this column in Hindustan Times,

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which actually has done a lot for thinking about bureaucracy more publicly and sort

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of the politics around bureaucracy in India after how many we're going to have.

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My Hayat was a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame School of Public Affairs.

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Dr. Doctorate works at the intersections of bureaucracy, law and the environment.

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She completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

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Myra is currently working on her book manuscript, which is super exciting, which is,

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I think tentatively entitled Ecology is a Water Governance in Pakistan, The Colony, The Co-Creation and the Contemporary.

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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.

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She's an anthropologist and historian researching ID technologies in South Asia.

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Her work explores the everyday workings of surveillance and securitisation in Pakistan

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through the intersection of kinship migration and postcolonial and colonial bureaucracy.

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My daughter, Zahra, received a Ph.D. from the interdepartmental programme in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan.

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Quite recently, and then last but not least, we have our all very well.

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Amongst them was Associate Professor in International Business at the Seed Business School in Oxford.

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She has wide reaching Wide-Ranging research interests, which include a focus on public and private governance,

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institutional performance and the changing nature of state society relations in India.

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She has a number of interesting projects going on right now,

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including a particularly interesting one on police in India, which perhaps he'd tell us a bit more about today.

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Before joining Oxford, she was an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.

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OK, so with that, I'm going to hand over to Yamani. I believe that's OK.

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But you'd like to sort of get us started on this conversation with some of your own work.

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Thank you, thank you for inviting me to be on this panel and for the opportunity both to engage with all

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friends and to people who have been deep influences on my work and my picking on bureaucracy.

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And as I was saying before we started, these are bureaucracy can't possibly be boring because two of my most interesting

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and fun friendships have been forged on the back of conversations on bureaucracy.

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And both of you actually an enigma here and really delighted to have the opportunity to learn

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from others who are studying this really exciting stuff to the course of today's conversation.

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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.

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What I've learnt from it.

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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,

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the dynamics of states citizen engagement, which shape bureaucracy, which we achieved democracy.

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I guess in the Indian context, I in some in the early years of my career,

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was deeply taken in by a lot of the discourse that was taking place in India in the early 2000s around accountability and transparency.

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And much of that discourse was centred around the notion of the image really of the bureaucrat.

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As you know, there's no nice way of saying it, but a bureaucrat being a rather nasty apostate,

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the bureaucrat being corrupt, the bureaucrat being in discipline,

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the bureaucrat being the key dispenser of state power and state patronage in ways that significantly undermine citizen rights.

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And a lot of the framing around of the narrative around accountability and transparency centred firmly around disciplining this errant,

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nasty individual that was in many ways,

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dispense wanted to be a bureaucrat in order to be able to access state power

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and then use that opportunity to dispense power in the most forceful ways.

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And all and most often than not, at the cost of the poor and the most marginalised and the most vulnerable.

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Now all of this is true. But are we any one that has had the displeasure of encountering a bureaucrat,

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whether it's in the form of trying to get your driver's licence, your passport or any and or in any other form?

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Rich, powerful or vulnerable ones experiences with the bureaucrat in many ways fit firmly within the stereotype of what the bureaucrat is.

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And in more ways than one, the grassroots mobilisation that that was at the heart of the accountability and transparency

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movement in India in the 2000s really was a response to precisely this reality.

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I got involved both as a researcher and as a part time activist in some of these movements, particularly the movement around social audits.

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In the early 2000s, just at the start of when the National Employment Guarantee Act in India was unfolding,

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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.

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The act of social auditing,

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which was really one of the most pioneering innovative civic social movement attempts at holding the state accountable and in a very tangible way,

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citizens taking donning the role of the state's citizens becoming auditors,

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which is essentially an accountability function of the state, empowering themselves with information, asking questions of the state in a direct,

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dynamic, tangible way and through a public hearing, asking questions and demanding direct accountability of the state.

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Being part of those processes is one of the most exciting and deeply Gillard moments when you see democracy unfold.

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And I was really privileged and extremely excited to be part of this of this experience.

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And as I spent more time there, the one thing that I kept wondering was about what happens after we go through this process,

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we push the bureaucracy to be responsive. But how does a bureaucracy respond to this and.

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As one suspend a little bit more time digging deeper into this,

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these were also times when a lot of a lot of what I learnt as a student of the value of participation in

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in air and participation in governance as being at the heart of what makes for responsive democracies,

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for responsive governance governments.

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And the social order will be embedded in a range of efforts of the grassroots of creating formal platforms for citizens to directly engage,

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whether it's in the process of planning or in the process of auditing, in the process of of monitoring different public services.

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And through these observations, the one narrative that kept coming back again and again when we would have one on one conversations with

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bureaucrats or you would engage with the bureaucrats was of these grassroots bureaucrats turning around,

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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.

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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.

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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,

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there were often occasions where errant officers were identified during these public hearings.

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And a few months later, when you go back to these villages, you would find these people were reinstated.

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And when you would talk to senior bureaucrats in the Rural Development Ministry, they would throw their hands up in the air,

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expressing deep frustration, saying that, well, this belongs to this particular cartel.

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Officers belong to a different service, and I don't actually have the power to do anything about it.

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And for me, that contrast was really striking. Here we are citizens recognising that bureaucrats are all powerful.

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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.

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And yet, the narratives that bureaucrats were telling me when we confronted them with their

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own failures of getting things done were narratives of lack of information,

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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.

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And over the course of the few of a few years down deeper,

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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.

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And Orwell is in many different contexts and countries all rolled into one.

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So when you want to do comparative work, as Akshay did, you got you got him lots of positions.

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One example in Uttar Pradesh and beyond as as as another example.

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So there is a lot of variation in how government, how state governments perform across a range of of indicators.

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Yet across these different states, the narratives of administrators that I would argue, remain the same.

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And in fact, those narratives were the same.

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Whether you were talking to the block development officer or the budget secretary or you went to, you know,

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the beautiful colonial buildings of South Block and North Block,

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where the most powerful bureaucrats sit, and they too would often say exactly the same thing.

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What can I do? I'm just a joint secretary. What can I do? I'm just a secretary.

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And all of this in the context of a moment when an effort was being made from the grassroots to make the

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state more accountable and more responsive through mechanisms like social audits and participatory planning.

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All of this at a time when an effort was being made to strengthen decentralisation.

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This is the story of the 2000s and the story of 2014, so things are quite different today.

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But that but. But it was fascinating to hear these narratives at a time when an attempt was

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being made to prise open the state and make it more responsive to citizens.

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Get those very powerful creatures whom we thought would be responsive to demands coming

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from from below had a self-reinforcing narrative of lack of power and lack of capacity.

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A few a few years later, in about 2010. We I began working a little bit more, narrowing my focus on one sector education.

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And that's in fact around the time when I first heard of upshaws work and over the years followed it and found

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his frameworks really useful to understand this narrative of powerlessness that I was beginning to feel.

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And I happened to be sitting as a fly on the wall.

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In a in a meeting with the Bihar government's chief secretary, secretary of education,

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and three a researcher that had studied an experiment that they.

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Doing to improve the quality of primary education in this in the state and I and somebody from the NGO

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that had been rolling out various education programmes to improve quality learning quality in the state.

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We were talking about the positive impact of summer camps on improving learning outcomes,

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and the discussion was really around how do we scale this up?

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It was perhaps one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever had the opportunity to

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be a fly on the wall in because it in the room where some of the most powerful people,

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oh, by the way, the education minister was there too.

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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.

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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.

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And that was suddenly how the government was trying to build its legitimacy in the national narrative, too.

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And yet these very powerful people the minister, the chief secretary,

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the secretary of the department concerned basically ended the conversation two hours later.

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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.

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And that's why the conversation ended, not because the government was getting tired, but the Congress.

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But at the at the tail end of the conversation, we everyone sort of scratch their heads from the government side and said,

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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.

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But when it comes to embedding this in our everyday functioning, we just don't know routine make no huddle mushkil here.

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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,

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the powerless bureaucrat on the one hand and the bureaucrat who is able to get things done when they go into mission mode,

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but fears to get through things when it has to be sort of a routinised as part of the everyday functioning of the bureaucracy.

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I felt that there's a lot more about bureaucracy that we don't understand,

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and there's a lot more about our understandings of accountability and transparency

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and grassroots mobilisation directly making or social accountability.

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All of these were experiments or conceptual terms and practical grassroots experiments that had become popularised through the

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decades of the 2000s and had moved us along in our understandings and experiences and practises of democracy significantly.

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But one of them seemed to be hitting. I felt against a wall of a bureaucracy that wasn't necessarily just errant.

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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

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to reorganise itself to be responsive to these demands that were now increasingly being placed on them.

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So it was that that led me to say, I think we need to understand the grassroots democracy, the grassroots bureaucracy, far better.

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But I also knew that the grassroots bureaucracy is shaped by the hierarchy within in which it's embedded,

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and therefore you can study the grassroots bureaucracy without understanding its entire chain of command.

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That's what led me into a deeper dive into understanding bureaucracy.

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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.

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And over the years, we've been studying the bureaucracy through efforts to reform education systems and

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understand how the bureaucracy from the grassroots to the top response to these efforts.

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So what is it that allows the mission more to work well?

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And what is it that prevents the mission mode from scaling into routinely in a routinised way?

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Move the envelope of the bureaucracy. This has led me into a world of trying to better understand the sociology of the

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bureaucracy as an organisation for which norms its its its rules of functioning,

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its culture of shares. Work has been deeply influential for me in trying to interpret what this narrative

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of a powerless bureaucracy does to how the bureaucrats view themselves,

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how it legitimises the notion of a bureaucrat bureaucrat being nothing but a passive agent

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responding to rules rather than an active agent providing public goods and services,

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or being a quote unquote public servant.

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Many cars work on the paper state led me into the deep, dark world of government circulars and government orders.

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And what these circulars and orders do to shape the bureaucrats life of bureaucrats understanding of his or her role are bureaucrats understand.

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Performance and the bureaucrats relationship with the internal hierarchies and citizens

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in a recent paper that we've just finished studying education reforms in Delhi,

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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,

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and we dived into about 2000 of them to try and make sense of what the circular does to the school child.

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And I'll end with this quote, the schoolteacher says, I'm just moving from one circular to the next.

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It's like if you're GPS and if the circular doesn't come,

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I don't know what to do because it's like if your GPS stops working, you won't find your way.

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No. That's how central the paper is.

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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

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that's a little bit controversial in terms of how one positions this work.

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And often I'm often told that I'm missing something here,

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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.

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And I understand that because after all, the political context shapes the bureaucracy and shapes how the bureaucracy,

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particularly at the grassroots, build its relationships with shapes its contract with citizens.

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But at the same time, I find that when we start, when we take politics as a lens,

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we get distracted and we forget to understand the bureaucracy as an organisation.

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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.

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But I think it's important to do because it gives you an understanding of what this organisation is with all its hierarchies,

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its people, its rules, its norms and its its rebound spectacle.

