Rajesh Veeraraghavan

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Book Review of Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools by Yamini Aiyar
Oxford University Press, 2024

I reviewed this book as part of The South Asia Summer Reading Group (SARG) is an informal organization of individuals with an interest in the politics of South Asia. More at the Contemporary India website. https://indiacenter.berkeley.edu/sarg/sarg-2025

This book traces a reform process in Delhi, where education became a central political priority. As the authors note, it is rare for a political party to make education not only a policy focus but a political slogan. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) did just that, placing education at the heart of its campaign and governance model, and, crucially, gaining legitimacy for it. Yamini Aiyar and her team had a front-row seat to this experiment. As Lant Pritchett writes in the foreword, this is a book about a process as it unfolds, not after the dust has settled but through close engagement and observation as it happens.

Importantly, the book is not an evaluation, nor does it want to be seen as one. Instead, it offers a grounded way of studying policy, attuned to social science, context, and institutional dynamics. It is as much a book about education reform as it is about how the state works, particularly in a centralized bureaucratic system stuck in a low-level equilibrium.

One of the book’s strengths is that it avoids familiar traps. Many efforts to explain state reform fall into two camps: political economy analyses that explain everything through incentive structures, or disciplining-plumbing fixes that tinker with and tighten implementation. I particularly appreciated how this book resists the usual “get the incentives right” or carrot-and-stick approaches. Instead, it tries to interrogate how norms might shift within the bureaucracy, and how difficult that is given the structures and habitus that shape how bureaucratic actors think and act. Rather than blaming frontline actors for failure at the last mile, it begins with a puzzle: why do teachers and lower-level bureaucrats often feel disempowered, even when relatively well paid? The book centers the everyday experience of these actors and asks what possibilities exist for agency and transformation within those constraints.

In Delhi’s education bureaucracy, as in many bureaucracies, the culture of circulars defines how the system operates. These are not just communications; they shape the grammar of governance. Even when autonomy is encouraged, it is difficult to claim because discretion has been systematically eroded. At one point, officials describe the challenge of responding to circulars that are both directive and open-ended. That contradiction is best captured in what I would call the tyranny of the “flexible circular”—still a top-down mandate, but one that demands to be “flexible.” The irony is that such circulars are often interpreted within a rigid, checkbox mindset. As the author observes, the plea for flexibility is frequently drowned out by deeply internalized norms—habits of hierarchy, rule-following, and compliance that have shaped behavior across the bureaucracy. This culture is not just imposed from above; it is held from within, by both teachers and senior bureaucrats. It is not just structure from above, but culture from within, that constrains the possibility of change.

Against this backdrop, the Delhi government’s reforms sought to shift not just practices but culture. The reformers tried to involve frontline actors, not merely as implementers but as participants. But the work did not stop there. One of the book’s important insights is that reform also involved coaxing senior bureaucrats, who—despite sometimes sharing the reformist vision—are themselves embedded in a deeply hierarchical way of working. Even with political will and a clear diagnosis of the cultural problem, the machinery of implementation still tends to operate in a top-down fashion. This means that meaningful change requires persistence. It cannot be willed into being by reformers even with political will and a campaign slogan. The book captures this slow, layered work: navigating resistance, building coalitions, and working (and may I add “Patching development” ) within the grain of the state without romanticizing the process.

Still, some tensions remain. One recurring theme is the binary that many actors seem to accept: either focus on test scores and syllabus completion, or improve educational quality. The book observes this dynamic but does not fully interrogate it. Why can’t both be achieved? Is it simply a matter of time, capacity, or something more deeply structural? That question remains somewhat underexplored.

The book is grounded in three years of fieldwork—interviews, observations, surveys, and close access to both policymakers and politicians. The authors’ institutional location enabled a kind of embedded research that few studies of state capacity manage. In that sense, the book is as much about studying the state from within as it is about tracking the reform itself.

It also offers a quiet warning. For those drawn to AI or tech-driven solutions that see state implementation as a thin, codifiable task, this book is a reminder of what gets missed. The story echoes other accounts, like Mathur’s study of NREGA in Uttarakhand, where the frontline state is burdened by procedural demands, stripped of discretion, and caught in a culture of compliance.

Written in accessible prose, the book captures the texture of working in and with the state. It does not offer a romantic narrative of success, nor a cynical account of failure. Instead, it provides a rare, honest portrait of what it takes (and what stops them) to shift institutional culture—slowly, politically, and in context.

You can get the book

https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-State-Capacity-Delhis-Schools/dp/0198922639#:~:text=This%20book%20examines%20an%20ambitious,National%20Capital%20Territory%20of%20Delhi.