With Nitish Kumar’s exit, Bihar’s Sushasan must go beyond top-down Deep reform requires empowering those within the system, drawing on support from institutions within the public system

What’s next for #Bihar?

Our piece in today’s @indianexpress.com

indianexpress.com/article/opin...

Master’s students and PhD candidates are encouraged to join. PhD candidates and faculty are also invited to present their own research.

Any questions: email me.

I will be organising the Bihar Public Policy Days on 2–3 March 2026 at LSE.

I am very glad that we have distinguished guests from Bihar's bureaucracy and one of its prime research institutes joining us.

Registration: forms.office.com/e/tsC36Ht9ZV

open to LSE and non-LSE academics

Finally, these findings indicate that state-cadre bureaucrats are really important. If IAS officers are the steel frame of the Indian state, state-cadre bureaucrats are the bricks and glass.

Full paper as a preprint: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

This cannot be done by order. It is a labour-intensive task, taking place beyond formal settings like review meetings, and often includes symbolic acts and trust-building actions. I base this on around 40 interviews with public managers in Bihar and Karnataka.

I argue that the task of a public manager in this case is to increase mutual expectations about effort levels, and increasing these mutual expectations hinges on a public manager being able to persuade subordinates that their colleagues will reciprocate with higher effort.

Linking novel posting data with independent household surveys on learning across ten years, I show that only those bureaucrats with less authority but more ability to engage in persuasion impact learning.

Why?

Using the empirical case of rural 🇮🇳 and learning in public schools, I exploit an admin setup mimicking a natural experiment with two types of bureaucrats for the same spatial unit, the district, that either have more authority or more opps for time-intensive persuasion.

Do managerial bureaucrats impact the quality of service provision for difficult-to-monitor tasks?

In my JMP, I argue that they do but that the type of bureaucrats having an impact is not what gets most attention in the literature (and from politicians / media).

Preprint: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

🧵

Now on the job market.

I research on bureaucracies, service delivery, and the political economy in low- and middle-income countries with a particular focus on state capabilities and management practices within the public sector. Special focus on 🇮🇳.

martinhaus.info

New resource for researchers trying to map Indian pincodes to geolocations:

www.data.gov.in/catalog/all-...

This is a really excellent paper from Italy that shows that austerity fuels far right support. Part of the nostalgia for the past that the populists drew on is a nostalgia for a visible and effective public service. 1/

Preview of Accepted manuscript: "Application Barriers and the Socioeconomic GAP in Child Care Enrollment"

🚨Finally online: Our paper on barriers to child care enrollment is now available @jeeanews.bsky.social 🤩🤩🤩

I'm over the moon 😁 Thanks to the most amazing team, @lergetporer.bsky.social, @fpeter.bsky.social & @simonwiederhold.bsky.social – what a ride! 🫶

doi.org/10.1093/jeea...

#EconSky

Might be of interest!

@pavisuri.bsky.social

www.epw.in/journal/2024...