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It's Ray-Ban sunglasses and field bikes with which really shapes what the bureaucracy is.

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Its files and its broken was and then put it back in to the larger politics.

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Only then will we have a more robust understanding of the Indian state and perhaps some new

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framework so that we can discuss reforming the Indian state and making it more accountable,

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more transparent and more responsive to the citizens it claims to be solving.

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Thank. Thanks. That was fantastic, allowed her to go a little like journey, these like 10 15 minutes,

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we'll come back to some of the really important points you raised, I'm sure in the discussion. Thank you for that.

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Record, I hand over to you. Yes, thank you.

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Hi, everyone who is here, thank you for making time. And thank you and Annika for this invite.

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So I will quickly walk you through the broad contours of my current project,

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which is which is my which is my book project, and then I thought I'd give.

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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.

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And at the end, I thought I'd talk a bit about the kinds of research methods I have used.

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So my my current book manuscript,

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which is based on my dissertation it it argues that its stake in the governance of Nigeria is the nature of governance itself.

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And the manuscript is really it's a historical legal ethnography of a public irrigation system in Pakistan.

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It examines the performer devotee of stage failure in enabling three sorts of things,

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so one is God intervention to with corporate profitability and three is ethical liberal amongst bureaucrats.

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And so the the entire analysis is organised around three axes along which public private distinctions are negotiated.

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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.

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The adjudication bit is is really me chasing the enabling conditions for the declaration of a water crisis,

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of a national water crisis to a history of environmental jurisprudence and the analysis

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that regulates legal and environmental anthropology and histories of the Cold War.

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The evaluation bids the Connect contemporary claims to public service by water

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corporations to British colonial era conceptions of the public value of water.

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And the hinge of that section is it's rooted in the argument that the two constituent variables water and land in the hydraulic

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engineering concept of the duty of water were articulated by a hard hitting component that of that aggression is legal.

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And so this section in your designs and technology studies colonial histories of South Asia and increasingly critical development in studies.

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And then and then labour delves into irrigation bureaucrats, quotidian work and shows that.

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Contrary to popular conceptions of the corrupting influence of private considerations, such as, for example, feet in public affairs,

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bureaucratic attempts to be good Muslims can actually make them good bureaucrats and hence facilitate public service delivery.

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And why I think this is important is because, I mean, for me,

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what makes this particular bad exciting is that how bureaucrats navigate public private tensions,

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I think, enables inside not only into ethical self fashioning, but because they are public servants.

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It also demonstrates how they're ethically able to affect the large number of persons.

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And here I'm talking about ethical nubile that's manifested in decisions such as blocking or rearranging floors.

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Irrigation water isn't changing its velocity, those sorts of things.

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So there and now there's some specific threads that I am trying to develop further.

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One is I'm interested in rethinking the boundaries of the categories of of of the bureaucrat and the leverage and discharge.

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I think my overall interest is in directing attention to the state as employers, the state,

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as one of the largest employers in in many parts of the world, also particularly in Pakistan.

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And second is my interest in the history of the histories of and the ongoing politics of

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unionisation amongst government employees amongst in in government departments and at Holland is.

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Oh, it is, it's this it's this examination of the conception of public office as a sacred duty, as a sacred trust,

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and that it turns out there's a lot of litigation around this in in the higher courts of Pakistan.

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And then a fourth is it started out with it.

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Disinterest interest really began with a dissertation chapter that was titled Agenda of Corruption and Kyoto.

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I'm interested in in examining the the gendered nature of ethically bush.

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So these are the directions in which I hope this look really cool in in the in the in Daniel, in the near future.

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And I thought I would end with. Just very quickly walk you through the modality.

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The primary research modality of of this project and then ananich in response to your two questions.

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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.

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So I've drawn on archival research in Pakistan and then just very little also at the India Office Archives at the British Library.

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And it's mostly ethnographic research and in Pakistan, Pakistan's Punjab.

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I also did. I've also done research a shorter results statements that incorporate in development of water across across some sites that,

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you know, kind of took me outside of Pakistan. And so this includes the Czech Republic, Sweden, Tajikistan and even and even the US.

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And really what I was trying to do through this, you know, sitting around or through this jumping around really initially,

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initially in the initial days of fieldwork was was really chasing the flow of water.

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That's that's really been how I started the project, tracing the flow of water from development organisations,

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country plans and corporate boardrooms to state sanctioned water distribution schedules in Pakistan to organise and pumps onto

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farmers fields into illegal water channels and via seepage into the aquifer when disputed records like when it becomes a case,

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when something becomes a case. And Judy,

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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,

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which I'm sure was a mediation of water access by ethnic and religious sectarian differences.

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The structural violence of power differentials between landed in the nanny extensions,

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the interruption and even reversal of the violence in bureaucratic dispute resolution in July.

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And really, what a post-colonial politics of provision of public goods is.

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And so what gets me into this is, you know, growing up in Pakistan, bureaucracies everywhere,

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at least at least the way that I grew up, bureaucracy is everywhere. Condemnations of it are also everywhere, right?

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Whether it's whether it's academic or non-fiction writing, whether it's news media representations, dramas, you know, whatever you have.

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Stereotypes of all the bureaucrats of certain bureaucrats.

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And this is, of course, not to say that those stereotypes are not are often not accurate.

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And so and also in particular, this this entire genre of, you know,

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fiction by by bureaucrats and about bureaucrats, which has, I think, also very interesting colonial lineages.

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And then, you know, this particular gone by in a wartime bureaucracy.

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I think I'd see that this is sometime in the summer of summer of 2012.

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I was transitioning from an earlier project.

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And the newspapers in in the hope that that somehow we're talking about how prime agricultural land in parts of Punjab under the

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government was planning on releasing these two corporations and some governments in the Middle East and not much more was being set.

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But to me, it was interesting because as somebody who kind of, you know, still remembered textbooks from many levels in in in Pakistan,

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you're going to, you know, started with Pakistan is a semi-arid to arid country and we only get this.

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This is a range of rainfall, right? And we basically rely on this massive irrigation network.

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And so I just thought it was really interesting to think through, well, well, what really is happening here?

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What sort of export is this? What are what are we exporting by allowing this kind of agriculture?

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It's really about water like it's land because it solved because it is not Asian water.

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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.

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I hope that's helpful. And I don't. And I just love to talk more about about all of this and spider.

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Really fascinating and so excited to read your book, you know, the articles that come out of it in the near future.

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Thank you so much, and I can already see some really interesting battles or conversation points with what you just said.

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So yeah, looking forward to that. Should be one to zero if that's OK.

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Thank you, Nick. Yeah, so I'll I'll just start with talking about what I work on.

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It's Pakistan's biometric based national identity database, and I look at how it intersects with questions of surveillance, citizenship and kinship.

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So NADRA is the national database and registration authority, and this is for most.

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South Asians will know either NADRA or Aadhaar.

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So it's basically Pakistan's version of Punjab or predates it, but by many years, actually.

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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.

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It began its operations in 2000.

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It launched this computerised national ID card, and it's now one of the largest centralised identity databases in the world.

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So it has 176 million registered Pakistanis, and its significance really is in its ubiquity.

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So the card is used for banking, for paying bills, for property transactions, for voting, and the list goes on.

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And it has custom made software, so it produces its registration and identity database in-house,

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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.

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So one of the differences from my day is that it is tied to citizenship entitlements, and as part of this process,

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it sometimes even changes individuals and families status from citizen to quote unquote, alien.

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So I originally came to this project with an interest in surveillance and the Pakistani security state,

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which is which is a very, very ubiquitous presence in and of itself.

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But I was keen to going into graduate school who was keen to move away from the

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security studies paradigm and especially its assumptions about places like Pakistan.

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And I wanted to get at the phenomena of security and surveillance from an ideological and historical

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perspective to see how security infrastructures were intersecting with social and political life in Pakistan.

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And then during an early preliminary fieldwork, my first summer back from graduate school,

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I was working in Bristol migrant neighbourhoods in Islamabad.

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So these were informal settlements at the time, and I was working here as a researcher,

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but also organising around housing rights in Islamabad and the the Pashtun migrants who were in this settlement came from the northwest of Pakistan,

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so many from the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, and part of the reason they did come in waves of migration.

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But they had experienced multiple displacements as a result of the war on terror.

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But and Pakistan's military operations in that area bordering on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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So early on during this fieldwork period,

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I learnt about what was called this blocked identity card and this was happening as

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people were complaining about this as local government elections were approaching

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and a large number of these migrants weren't able to basically vote for their for

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their local representatives because NADRA had placed them under citizenship.

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Reverification, essentially, and this was showing up in the form of the blocked card.

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So the blockade meant that either couldn't use their identity cards, even if it was still physically as a document in their possession.

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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.

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But B, they had to really indicate their identity as individuals.

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So, you know, I am Zehra, but also as Pakistani nationals.

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And for this, they needed to collect a host of identity documents.

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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.

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That's the deed after which a large number of Afghan refugees came to Pakistan.

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And simultaneously, these documents also had to evidence and authenticate their their kin relation.

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So the fact that they were truly related to who they said they were as if they're saying X is my father,

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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,

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this was appearing to be like a classic moment of breakdown where the insides of the systems and its assumptions and logics become visible.

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In this moment, but as I looked closely realised that actually this wasn't the moment of breakdown,

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the blockage of the of the identity card was in a failure,

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but it was this technical bureaucratic system doing its job or enacting a feature of its design.

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And the design I'm speaking of is is a design, a structure of the identity database, which in fact incorporates of this design,

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incorporates a long standing capacity to document kinship and fat and the family as the means of establishing identity for purposes of governance.

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And it was this reliance and kinship that, of course, growing up in Pakistan, it obviously knew about.

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But in this moment it really caught me as I found, as I started looking into NADRA and speaking to people at NADRA,

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there really is a kinship was guiding bureaucratic protocols for identity registration,

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and Wooroloo was conditioning the possibilities for how those who get blocked out of the system can then negotiate free entry.

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So when I started researching the implications of NADRA on the lives of those that it impacted most and disproportionately so with migrants,

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they emphasised the sense of collective punishment that they felt. And of course, this is a much longer history into the colonial period.

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But when one family member was blocked frequently, this would spread to the whole family.

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And in fact, it would move across households through the documented included connexions between family members.

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And so kinship was uprooting. Is this almost contagious element?

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Not because of an essential shared quality of some sort, but because of how the aid system was configured.

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So it began to look at this question and really design my research from the perspective of Western migrants,

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but then eventually also nadra because I saw how and why and what just looking at it from other.

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I began to see how and why the ID regime includes blood, blood relations or biological relatedness to construct individual identity.

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And this involved examining the relationship between the domain of bureaucracy and that of the family,

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both as information and data, but also as lived experience.

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So I did this through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research into bureaucratic information systems,

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so to speak, really quickly to the ethnographic part.

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First, I spent time at the NADRA Registration Centre, the mega centre that opened 24-7 in Islamabad, so you can go any time.

