Public policies will decide whether India would become a 10 trillion-dollar economy by 2030. They will decide whether the farmers' distress would continue or not. They will decide whether the youngest population in the world would have the skills and education to deliver the demographic dividend. Public policies are the lever for large-scale social and economic change.
What will decide whether we would have the right public policies for the country? One most critical factor would be public policy education: How we train and prepare our public policy professionals.Today there is very little formal public policy education in India. We need more professional policy education. It would not suffice to just borrow the policy education models from abroad. We need to develop our own models and contextualise policy education for India. All these need revolutionary changes in the existing education models.
The current policy making is largely a top-down exercise. An example would make this clearer. Indian School of Public Policy was involved in designing an education scheme in a state. The goal was set by the Minister and the Education Secretary. We worked out a scheme to achieve it. The department fixed a date for a Press Conference to announce the scheme. We suggested that this is a unique scheme and there is no experience of how it would work on the ground. At the least, we should invite district education officers and get their feedback on the scheme and possible challenges of implementation before the announcement. The department fortunately agreed but commented that this kind of consultation with line officials has never been done before. The people who are policy's eyes and ears on the ground are hardly ever involved in designing the policy.
In designing policy, the beneficiaries remain rather abstract entities — the poor, socially and economically marginalised — type of general images capture the beneficiaries in the minds of policy makers. There is no detailed profile or concrete understanding of beneficiaries, and often the beneficiaries are not all alike, they are from diverse geographical and socio-economic backgrounds. Understanding the real beneficiaries and their actual life-world, not generalized abstractions, is crucial for getting policy design and implementation right. One example will illustrate this succinctly.
A slum rehabilitation project in a metro city promised one apartment to each slum-dwelling family. The Government and NGOs were concerned about the real possibility of slum dwellers selling the flats and re-occupying land somewhere else in the city. The top-down approach is to put a ban on re-sale of flats for certain number of years. However, the state capacity to enforce such a ban is almost non-existent. After much deliberation and debate, a brilliant idea came upon the table-let's ask slum dwellers themselves. It is rather interesting how consulting the beneficiaries is usually a last resort. A community meeting was organized and well-trained facilitators conducted the meeting. The solution that came out was very similar-make it illegal to sale and put heavy penalty on those who do to make an example of them.
Someone realised that most of the people in the community meeting were men. Let's ask the women then. The women came up with the suggestion that keep latrines public and do not provide that facility in each apartment. It is unlikely that those who would pay high sums to buy these flats would be willing to use public toilets. The women had higher stake than men in living in a decent flat; a majority of men were probably happier in en-cashing the flats. Understanding and consulting real beneficiaries make or break a policy.
How do we ensure that the line officials and the real beneficiaries are involved in the design and implementation of policies? There are many ways to achieve this but in the context of policy education, a systemic learning of design thinking would go a long way. Including design thinking and user-centered design in formal policy education would revolutionise policy making as well as policy practice. Design thinking should be one of the key pillars of policy education in India.
The writer is Dr Parth J Shah, Member of the Governing Council, of Indian School of Public Policy