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And here I shadowed data entry operators who would basically do the work of identity registration,

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and this includes those who are coming in to register for an identity card for the first time,

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as well as those who are making changes to to their existing identity record.

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And this goes from registering divorces to correcting spelling mistakes.

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And here I also spent time with assistant managers who were basically in charge of the approvals of each registration case and

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who as a little bit of another they think is different from kind of a conventional bureaucracy because there is heralded,

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maybe somewhat similarly, toward high as this kind of new,

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new and fancy and shiny bureaucracy that is actually quite efficient, that uses technology well.

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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,

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how they fit into the bureaucracy at large, how the cultural and political dynamics play out, particularly in a place like a soundbite.

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But I limit myself now to just seeing that. What ultimately I found really fascinating was the very process of establishing identity.

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So this was not Dyadic relationship between the citizen who comes in and applies for an ID card and the data entry operator.

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But this dynamic interplay between registration software, biometric equipment and multiple family members,

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so people just show up with it with a different, a different members of their family.

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And this was because this was required to actually authenticate one individual as a religion,

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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

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registration centre was and the examination of relatedness and interaction as it

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plays out here was to dissenter biometrics as the source of producing the authenticated

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individual and instead to foreground the relational logics of the database.

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And what? Preceded it. And so to understand the logic of this beautified Khan network,

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I also did field work at the technology and development department in the projects division at Nasra.

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And of course, given the really highly securitised nature of NADRA,

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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.

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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.

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So from flood relief to welfare payments to preventing fraud in bank transactions.

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And I looked at how ID technology and biometrics, such as NADRA systems like maladroit, get used across domains.

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So in fact, they even get repurposed other than into functions other than what they were built for.

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We're seeing this now with COVID, and this is a lot to do with, of course,

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institutional culture and how some institutions become especially powerful in shaping other parts of the bureaucracy.

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But I think it also has something to do with how they're built in ways that enables a certain kind of agility.

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So ensured a significant part of understanding Nadella's identification protocols for me in the present meant looking at how it came to be.

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And this is where you know that historical questions really emerged and following this was involved,

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you know, research in National Archives and Colonial Archives.

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But in fact, a lot of what guided my my queries was informed by the Bristol migrants I was spending

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time with simultaneously who were navigating Nagios procedures of reverification.

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And they were their own. They were their own archivists, basically of sorts,

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both trying to understand like what would make a strong case of proving identity and then also collecting document dossiers from across various

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locations from their family members from across generations to produce this authentic genealogical Vinicius account of their belonging in their camp.

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So being in the archives and then watching archives in action in Bristol neighbourhoods in Pakistan,

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I saw what happens when an identification technology basically goes back and forth between being digital and non-digital.

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So between the database and paper and the documentary process of citizen reverification

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basically brought out the historical components of my project to the fore.

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And one of my central questions was about this history of of identification and identity

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documentation was about what allowed specific kinds of bureaucratic practises of

389
00:44:07,680 --> 00:44:13,590
individuation is what I it introducing the individual and and the documentation of family

390
00:44:13,590 --> 00:44:19,800
relations to keep emerging and persisting in the age of biometrics and database technology.

391
00:44:19,800 --> 00:44:25,350
So to follow this history of identification is looking at a set of really diffuse practises for making

392
00:44:25,350 --> 00:44:31,830
individuals before these practises congeal into technological objects that then the bureaucracy picks up.

393
00:44:31,830 --> 00:44:39,540
So to do this attract would lead up to Pakistan's first national identity registry, which was made in the 1970s,

394
00:44:39,540 --> 00:44:46,920
but then also looked at the role of vital statistics and identity certificates and property deeds in colonial South Asia.

395
00:44:46,920 --> 00:44:50,040
And I don't have the time to go into details of all that,

396
00:44:50,040 --> 00:44:57,870
but I want to emphasise that it was actually doing ethnographic work on bureaucracy that led me to ask

397
00:44:57,870 --> 00:45:04,080
specific kinds of historical questions and read the historiography of South Asia in a different way.

398
00:45:04,080 --> 00:45:09,930
So what I mean here is that we're we often I mean, a lot of anthropologists, a lot of people everywhere, historic eyes.

399
00:45:09,930 --> 00:45:17,880
But I think we, we we don't think or at least I didn't think through the kinds of historiography shifts that

400
00:45:17,880 --> 00:45:22,890
an ethnographic approach can actually produce by virtue of the kinds of questions we ask,

401
00:45:22,890 --> 00:45:25,170
but by looking at the bureaucracy in the present.

402
00:45:25,170 --> 00:45:33,390
So for my project, for instance, looking at the persistence of kinship and the use of relatedness in a in a contemporary identity database,

403
00:45:33,390 --> 00:45:41,400
let me just see the history of identity documentation and even colonial identification practises in in a different way,

404
00:45:41,400 --> 00:45:46,980
basically by by seeing the importance of how the the state used relations between

405
00:45:46,980 --> 00:45:52,200
persons as the means of governing them beyond a kind of simple continuation or rupture.

406
00:45:52,200 --> 00:45:59,220
So as Doug, there things are like really fascinating insights and you know how the graphic

407
00:45:59,220 --> 00:46:04,860
needs historical research and also this relationship between something that

408
00:46:04,860 --> 00:46:12,000
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,

409
00:46:12,000 --> 00:46:15,470
like the two of you are doing. I also really appreciate the use of.

410
00:46:15,470 --> 00:46:18,920
Foreground kinship in this story, because often when it comes to studies of bureaucracy,

411
00:46:18,920 --> 00:46:24,830
kinship is sort of left out, and that's an important way to bring it back in through NADRA.

412
00:46:24,830 --> 00:46:31,350
Thanks so much for that, Xiao onto do you?

413
00:46:31,350 --> 00:46:36,240
Thanks. And it's a real pleasure to be here with with all of you.

414
00:46:36,240 --> 00:46:41,100
I've learnt so much from from the work here, especially from their own Yamani,

415
00:46:41,100 --> 00:46:46,230
and I'm really, really glad to learn about my valuable work in the area as well.

416
00:46:46,230 --> 00:46:54,930
Fascinating stuff. So a bit about my own interest in bureaucracy, how I kind of came to study it.

417
00:46:54,930 --> 00:47:02,280
Then I'll say something about my my book project on education, then a Segway into the police reform study.

418
00:47:02,280 --> 00:47:09,900
And perhaps, you know, leave some questions that are kind of open in my mind about bureaucracy.

419
00:47:09,900 --> 00:47:14,040
So I didn't plan to study bureaucracy when I started doing research.

420
00:47:14,040 --> 00:47:18,330
I was actually interested more in civil society.

421
00:47:18,330 --> 00:47:24,750
So I was working with UNICEF in. I was in Uttar Pradesh looking at child labour interventions and the really big thing,

422
00:47:24,750 --> 00:47:32,400
and this is kind of building off with Yamani was talking about the notion of participation, decentralisation, local accountability.

423
00:47:32,400 --> 00:47:36,000
And with that were a set of ideas around communities and social capital.

424
00:47:36,000 --> 00:47:45,390
So the idea being that the centralised top-down bureaucratic command and control state is not capable of addressing so many problems.

425
00:47:45,390 --> 00:47:55,870
Likewise, markets are impersonal and often fail to provide essential public goods and communities, and society was seen as a potential solution.

426
00:47:55,870 --> 00:48:06,750
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

427
00:48:06,750 --> 00:48:14,520
very much in line with what Yamani was saying that the dominant in view of the corrupt official,

428
00:48:14,520 --> 00:48:16,350
there was efforts to kind of work around that.

429
00:48:16,350 --> 00:48:23,460
So officials in the Labour Department were seen as extracting bribes rather than addressing the root causes of child labour.

430
00:48:23,460 --> 00:48:27,610
And so in response to that series of initiatives in Eastern Europe,

431
00:48:27,610 --> 00:48:33,630
Asia merged to kind of work around from a bottom up approach to get communities

432
00:48:33,630 --> 00:48:37,710
to provide the public goods that could ensure that children were not working.

433
00:48:37,710 --> 00:48:43,200
So providing alternative schools and health centres that supported children.

434
00:48:43,200 --> 00:48:48,570
And what I found was that there were all these forms of collective action happening in these villages.

435
00:48:48,570 --> 00:48:52,810
Yet they always hit a roadblock, which is when they wanted to scale up,

436
00:48:52,810 --> 00:48:57,280
when they wanted to actually demand that school teachers come to those schools

437
00:48:57,280 --> 00:49:01,980
when they wanted to ensure that nurses actually provide health services.

438
00:49:01,980 --> 00:49:04,530
They had to negotiate with bureaucracy.

439
00:49:04,530 --> 00:49:15,720
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.

440
00:49:15,720 --> 00:49:24,960
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,

441
00:49:24,960 --> 00:49:33,840
so that got me interested in understanding those officers. Then I did some initial fieldwork with the education bureaucracy again in Uttar Pradesh.

442
00:49:33,840 --> 00:49:40,470
And, you know, I initially was struck by the fact that just as the army was saying,

443
00:49:40,470 --> 00:49:49,140
officers often describe constraints and that was first and foremost, they talked about what they could not do.

444
00:49:49,140 --> 00:49:55,110
At the same time, I found it quite impressive that everyone around them thought that they could get everything done.

445
00:49:55,110 --> 00:50:02,100
There is a sense that the bureaucrat, you know, by moving her pen is like God, quite quite frankly.

446
00:50:02,100 --> 00:50:05,760
And so this this sort of disconnect between public expectations,

447
00:50:05,760 --> 00:50:16,140
aspirations of the state and what the state could actually do with state capacity was available was really the motivation for my work.

448
00:50:16,140 --> 00:50:28,560
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.

449
00:50:28,560 --> 00:50:36,360
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.

450
00:50:36,360 --> 00:50:45,000
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.

451
00:50:45,000 --> 00:50:52,680
And we see that in social sciences and anthropology and sociology and increasingly political science to take account of diversity,

452
00:50:52,680 --> 00:50:57,930
to take account of a variation in norms in hierarchies and so on.

453
00:50:57,930 --> 00:51:02,100
But when it came to bureaucracy, it was almost treated as a as a unitary actor,

454
00:51:02,100 --> 00:51:06,900
as if there isn't variation in how bureaucracy behaves and understands its duties.

455
00:51:06,900 --> 00:51:14,010
And I found quite the opposite. So my work on education across northern India, I branched out of you,

456
00:51:14,010 --> 00:51:24,210
looked at other states both in in the kind of hill based areas like Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, as well as U.P. and Bihar.

457
00:51:24,210 --> 00:51:30,320
And across these states, I saw quite significant variations in how public officials understood the rules of.

458
00:51:30,320 --> 00:51:38,150
The game. And really spending time in frontline public agencies is how I came to understand this.

459
00:51:38,150 --> 00:51:42,050
So I looked at the universal primary education programmes in India.

460
00:51:42,050 --> 00:51:48,260
This is a service had gone right to education, mid-day meal programme and related schemes.

461
00:51:48,260 --> 00:51:51,590
And these are federal programmes and the rules are very detailed.

462
00:51:51,590 --> 00:52:00,980
Actually, if you go into them, state governments have to fulfil certain standards and obligations, and they're legally bound to do so.

463
00:52:00,980 --> 00:52:06,710
Yet when you go down to the field of practise, you see dramatic differences in how officials understand their duties.

464
00:52:06,710 --> 00:52:11,390
And quite often it's informal norms, and that's the real punchline of my book.

465
00:52:11,390 --> 00:52:18,260
It's actually the unwritten rules of the game that are driving the different types of behaviours that we're seeing across Indian states.

466
00:52:18,260 --> 00:52:25,280
And so, you know, what I basically did in the book was that I not only spent time inside, say,

467
00:52:25,280 --> 00:52:31,400
a local education office or the District Education Office going down to the Black Education Office.

468
00:52:31,400 --> 00:52:35,990
It was actually important for me to look above that office and below that office,

469
00:52:35,990 --> 00:52:42,740
and this is where I think it's really important logically to place Line Street

470
00:52:42,740 --> 00:52:50,010
level bureaucracies within their broader set of institutions to which they,

471
00:52:50,010 --> 00:52:51,890
you know, with which they interact.

472
00:52:51,890 --> 00:53:02,610
So the local education bureaucracies, we're often responding to pressures and demands coming from Inupiat would have been Latino in Himachal Pradesh,

473
00:53:02,610 --> 00:53:09,290
Shimla and they're going in and partner. So they're getting this kind of pressure coming from senior level officials.

474
00:53:09,290 --> 00:53:17,690
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.

475
00:53:17,690 --> 00:53:21,500
It could be legal action, it could be village education committees.

476
00:53:21,500 --> 00:53:24,680
These are kind of designated formal bodies in charge of schools,

477
00:53:24,680 --> 00:53:32,060
but actually even more frequent in my work I found was informal groups and in the case in the villages,

478
00:53:32,060 --> 00:53:37,340
I conducted fieldwork and it was actually women's associations that were often not even recognised

479
00:53:37,340 --> 00:53:42,830
by the state that were doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of village collective action.

480
00:53:42,830 --> 00:53:47,030
And what I find is that bureaucracies respond to these demands very differently

481
00:53:47,030 --> 00:53:52,070
across different states or into the norms that that guide their behaviour.

482
00:53:52,070 --> 00:54:00,770
So I have a framework I develop in the book, which really builds on a whole lot of organisational theory,

483
00:54:00,770 --> 00:54:05,600
institutional theory and public administration work on bureaucracy.

484
00:54:05,600 --> 00:54:14,030
And on the one hand, I identify a series of of behaviours and patterns that coincide with what I call liberalism,

485
00:54:14,030 --> 00:54:18,530
which is a kind of a kind of rule adherence.

486
00:54:18,530 --> 00:54:29,120
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,

487
00:54:29,120 --> 00:54:36,920
which I call, which I call it a more deliberative bureaucracy, which encourages flexibility and problem solving and discretion.

488
00:54:36,920 --> 00:54:44,640
And it's interesting because if one looks at the literature on bureaucracy, there's an overwhelming support for rule following.

489
00:54:44,640 --> 00:54:50,270
So I mean, this is there's a long history to this and there's very intellectual threads behind this.

490
00:54:50,270 --> 00:54:59,000
But perhaps the most forceful one is given by Max Weber the notion of the rational legal norm within a bureaucracy.

491
00:54:59,000 --> 00:55:08,540
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.

492
00:55:08,540 --> 00:55:15,710
You should actually have a different social world with the bureaucrat is effectively cut off from influences from the outside.

493
00:55:15,710 --> 00:55:20,420
Now there's, of course, been, you know, all kinds of modifications to this.

494
00:55:20,420 --> 00:55:29,630
There have been arguments that you need to combine elements of the Iberian state with also some degree of what sociologists call embeddedness.

495
00:55:29,630 --> 00:55:33,410
So some amount of having the state interact with society.

496
00:55:33,410 --> 00:55:39,790
But what I found, actually, there's a lot of tension between what these different sorts of ideas die.

497
00:55:39,790 --> 00:55:46,580
So just to give a couple of practical examples from the field, you know, take take the midday meal.

498
00:55:46,580 --> 00:55:53,780
And so I sort of trace the process of monitoring the mid-day meal from the state capital down to a village primary school.

499
00:55:53,780 --> 00:55:56,750
So there's a kind of script that this is what you have to follow.

500
00:55:56,750 --> 00:56:02,480
Ensure food grains are provided, ensure that that you're monitoring student attendance,

501
00:56:02,480 --> 00:56:10,460
ensure that all of the different inputs, apart from grains and payment to the cooks is made so on and so forth.

502
00:56:10,460 --> 00:56:14,990
And in different agency, you see these same foods being understood very differently.

503
00:56:14,990 --> 00:56:23,000
So in Uttar Pradesh, I literally have officers telling me in interviews that we view this as an accounting scheme.

504
00:56:23,000 --> 00:56:29,060
So effectively there's the funds being transferred from New Delhi.

505
00:56:29,060 --> 00:56:31,060
We're transferring those funds to the.

506
00:56:31,060 --> 00:56:39,220
The district and we need to, in return, get data to demonstrate that the funds were utilised according to the rules, right?

507
00:56:39,220 --> 00:56:44,110
And what else happens at the school is someone else's problem.

508
00:56:44,110 --> 00:56:51,820
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,

509
00:56:51,820 --> 00:56:56,380
they can ensure that the programme is actually delivered going down to the district level.

510
00:56:56,380 --> 00:57:03,550
I found when when underprivileged groups actually had problems getting access to the meal,

511
00:57:03,550 --> 00:57:09,430
they would seek support through village education committees that would go to the local education bureaucrat.

512
00:57:09,430 --> 00:57:17,230
And they would say almost identical things that we're accounting for the provision of the food grains,

513
00:57:17,230 --> 00:57:21,640
and we're enforcing certain standards, such as hygiene standards.

514
00:57:21,640 --> 00:57:24,790
And what I found is that actually, with this kind of rule,

515
00:57:24,790 --> 00:57:32,830
following disempowers the least advantaged and hygiene in one particular village where I conducted extensive fieldwork work.

516
00:57:32,830 --> 00:57:36,730
This worked against Dalit women who were trying to monitor the programme.

517
00:57:36,730 --> 00:57:45,010
So, so when the food grains were not arriving and when they actually went and demanded that the school do something about it,

518
00:57:45,010 --> 00:57:49,000
they were basically pushed away when they went to the District Education Office.

519
00:57:49,000 --> 00:57:54,340
They were again told that you should largely complete using our official grievance procedure.

520
00:57:54,340 --> 00:58:03,890
We're going by the rules. What happened in the end was that the school's headmaster and also other village

521
00:58:03,890 --> 00:58:10,840
elites conspired and basically put the case against them for for misusing the funds.

522
00:58:10,840 --> 00:58:17,200
So these women who were involved in cooking the food and they actually charged them with with with

523
00:58:17,200 --> 00:58:22,330
tampering with the hygiene of the food and this this notion of hygiene actually had a double meaning,

524
00:58:22,330 --> 00:58:31,090
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.

525
00:58:31,090 --> 00:58:34,310
But then this had the backing of a legal and administrative process.

526
00:58:34,310 --> 00:58:43,420
So this is one example of how officials who are actually doing their jobs and employing the rules that were given to

527
00:58:43,420 --> 00:58:52,180
them effectively disempower accountability at the local level and really prevent citizens from from participating.

528
00:58:52,180 --> 00:58:57,380
So over time, these same groups then learn not to engage as much with schools.

529
00:58:57,380 --> 00:59:02,350
And this is a kind of critique of a lot of the literature which argue that parents

530
00:59:02,350 --> 00:59:07,690
or households in this part of India don't care about school or education.

531
00:59:07,690 --> 00:59:14,830
So if you look at some surveys, if you look at cross-sectional data you may find from these that there's actually

532
00:59:14,830 --> 00:59:20,290
not a lot of civil society mobilisation and a lot of the work that's been published,

533
00:59:20,290 --> 00:59:27,450
say out of the World Bank, has drawn in big differences between states like and states like Kerala,

534
00:59:27,450 --> 00:59:33,070
you know, the latter having the right type of civil society mobilisation.

535
00:59:33,070 --> 00:59:41,080
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

536
00:59:41,080 --> 00:59:47,420
different points in which the front line states may intervene to influence that collective action.

537
00:59:47,420 --> 00:59:55,780
And so in these villages, actually, it was initially quite actively engaged in monitoring the mid-day meal programme,

538
00:59:55,780 --> 01:00:00,010
and over time, they learnt to disengage to their interaction with the bureaucracy.

539
01:00:00,010 --> 01:00:07,660
Very different results, by the way, that I observed in other states, in other places, and particularly in Himachal Pradesh.

540
01:00:07,660 --> 01:00:16,660
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.

541
01:00:16,660 --> 01:00:27,200
And you really see a countervailing set of norms that actually push against this conventional rule following that was so prevalent in U.P.

542
01:00:27,200 --> 01:00:30,970
So, you know, that's a bit about the book and I extend these arguments.

543
01:00:30,970 --> 01:00:38,980
I actually think that there's a kind of more general argument that we can we can potentially test in other countries beyond India.

544
01:00:38,980 --> 01:00:43,690
So I have a chapter that looks at education in China, France and Finland.

545
01:00:43,690 --> 01:00:52,480
And I do see interesting variations across these countries that in many ways resemble some of the differences I observed across states within India,

546
01:00:52,480 --> 01:00:59,350
France being a highly centralised and legalistic state where you have very high levels of education inequality,

547
01:00:59,350 --> 01:01:08,140
Finland being a state where you have a much more deliberative engagement and customised education which responds to individual student needs.

548
01:01:08,140 --> 01:01:13,930
And China's an interesting example. This is kind of I'm drawing on secondary literature in this chapter.

549
01:01:13,930 --> 01:01:21,610
It's not the core argument of the book, but there's a growing amount of work on deliberation inside the Chinese state.

550
01:01:21,610 --> 01:01:28,810
And this is just the kind of push us to think a bit harder about how bureaucracies work from the inside.

551
01:01:28,810 --> 01:01:37,800
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.

552
01:01:37,800 --> 01:01:42,300
So the police, in some sense, are possibly the toughest nut to crack.

553
01:01:42,300 --> 01:01:48,480
If you want to get inside and understand how an agency works, organisationally to have a strong culture.

554
01:01:48,480 --> 01:01:54,450
There's a strong insider versus outsider dynamic, probably similar somewhat to it that I was mentioning with security.

555
01:01:54,450 --> 01:02:00,270
More generally, security agencies and forces broadly have this kind of I mean,

556
01:02:00,270 --> 01:02:09,210
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.

557
01:02:09,210 --> 01:02:13,180
But there's also an organisational culture that that that that connects with that.

558
01:02:13,180 --> 01:02:21,240
And this is probably where, you know, linking contemporary bureaucracy to its colonial history would also be useful

559
01:02:21,240 --> 01:02:25,560
because that notion of the US versus them that I observe within the police,

560
01:02:25,560 --> 01:02:34,560
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.

561
01:02:34,560 --> 01:02:40,680
We're looking at a series, a series of reforms to actually address some of the accountability challenges that

562
01:02:40,680 --> 01:02:46,950
and some of the responsiveness that that that the police is trying to improve upon.

563
01:02:46,950 --> 01:02:56,390
So we're looking at an intervention to improve police, the basic handling and responsiveness of women's cases.

564
01:02:56,390 --> 01:03:01,170
And in this, we basically found that and this is a kind of large scale study.

565
01:03:01,170 --> 01:03:13,530
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.

566
01:03:13,530 --> 01:03:18,480
And this is kind of trying to mix methods a little bit to understand how you know,

567
01:03:18,480 --> 01:03:22,620
what is the impact of having dedicated services for women in the police station.

568
01:03:22,620 --> 01:03:27,450
So this is of programme is called irja and there's a dedicated women's help desk in the

569
01:03:27,450 --> 01:03:33,690
station and that help desk also provides training and also encourages community outreach.

570
01:03:33,690 --> 01:03:38,790
And we also look at the impact of having women as officers in that desk and what

571
01:03:38,790 --> 01:03:43,860
impact that has on women's reporting of cases and subsequent crime registration.

572
01:03:43,860 --> 01:03:50,190
We find actually that the desk increases outliers by women significantly, but in particular,

573
01:03:50,190 --> 01:03:57,930
when there's women officers in charge of the desk, I can say a bit more about what why that could be happening.

574
01:03:57,930 --> 01:04:03,660
But one one, one hypothesis we have and we're putting together our qualitative research.

575
01:04:03,660 --> 01:04:11,640
We've kind of looked at the two years of this intervention qualitatively in select set of police stations in Madhya Pradesh.

576
01:04:11,640 --> 01:04:19,440
What we what we're observing is actually having senior officers highlight the contributions of women in the police.

577
01:04:19,440 --> 01:04:26,070
Women are only a minority. Seven percent of the police force in India are women, so it's a very small minority.

578
01:04:26,070 --> 01:04:33,460
But highlighting this work has actually kind of raised the status of working on crimes against women.

579
01:04:33,460 --> 01:04:40,320
So prior to the intervention, actually, when I would talk to people in the K.W. Branch Crime Against Women branch,

580
01:04:40,320 --> 01:04:44,640
they inevitably referred to their posting as a punishment post.

581
01:04:44,640 --> 01:04:49,150
This was not where you wanted to be working, and this intervention, we argue,

582
01:04:49,150 --> 01:04:55,400
was actually making changes at the top of the police, which is having an effect further down on the front line.

583
01:04:55,400 --> 01:05:03,390
So I'll stop there and we'll pass it back to you.

584
01:05:03,390 --> 01:05:09,720
Brilliant. Thanks. Super interesting. And you know, again, another book to really look out for.

585
01:05:09,720 --> 01:05:13,140
We're eagerly awaiting this the whole bureaucracy world of the South Asia world,

586
01:05:13,140 --> 01:05:18,300
but also really, really interesting work on your your new project on police reform.

587
01:05:18,300 --> 01:05:21,660
Well, I'm waiting for people to sort of, you know, just to say it, everybody.

588
01:05:21,660 --> 01:05:25,320
If you want to pop a question into the Q&A box or if you want to ask a question,

589
01:05:25,320 --> 01:05:29,070
please just raise your hand and I'll just give you the right to speak.

590
01:05:29,070 --> 01:05:34,540
Sort of say it and you can ask it. But why are we just waiting for people to sort of collect their thoughts?

591
01:05:34,540 --> 01:05:38,070
Could I just have a sort of a follow up question to the four of you?

592
01:05:38,070 --> 01:05:41,970
I mean, there are lots of things I want to ask you, but perhaps just to begin, you know,

593
01:05:41,970 --> 01:05:46,130
what I find interesting was that all four of you actually do deploy at some graphic methods

594
01:05:46,130 --> 01:05:50,160
in different ways like you and coming from different disciplines or different worlds,

595
01:05:50,160 --> 01:06:02,140
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.

596
01:06:02,140 --> 01:06:06,120
Sorry. Sorry, politics, yeah. OK.

597
01:06:06,120 --> 01:06:08,970
So, you know, I mean, it's really interesting to think about methods,

598
01:06:08,970 --> 01:06:12,760
and I wondered whether we could have like a bit of a discussion, which sort of meant that,

599
01:06:12,760 --> 01:06:18,390
you know, what do you find most useful as an insight into the study of bureaucracy,

600
01:06:18,390 --> 01:06:23,100
but also a question on access because something that you know, I see really,

601
01:06:23,100 --> 01:06:28,620
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

602
01:06:28,620 --> 01:06:36,660
Asia to actually really get into the inner workings of bureaucracy in the way that perhaps was a bit or places like certain places,

603
01:06:36,660 --> 01:06:42,870
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

604
01:06:42,870 --> 01:06:47,790
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?

605
01:06:47,790 --> 01:06:50,130
And some of them, but also just in terms of, you know,

606
01:06:50,130 --> 01:06:53,820
what kind of methods of your big dope have you changed your methods depending on the project you're working in?

607
01:06:53,820 --> 01:06:57,990
So like, you know, actually you mentioned our cities and your police reform book,

608
01:06:57,990 --> 01:07:02,250
but I guess I'm assuming you don't use our cities previously or Yamani the kind of mix of

609
01:07:02,250 --> 01:07:08,040
methods you've used because you had very big studies and then you had smaller studies as well.

610
01:07:08,040 --> 01:07:14,610
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,

611
01:07:14,610 --> 01:07:17,370
given what you have some graphic what we're throwing up.

612
01:07:17,370 --> 01:07:21,970
So I wondered a bit about, you know, that's sort of the mix of methods that you deployed for your question.

613
01:07:21,970 --> 01:07:30,440
Mean, would you like to? Jump into this.

614
01:07:30,440 --> 01:07:38,950
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.

615
01:07:38,950 --> 01:07:44,180
I didn't know. OK, I think so.

616
01:07:44,180 --> 01:07:56,270
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,

617
01:07:56,270 --> 01:08:04,970
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,

618
01:08:04,970 --> 01:08:09,710
and over time, a lot more straight jacketed policy and research.

619
01:08:09,710 --> 01:08:22,760
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.

620
01:08:22,760 --> 01:08:31,910
And for me, it was never it was just the most natural thing to then draw on ethnographic qualitative tools to be

621
01:08:31,910 --> 01:08:38,840
able to rigorously study some of the intuition that I was picking up from being part of that world.

622
01:08:38,840 --> 01:08:51,560
And, you know, we considered subbing and what we did was we use survey tools when we wanted to understand trends.

623
01:08:51,560 --> 01:08:58,700
So one of the initial things that we did when this sort of narrative of powerlessness got me,

624
01:08:58,700 --> 01:09:03,800
got my attention and I felt that there was something that we needed to understand.

625
01:09:03,800 --> 01:09:12,680
We began to as we try to identify levers of power within the bureaucracy.

626
01:09:12,680 --> 01:09:16,010
And it was pretty clear to us, from talking to bureaucracies,

627
01:09:16,010 --> 01:09:23,330
bureaucrats and from being part of the policy discourse that the budget or how money flows through the

628
01:09:23,330 --> 01:09:30,170
system is an extremely critical measure of where power rests within the hierarchy of the bureaucracy.

629
01:09:30,170 --> 01:09:36,740
And every conversation that we would have with bureaucrats always ended up in, you know, I don't have money.

630
01:09:36,740 --> 01:09:47,150
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.

631
01:09:47,150 --> 01:09:52,100
And the best way in which to understand that was by actually trying to trace the budget.

632
01:09:52,100 --> 01:10:00,680
So when the finance minister makes a grand announcement and, you know, 20000 crores are being allocated the education budget,

633
01:10:00,680 --> 01:10:08,330
how does this actually translate into bureaucratic action of implementation all the way down to the grassroots?

634
01:10:08,330 --> 01:10:14,450
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,

635
01:10:14,450 --> 01:10:21,320
how money gets used was both part of the narrative of what accountability is Humira before Humira has all our money.

636
01:10:21,320 --> 01:10:28,910
Our accounts was a critical mobilisation point of framing how to think about accountability.

637
01:10:28,910 --> 01:10:34,760
And so I was already sort of thinking about some of these questions just by virtue of being embedded in that context.

638
01:10:34,760 --> 01:10:43,130
And we used to what we were working very closely with Prudhomme that had started doing these large scale surveys of learning outcomes.

639
01:10:43,130 --> 01:10:49,370
And so it seemed to be a natural place to place these questions about how money flows through the system.

640
01:10:49,370 --> 01:10:53,960
For us to be able to better understand where power rests and whether there is variation in

641
01:10:53,960 --> 01:11:01,310
different districts and different administrative units and states through large scale survey.

642
01:11:01,310 --> 01:11:05,420
And that survey was designed not. That's how we started doing expenditure tracking.

643
01:11:05,420 --> 01:11:11,660
And the idea was not just to build a deeper academic understanding of what was happening,

644
01:11:11,660 --> 01:11:16,580
but also draw from that knowledge that could contribute into the discourse and policy.

645
01:11:16,580 --> 01:11:21,770
So because that dynamic was very much embedded in how we began to do our research,

646
01:11:21,770 --> 01:11:30,680
the engagement with the bureaucracy was part and parcel of the process, and we realised that some questions are better answers to these surveys.

647
01:11:30,680 --> 01:11:34,730
And by the way, there was a great irony here because we were basically trying to pull out government

648
01:11:34,730 --> 01:11:40,460
documentation through the mechanism of our as and ideally these should be available to you.

649
01:11:40,460 --> 01:11:46,420
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.

650
01:11:46,420 --> 01:11:55,910
Nobody saw relevance in it or used for it, and it was from there that we felt that do understand now.

651
01:11:55,910 --> 01:11:57,290
So we understood some things.

652
01:11:57,290 --> 01:12:04,040
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.

653
01:12:04,040 --> 01:12:06,920
But what does this mean, then, for the local bureaucrat?

654
01:12:06,920 --> 01:12:14,300
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?

655
01:12:14,300 --> 01:12:19,070
And the only way for us to do this was to actually position ourselves.

656
01:12:19,070 --> 01:12:23,300
They observe and understand, but we couldn't be everywhere.

657
01:12:23,300 --> 01:12:29,890
And there were some things that we realised we couldn't do effectively just.

658
01:12:29,890 --> 01:12:38,020
Just by being outsiders coming in, because what inevitably used to happen is we'd come in and, you know, the BDO would say,

659
01:12:38,020 --> 01:12:43,840
Oh, look, there's somebody that believe Ali Madumere has someone has come from Delhi, so I'm not going to talk to you.

660
01:12:43,840 --> 01:12:52,270
I'll just talk to this, madam. And that was both problematic for we wanted to observe and understand how bureaucrats behaved,

661
01:12:52,270 --> 01:12:55,630
but also deeply disturbing from a policy and activism point of view,

662
01:12:55,630 --> 01:12:59,200
because the whole point of studying the bureaucracy was to ensure that they could do their job better,

663
01:12:59,200 --> 01:13:04,600
not prevent a citizens who had come all the way to the lodge their grievances.

664
01:13:04,600 --> 01:13:09,370
So we had access to grassroots feel colleagues who had been in these places for a long time,

665
01:13:09,370 --> 01:13:14,560
who had been working with us to do these expenditure tracking surveys and we felt would make better observers

666
01:13:14,560 --> 01:13:21,790
because they also gelled much better with the context and what didn't fall into the trap of the madam,

667
01:13:21,790 --> 01:13:27,550
the madam from Delhi. But, you know, they were not going to they were not skilled to be good.

668
01:13:27,550 --> 01:13:35,150
Qualitative research, as they were better had been quantitative researchers. And that's when we hit upon with a colleague, Shahana Bhattacharya.

669
01:13:35,150 --> 01:13:43,960
We were we were doing some experimental work, and she had used time.You surveys to study how women use time inside households.

670
01:13:43,960 --> 01:13:49,270
And we deployed the pool of time you surveys to have our female colleagues just document

671
01:13:49,270 --> 01:13:52,930
literally hour by hour for periods of time that they were sitting in these offices.

672
01:13:52,930 --> 01:13:58,570
What was happening. So it was easier for them to document this without building narratives.

673
01:13:58,570 --> 01:14:05,080
And we were able to then access that data to better understand what was actually going on inside these offices.

674
01:14:05,080 --> 01:14:13,840
That led to its own problems because very often when our colleagues were in these offices documenting what was happening,

675
01:14:13,840 --> 01:14:28,390
they also sort of acquired a sense of power of knowledge over what the bureaucrats were doing and and their own sense of superiority.

676
01:14:28,390 --> 01:14:32,890
So, you know, they would often when we would chat, they would say, Well, you know, I call up this office.

677
01:14:32,890 --> 01:14:36,430
I had nine 30 and he wasn't there and I told him, How could you not be there at 9:30?

678
01:14:36,430 --> 01:14:45,340
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,

679
01:14:45,340 --> 01:14:52,990
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.

680
01:14:52,990 --> 01:14:59,620
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.

681
01:14:59,620 --> 01:15:08,620
So we learnt by experimentation. And I think that that helped us recognise that this mixed methods is a useful way of really understanding.

682
01:15:08,620 --> 01:15:16,990
Some things are more amenable to certain forms of data collection than others and also because we were always there.

683
01:15:16,990 --> 01:15:18,820
It helps it at some level.

684
01:15:18,820 --> 01:15:25,510
It helps us get deeper insight because you are actually observing and participating in things that you're studying and writing about.

685
01:15:25,510 --> 01:15:29,500
It also means that certain kinds of biases do creep in.

686
01:15:29,500 --> 01:15:35,710
And so the surveys help to ensure that are across verifying all the information that you're getting,

687
01:15:35,710 --> 01:15:40,360
so that it's also a way of weeding out your own internal biases.

688
01:15:40,360 --> 01:15:46,600
We are right now doing a survey of the office as part of our state capacity initiative.

689
01:15:46,600 --> 01:15:50,320
The idea was it's part of our long term study of maybe one to sort of capture

690
01:15:50,320 --> 01:15:53,860
what we're calling very ambitiously the moral economy of the bureaucracy.

691
01:15:53,860 --> 01:16:03,340
This is specifically focussed on the elite Indian Administrative Service and wondering what we want to try and understand their own perceptions

692
01:16:03,340 --> 01:16:13,300
of integrity of ethics of trust basically capture the value systems within which they are embedded and because these are senior officers.

693
01:16:13,300 --> 01:16:18,250
We know that every time you go and interview them, you are going to get stock answers until they leave.

694
01:16:18,250 --> 01:16:21,490
And when they leave, they become the biggest activists for bureaucratic reform.

695
01:16:21,490 --> 01:16:24,550
And that's not helpful either, because it's easy to preach when you're outside.

696
01:16:24,550 --> 01:16:32,230
And what we want to understand is the internal dynamics of the system and also given the nature of their jobs,

697
01:16:32,230 --> 01:16:37,540
they would not be amenable to ethnographers observing, writing, etc.

698
01:16:37,540 --> 01:16:42,760
So after a lot of sort of thinking, we narrowed it down to actually doing surveys.

699
01:16:42,760 --> 01:16:50,290
These are perception based surveys. They have their limitations, but they are still a useful starting point for us to understand,

700
01:16:50,290 --> 01:16:53,950
and we've used COVID as a way of trying to understand this.

701
01:16:53,950 --> 01:16:59,500
We did one round of surveys last year through SurveyMonkey had about 500 of its 400 plus

702
01:16:59,500 --> 01:17:05,950
officers that we interviewed some former some and as a result created a mixed sample.

703
01:17:05,950 --> 01:17:12,490
And we interviewed them in August after the first lockdown, when India had decided that it had over the August 2020.

704
01:17:12,490 --> 01:17:20,110
So India had decided they had overcome COVID in the Soviet run through August, September, October.

705
01:17:20,110 --> 01:17:24,790
And you know, while some of it is the typical stock answers you can read between,

706
01:17:24,790 --> 01:17:29,830
so there's some very interesting things that we learnt about how the bureaucracy viewed.

707
01:17:29,830 --> 01:17:35,080
The role of stigma in shaping that ability to expand testing, for example, at that point,

708
01:17:35,080 --> 01:17:43,180
the expansion of testing was critical to how the bureaucracy viewed the role of the media in spreading misinformation or in enabling awareness.

709
01:17:43,180 --> 01:17:49,580
The role of politicians and our idea is that we do a whole series of these over a period of a few years.

710
01:17:49,580 --> 01:17:56,410
So we have a sort of long range that would then give us a more detailed understanding of what the bureaucracy is doing.

711
01:17:56,410 --> 01:18:01,000
So it. So I I think that mixed methods are really important,

712
01:18:01,000 --> 01:18:07,450
and I think that as policy practitioners being embedded in that ecosystem can be very hard one day,

713
01:18:07,450 --> 01:18:11,950
just because our own instinct and insights into engaging with bureaucracy come into play.

714
01:18:11,950 --> 01:18:21,100
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

715
01:18:21,100 --> 01:18:29,790
who ensure that you put us back to the rigours of academia in our analysis and makes a huge difference to what we do.

716
01:18:29,790 --> 01:18:35,300
Early on Thanksgiving, many would like to jump in next.

717
01:18:35,300 --> 01:18:42,040
Myra, would you like to go ahead? Sure. Yes. OK, so.

718
01:18:42,040 --> 01:18:51,070
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

719
01:18:51,070 --> 01:19:00,860
Neitzel questions around position ality and the research was how the research was viewed by whom.

720
01:19:00,860 --> 01:19:05,600
What? What sorts of self perceptions are we comfortable with and which ones do we not want to cultivate?

721
01:19:05,600 --> 01:19:12,700
Or further? Why were you uncomfortable with certain impressions, etc.?

722
01:19:12,700 --> 01:19:27,250
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.

723
01:19:27,250 --> 01:19:37,180
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,

724
01:19:37,180 --> 01:19:51,820
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.

725
01:19:51,820 --> 01:20:02,680
When, you know, constantly calling and trying to set up meetings with officials wasn't wasn't going anywhere.

726
01:20:02,680 --> 01:20:08,890
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.

727
01:20:08,890 --> 01:20:15,280
So. So it was this. So I started out feeling feeling a lot of pressure and feeling like, Oh my god, I'm here.

728
01:20:15,280 --> 01:20:27,010
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

729
01:20:27,010 --> 01:20:33,640
that I ended up spending most of my time with the you could see the law in the mid-year,

730
01:20:33,640 --> 01:20:43,510
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.

731
01:20:43,510 --> 01:20:48,460
So they were they were in the field a lot of the time they were in court,

732
01:20:48,460 --> 01:20:53,680
a lot of the time either fighting corruption proceedings against them or being asked by

733
01:20:53,680 --> 01:21:01,180
the senior bureaucratic lawyers to be the department's representative in a court summons.

734
01:21:01,180 --> 01:21:12,060
And so that sort of mobility needed easier for me to, you know, also insert inside myself.

735
01:21:12,060 --> 01:21:24,450
The other thing that helped me was initially trying to understand more than one office or department.

736
01:21:24,450 --> 01:21:29,970
So, you know, initially if, if, if my understanding was a very simplistic one of what our bureaucracy,

737
01:21:29,970 --> 01:21:32,890
irrigation, of course, I just want to be at the irrigation department, right?

738
01:21:32,890 --> 01:21:39,360
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.

739
01:21:39,360 --> 01:21:46,110
They have different rings as a headquarters, as field offices, the engineering being the revenue wing where you want to be.

740
01:21:46,110 --> 01:21:54,570
And so trying to get a sense of these various offices and then also the interactions of the irrigation department with, for example,

741
01:21:54,570 --> 01:22:00,570
the provincial planning and development department held that the irrigation department dinner works

742
01:22:00,570 --> 01:22:05,140
closely with the Agriculture Department also help because then I felt like one wasn't going anywhere.

743
01:22:05,140 --> 01:22:14,130
I felt like there were these other avenues to explore the World Bank, madam.

744
01:22:14,130 --> 01:22:22,840
Yeah, so. So you see this. This is this space is a very, very extensively and long researched one.

745
01:22:22,840 --> 01:22:29,280
There is a lot of scholarship on irrigation in Pakistan.

746
01:22:29,280 --> 01:22:37,830
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.

747
01:22:37,830 --> 01:22:42,420
There's a lot of economists who who walked.

748
01:22:42,420 --> 01:22:50,760
And there's also a lot of studies that organisations like the World Bank and ADB and Giger, the GI Guys,

749
01:22:50,760 --> 01:22:57,930
the Japan International Cooperation Agency, which is also which is very central in this space because they've been one of the biggest donors.

750
01:22:57,930 --> 01:23:02,580
And so when I when I when when you when you were going to when a woman like myself shows up,

751
01:23:02,580 --> 01:23:07,980
it's the familiar model is of the World Bank model because that's how these models show up.

752
01:23:07,980 --> 01:23:11,400
They kind of then come and they do what they wanted with the surveys. They want to collect data.

753
01:23:11,400 --> 01:23:16,380
And so for me, the struggle was, no, actually, I'm not that sort of boss on.

754
01:23:16,380 --> 01:23:23,460
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.

755
01:23:23,460 --> 01:23:26,040
And that was really helpful for me. Also, you know,

756
01:23:26,040 --> 01:23:34,770
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,

757
01:23:34,770 --> 01:23:45,420
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,

758
01:23:45,420 --> 01:23:54,300
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.

759
01:23:54,300 --> 01:23:59,910
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.

760
01:23:59,910 --> 01:24:04,890
It seems like you're a really slow learner waiting to come back again.

761
01:24:04,890 --> 01:24:10,770
And so there's something very humbling about that.

762
01:24:10,770 --> 01:24:23,460
But I think over time and, you know, done that, done efficiently, it was it's been it's been very, very rewarding.

763
01:24:23,460 --> 01:24:28,170
The other thing and this is kind of linked to the World Bank model issue was all,

764
01:24:28,170 --> 01:24:32,700
but you're not an engineer, you're not an economist, you're not working with these big datasets.

765
01:24:32,700 --> 01:24:37,920
You can tell us about trends or what use is your anthropology.

766
01:24:37,920 --> 01:24:43,530
And here it was also this interesting kind of reversal of the poor what is exotic to whom?

767
01:24:43,530 --> 01:24:47,160
Because a lot of people like anthropology, that's so fascinating.

768
01:24:47,160 --> 01:24:57,870
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.

769
01:24:57,870 --> 01:25:04,260
So let this, you know, let this city woman do whatever the [INAUDIBLE] she thinks she wants to do next.

770
01:25:04,260 --> 01:25:12,180
So that sort of attitude I got, especially, I think, from some of the body was again,

771
01:25:12,180 --> 01:25:18,180
it ended up being helpful because if a lot of people aren't taking your work too seriously,

772
01:25:18,180 --> 01:25:25,170
it gives you freedom on the way to kind of figure all things out. And, you know, just just be on your own.

773
01:25:25,170 --> 01:25:32,820
And then, you know, again, the fact that this is a very, very masculine space,

774
01:25:32,820 --> 01:25:39,360
the engineering world, the irrigation world and bureaucracy are very, very masculine space.

775
01:25:39,360 --> 01:25:47,970
That was its own. It came with its own set of of of questions and questions that I had.

776
01:25:47,970 --> 01:25:50,120
And, you know, so so for example,

777
01:25:50,120 --> 01:25:57,150
like this whole chapter that's trying to understand if there's something to probing the gendered nature of ethical labour and bureaucratically.

778
01:25:57,150 --> 01:26:01,920
But that's not a question I went into the field with right for me when I started fieldwork.

779
01:26:01,920 --> 01:26:08,350
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.

780
01:26:08,350 --> 01:26:14,730
Right. And so there was this. There was this fantasy of immediate access or, you know, all these guys,

781
01:26:14,730 --> 01:26:22,380
they hang out the hefty and the kind of dog and family, I want to do that because how else would I understand?

782
01:26:22,380 --> 01:26:30,270
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,

783
01:26:30,270 --> 01:26:35,370
the only woman at the time who who was part of the revenue wing and right,

784
01:26:35,370 --> 01:26:41,100
and that was part of the effort by some of the male officials to try to get me away from their offices,

785
01:26:41,100 --> 01:26:41,820
which is also, you know,

786
01:26:41,820 --> 01:26:50,280
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,

787
01:26:50,280 --> 01:26:56,140
which is reflected through stories and, you know, rumours such as Jessica just Gajendra.

788
01:26:56,140 --> 01:26:59,490
It was Starsky. Such a great idea for somebody who comes with a short while.

789
01:26:59,490 --> 01:27:02,850
It's easy and you know, it's easy for you to say, I don't get it.

790
01:27:02,850 --> 01:27:04,650
I can ignore all of this.

791
01:27:04,650 --> 01:27:14,580
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.

792
01:27:14,580 --> 01:27:22,310
Those dynamics also. So yes, I hope that gives you some sense of.

793
01:27:22,310 --> 01:27:31,640
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,

794
01:27:31,640 --> 01:27:38,360
but from the World Bank or from the legal problem, you know, it's like, what is the madam do there?

795
01:27:38,360 --> 01:27:41,510
Yeah, thanks. Bye, Rosetta. Would you like to weigh in next year?

796
01:27:41,510 --> 01:27:44,900
And then we have actually quite a few questions coming in five so far.

797
01:27:44,900 --> 01:27:48,230
So yeah, yeah, yeah.

798
01:27:48,230 --> 01:27:54,330
No, I totally. I think the gender question is very interesting because I felt that very strong data was always in the way.

799
01:27:54,330 --> 01:28:00,440
And how do you just normalise something that is interesting? I think about now there is this kind of spatial.

800
01:28:00,440 --> 01:28:03,920
I think some of these things are so, so spatial and architectural, almost.

801
01:28:03,920 --> 01:28:10,010
And one thing that really helped me and so micro, but was that Nader is open plan, right?

802
01:28:10,010 --> 01:28:17,510
So all the data entry stations are set up and then even the assistant managers have just like a fibreglass wall.

803
01:28:17,510 --> 01:28:22,370
So I could shadow and be there and everybody seeing what I was doing.

804
01:28:22,370 --> 01:28:28,010
And so it actually. And of course, as I'm thinking about surveillance, that's really key.

805
01:28:28,010 --> 01:28:36,380
But and I think the surveillance isn't just in terms of what's happening with the speed and securitisation, but also for corruption.

806
01:28:36,380 --> 01:28:40,460
So to make sure that nobody jumps the queue, there's a queue matic going.

807
01:28:40,460 --> 01:28:49,010
If you do, everybody sees. So that actually really helped me because they could see what I was doing.

808
01:28:49,010 --> 01:28:54,320
I could see what was happening and what the dynamics were. And in a weird way, it worked out.

809
01:28:54,320 --> 01:29:00,890
But I think the other the other part that I've been thinking about in terms of the institutions,

810
01:29:00,890 --> 01:29:05,360
how bureaucracies are connected and moving between spaces.

811
01:29:05,360 --> 01:29:09,470
So in a way that the registration centre became more of a site than I had originally

812
01:29:09,470 --> 01:29:17,360
planned and learnt how to code in the hope that I would understand the database.

813
01:29:17,360 --> 01:29:21,090
So I went through all this pain. But of course, you know, it was naive of me.

814
01:29:21,090 --> 01:29:29,750
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.

815
01:29:29,750 --> 01:29:34,130
And this is what's interesting in terms of other bureaucracies, because most like out of hat,

816
01:29:34,130 --> 01:29:41,300
I imagine that there are people who would be working at a hedge fund or in Silicon Valley or in start-ups in Pakistan,

817
01:29:41,300 --> 01:29:46,550
and they end up in these spaces because it's an exceptional kind of bureaucracy that allows

818
01:29:46,550 --> 01:29:53,510
them like innovation and to bring sort of new kinds of technologies into this space.

819
01:29:53,510 --> 01:29:59,840
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.

820
01:29:59,840 --> 01:30:02,270
So they were they were super helpful to speak to,

821
01:30:02,270 --> 01:30:08,600
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.

822
01:30:08,600 --> 01:30:16,010
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.

823
01:30:16,010 --> 01:30:21,230
So my space there was limited, but similar to what I was describing in the projects division.

824
01:30:21,230 --> 01:30:30,230
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.

825
01:30:30,230 --> 01:30:34,670
And that and even though it wasn't very interested in welfare,

826
01:30:34,670 --> 01:30:41,480
I think it is in ultimately became compelling to think about it because so much of other the other

827
01:30:41,480 --> 01:30:47,690
ID reduced biometric regimes through the World Bank are so tied to welfare payments in Pakistan.

828
01:30:47,690 --> 01:30:51,530
That's a very minor part of what neither does, but it does do it.

829
01:30:51,530 --> 01:30:57,740
But looking at that connexion between the projects division that manages welfare payments and other really helped

830
01:30:57,740 --> 01:31:08,840
me understand how the how the whole system works and how how data is used and constructed within the system.

831
01:31:08,840 --> 01:31:19,730
So only once married or ever married, sorry, ever married women can receive a welfare payment within within based within this welfare programme.

832
01:31:19,730 --> 01:31:25,550
And so NADRA has to share that precise data that they have been made their woman and their,

833
01:31:25,550 --> 01:31:29,150
you know, been best has its own kind of poverty scoring that it does.

834
01:31:29,150 --> 01:31:35,330
So understanding that was it was a really key part of figuring out the system as a whole.

835
01:31:35,330 --> 01:31:38,810
And there was a woman there who managed the projects division.

836
01:31:38,810 --> 01:31:41,390
Everybody told me really off knock, you know,

837
01:31:41,390 --> 01:31:51,860
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.

838
01:31:51,860 --> 01:32:01,760
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,

839
01:32:01,760 --> 01:32:08,640
the very an idea of bureaucracy, which however, finally even a very oppositional to it does come up and said, Well, for me,

840
01:32:08,640 --> 01:32:12,650
it came out in two ways to think about, you know, rules as opposed to code.

841
01:32:12,650 --> 01:32:21,350
So how people were managing registration software and the rules of registration as they negotiated with.

842
01:32:21,350 --> 01:32:27,290
Who'd come in to do most of the time to sort of help them get through the process even if

843
01:32:27,290 --> 01:32:30,890
they were missing some things or their biometrics weren't working or things like that.

844
01:32:30,890 --> 01:32:39,020
So how how that and this is happening increasingly, I think with the use of technology across the board, across bureaucratic systems.

845
01:32:39,020 --> 01:32:40,790
And the other thing I was thinking about is it, you know,

846
01:32:40,790 --> 01:32:48,410
this rule of kind of social of embeddedness and how and how that plays out, particularly in the realm of identification.

847
01:32:48,410 --> 01:32:55,410
So while I was there, there changed its rules. Still, you can now apply in any district for an identity card.

848
01:32:55,410 --> 01:32:57,980
It doesn't have to be very urgent reside.

849
01:32:57,980 --> 01:33:07,190
And and that was creating a new problem for people in Islamabad because you have, you know, famously, no one is from Islamabad.

850
01:33:07,190 --> 01:33:13,790
So there were people from everywhere and there's so many migrants and of course, upon refugees who have a standing presence.

851
01:33:13,790 --> 01:33:17,270
And so they had to register people.

852
01:33:17,270 --> 01:33:25,160
But they would always say that local knowledge people who are local or regional, not their offices would actually understand this much better.

853
01:33:25,160 --> 01:33:30,880
And so there's that and this I saw in the colonial archive in the post-colonial like the the fifties in the sixties,

854
01:33:30,880 --> 01:33:35,930
as I didn't see documentation was becoming the thing that,

855
01:33:35,930 --> 01:33:44,450
you know, knowing who someone is and who they are related to was really a key part of being able to,

856
01:33:44,450 --> 01:33:50,800
you know, be able to identify in a in a bureaucratic setting.

857
01:33:50,800 --> 01:33:57,730
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.

858
01:33:57,730 --> 01:34:02,470
I would love to talk more about that, but I would have a chance, maybe have six questions now.

859
01:34:02,470 --> 01:34:06,740
So we will try to run through them because the really great questions that are coming up.

860
01:34:06,740 --> 01:34:13,290
OK, sure. Yeah, thanks. So, yeah, how I study what I do in the methodological choices.

861
01:34:13,290 --> 01:34:25,080
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.

862
01:34:25,080 --> 01:34:34,220
My My book is in a comparative politics of Education series, yet I also find myself at various moments frustrated with my home discipline.

863
01:34:34,220 --> 01:34:42,370
And I think this is partly based on a broad reading of, you know, what factors drive bureaucratic behaviour.

864
01:34:42,370 --> 01:34:47,110
I mean, one can not only look as as nominee mentioned, you can only look at the political economy.

865
01:34:47,110 --> 01:34:52,330
You have to understand bureaucracies as institutions with the social life of their own.

866
01:34:52,330 --> 01:34:56,800
And I think there was at a time of political science that did that.

867
01:34:56,800 --> 01:35:02,680
But over the years and you know, you see it in this kind of, you know,

868
01:35:02,680 --> 01:35:07,720
the the separation of public administration as a separate discipline in the sense,

869
01:35:07,720 --> 01:35:15,820
I think that's really weakened our understanding actually of bureaucracy within the field of political science because those who are studying

870
01:35:15,820 --> 01:35:27,880
bureaucracies as institutions are often not engaging with political science for sort of a series of speed and development and vice versa.

871
01:35:27,880 --> 01:35:34,030
Those are studying institutions are often treating them as unitary actors and the very

872
01:35:34,030 --> 01:35:40,190
sort of abstract and broad brush stroke way without getting into the sort of social life.

873
01:35:40,190 --> 01:35:48,220
So my my approach to this is really to use a variety of methods and so in the education book and

874
01:35:48,220 --> 01:35:55,030
combining different qualitative field methods which provide different ways of understanding not.

875
01:35:55,030 --> 01:36:03,220
So one one set of tools is to interview officers, and they would often start by interviewing officials at a senior level,

876
01:36:03,220 --> 01:36:07,660
you know, within the state to understand how they think of their own duties,

877
01:36:07,660 --> 01:36:17,260
what turns to what categories are they using to describe their own ideas of what their mandate is and and accordingly,

878
01:36:17,260 --> 01:36:21,110
then trying to see if these ideas are consistent?

879
01:36:21,110 --> 01:36:28,090
Do they vary across officers? And so that is a kind of big interview sort of component to do my research.

880
01:36:28,090 --> 01:36:36,290
But I also found focus group discussions quite helpful because often it was concrete examples that made it that brought an idea to life.

881
01:36:36,290 --> 01:36:45,550
So hearing an officer say this is how I actually addressed a particular case, and that might snowball into another official sitting there saying,

882
01:36:45,550 --> 01:36:50,950
Oh, that also happened in my, you know, in my district or that didn't happen in my district.

883
01:36:50,950 --> 01:36:59,770
And so even the conflict between different ideas or different sets of of of of ideas about what

884
01:36:59,770 --> 01:37:05,770
the rules are was actually really helpful for me to arrive at what I could call much more robust,

885
01:37:05,770 --> 01:37:10,600
stable patterns of what I was seeing, but I didn't think that was enough.

886
01:37:10,600 --> 01:37:19,330
I think it was really important to see officers, officials block official the district officials carry out their work.

887
01:37:19,330 --> 01:37:24,160
And so I would spend a lot of time just sitting at a district education office or sitting

888
01:37:24,160 --> 01:37:28,960
outside a block education office until I could get a moment with the block education officer.

889
01:37:28,960 --> 01:37:33,790
And maybe that person was on the way to visiting a school and I would join them on a monitoring visit.

890
01:37:33,790 --> 01:37:42,550
And, you know, as one one public administration scholar had said, So this is Evelyn Brodkin at Chicago.

891
01:37:42,550 --> 01:37:47,440
She's written a lot on on on public administration in the United States.

892
01:37:47,440 --> 01:37:52,450
She says that this kind of moving between interviews and participant observation allows

893
01:37:52,450 --> 01:37:57,670
you to establish links and contradictions between what people say and what they do.

894
01:37:57,670 --> 01:38:05,200
And I think that's been really important for me to actually establish what's a normal and what's maybe someone's aspiration.

895
01:38:05,200 --> 01:38:11,800
And the two can often be different. The third piece of evidence that I thought is really important is actually the citizens

896
01:38:11,800 --> 01:38:16,500
perspective of the state because ultimately a lot of services and I'm working,

897
01:38:16,500 --> 01:38:21,160
I've been working on education for the for the book there co-produced.

898
01:38:21,160 --> 01:38:25,540
It's not just the state providing the service of plot their goals, education.

899
01:38:25,540 --> 01:38:27,550
Actually, you need communities.

900
01:38:27,550 --> 01:38:36,100
You need parents, households and children to participate in that process to produce that service that gets rendered as education.

901
01:38:36,100 --> 01:38:38,980
Right. And so understanding how citizens see the state,

902
01:38:38,980 --> 01:38:44,950
so what is their experience when they interact with frontline officials, when they talk to the schoolteacher?

903
01:38:44,950 --> 01:38:51,190
So that involves sitting again. A lot of sitting takes place in my work at a school.

904
01:38:51,190 --> 01:38:57,670
Sometimes I would just I would be the only other person, so the teacher might have asked for my help to teach something.

905
01:38:57,670 --> 01:39:06,100
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.

906
01:39:06,100 --> 01:39:15,610
And so these sorts of, you could say quotidian observations inside a school really opened up for me, the citizen perspective on the state.

907
01:39:15,610 --> 01:39:19,120
I also get a bit of participant observation outside of school.

908
01:39:19,120 --> 01:39:25,000
So looking at, for example, the panchayat and how the village, the village elected council,

909
01:39:25,000 --> 01:39:28,810
how often does education even come up when it's problems at the school?

910
01:39:28,810 --> 01:39:33,850
Do they view a panchayat elections as a forum to actually talk about these issues?

911
01:39:33,850 --> 01:39:40,240
And what I learnt actually from that perspective was that electoral politics is far removed from service delivery.

912
01:39:40,240 --> 01:39:48,610
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.

913
01:39:48,610 --> 01:39:53,810
And, you know, are our children learning? And so that disconnect came out to through these different methods.

914
01:39:53,810 --> 01:39:59,650
But the other piece methodologically, that I think is important now I'll just reiterate,

915
01:39:59,650 --> 01:40:05,800
is really tracing policy implementation over levels of the state. And I think this just requires a lot more work.

916
01:40:05,800 --> 01:40:14,740
That's both the multilevel and is also comparative. So comparative could be within the same province or the same district and looking,

917
01:40:14,740 --> 01:40:19,450
say, across villages or across sub unit, or it could be even across states.

918
01:40:19,450 --> 01:40:25,660
One strategy that I think is quite promising is to look at bordering districts in different states.

919
01:40:25,660 --> 01:40:30,740
So the state level is kind of apparatus can be different or you can also think about countries, by the way.

920
01:40:30,740 --> 01:40:38,260
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,

921
01:40:38,260 --> 01:40:46,420
where you have very different political economy conditions, but you can control for things like like local norms at a village level.

922
01:40:46,420 --> 01:40:54,510
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.

923
01:40:54,510 --> 01:41:03,810
Because I think there's opportunities to build bridges there in the police research I've combined with my with my colleagues.

924
01:41:03,810 --> 01:41:07,650
A large scale asked along with surveys.

925
01:41:07,650 --> 01:41:17,970
So we did a survey of 2000 police officers pre and post the intervention and qualitative process tracing where we took eight eight pianos,

926
01:41:17,970 --> 01:41:27,060
eight police stations from from from about twenty eighteen till about twenty twenty just before the COVID lockdown in India and

927
01:41:27,060 --> 01:41:35,220
just observed over time that having a women's help desk inside the comma changed anything about police attitudes towards women,

928
01:41:35,220 --> 01:41:42,840
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

929
01:41:42,840 --> 01:41:48,630
show us a pattern and show and demonstrate a credibly demonstrated an impact,

930
01:41:48,630 --> 01:41:54,270
but it could not tell us why or how that impact was reached. And in fact, we had thought there would be no impact.

931
01:41:54,270 --> 01:41:58,570
And in fact, there's quite a lot of teams that don't report all the facts.

932
01:41:58,570 --> 01:42:02,100
And I think that's a big problem because we could be learning a lot about why

933
01:42:02,100 --> 01:42:05,670
things don't work out rather than just presuming it's all about corruption.

934
01:42:05,670 --> 01:42:14,580
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.

935
01:42:14,580 --> 01:42:23,790
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.

936
01:42:23,790 --> 01:42:28,170
Would you have to open up that black box of that institution to understand that?

937
01:42:28,170 --> 01:42:33,240
And so through the qualitative work, we found that that that having the desk could,

938
01:42:33,240 --> 01:42:39,450
for example, raise the status of crime against women's work within the police station.

939
01:42:39,450 --> 01:42:44,190
There's a side by side, an informal set of practises called paramours.

940
01:42:44,190 --> 01:42:49,260
This is counselling or they call it, sometimes depending on where you are.

941
01:42:49,260 --> 01:42:58,230
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,

942
01:42:58,230 --> 01:43:01,110
which requires the registration of the case,

943
01:43:01,110 --> 01:43:05,340
and it was only the qualitative work that would have brought that out of the city would never have done that.

944
01:43:05,340 --> 01:43:11,850
So I think there's probably some really good opportunities to do these methods,

945
01:43:11,850 --> 01:43:15,720
recognising that there's also trade-offs in what one human being or a group

946
01:43:15,720 --> 01:43:21,090
of human beings can actually do with a finite amount of time and resources.

947
01:43:21,090 --> 01:43:26,280
So I'll just stop there. But but really interesting stuff to hear about the different methods.

948
01:43:26,280 --> 01:43:36,420
Oh, sorry. One last thing I just mentioned, like everyone else, I do think embedding the bureaucracy historically is really important.

949
01:43:36,420 --> 01:43:39,360
And so in the sort of next round of work,

950
01:43:39,360 --> 01:43:48,870
I'm doing one of the reasons just looking historically on how did this concept of law and order become central within the police?

951
01:43:48,870 --> 01:43:57,840
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

952
01:43:57,840 --> 01:44:03,000
starting point where the emphasis is on crowd control and controlling public space,

953
01:44:03,000 --> 01:44:10,560
rather than responding to individual citizen concerns responding to to particular crime cases.

954
01:44:10,560 --> 01:44:20,520
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,

955
01:44:20,520 --> 01:44:24,600
you know, going back to to do the work that is done,

956
01:44:24,600 --> 01:44:30,210
lot gets written down in a lot of communication within these agencies is happening to who,

957
01:44:30,210 --> 01:44:34,860
you know, formal formal letters and they kind of take a life of their own.

958
01:44:34,860 --> 01:44:38,826
So anyway, I'll just stop there. Thanks. Thanks, Akshay.