Saksham Khosla and I have a new op-ed in the Hindustan Times. The piece extracts lessons from our recent Carnegie paper on India’s elite civil service cadre, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Here is the gist:

Over the years, widespread political meddling has fueled the notion that malicious politicians stand in the way of honest, hardworking bureaucrats who seek to implement key government policies. A nascent scholarly literature, combining data on the career records of IAS officers with granular information on development outcomes and electoral dynamics, does not dispel this notion. But it finds that the relationship between politicians and the bureaucracy is far more complicated.

You can read the full piece here.

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of moderating a wide-ranging discussion with three Indian Members of Parliament at the Carnegie Endowment: Sushmita Dev of Assam (INC), Baijayant “Jay” Panda of Odisha (BJD), and Anurag Thakur of Himachal Pradesh (BJP) .

The 90-minute discussion, including about 30 minutes of Q&A with the audience, touched upon everything from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) to U.S.-India economic relations and climate change.

You can watch the entire event here.

Saksham Khosla and I have an op-ed in Monday’s edition of Mint that summarizes our recent Carnegie paper on the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). You can read the column here, but this is the basic gist:

Although there is no shortage of opinions related to the IAS, there has been a surprising paucity of hard data on its operations and performance until now. A new body of research, combining unprecedented access to the profiles of IAS officers with granular data on local development outcomes and electoral dynamics, sheds new light on their career trajectories, their impact on development outcomes, and their relationship to politics.

Mint supplied this nice infographic to accompany our piece (incidentally, Mint relaunched today as a broadsheet newspaper):

If you are interested, you can read the full paper on which this op-ed is based here.

The August issue of Seminar is now online and it is worth checking out. There’s been a longstanding debate about the utility of election surveys in India, and this special issue explores multiple aspects of election surveys, from methodology to prediction and causal inference.

The full issue can be accessed here.  Neelanjan Sircar and I have a short essay on how to improve election surveys (short answer: greater transparency + data sharing). You can read our contribution here.

If you’re interested in what Members of Parliament from across the Indian political spectrum think about the Indian economy, the Modi government, or U.S.-India relations, then you’re in luck.

On Tuesday, September 13th from 4 to 5:30 p.m, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will host a public discussion with three Lok Sabha MPs: Sushmita Dev of the Indian National Congress, Baijayant “Jay” Panda of the Biju Janata Dal, and Anurag Thakur of the Bharatiya Janata Party. I’ll be moderating.

You can RSVP for the event here. If you can’t make it person, we will post video of the event within 2-3 days. We’re grateful to the Georgetown India Initiative and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) for co-hosting this event with us.

If you have any questions you would like me to ask, send me a message.

Saksham Khosla and I have a new paper that reviews a fascinating, nascent empirical literature on the functioning and performance of India’s elite civil service cadre, the Indian Administrative Service (IAS).

Seemingly everyone has an opinion on what ails the IAS and what reforms ought to be pursued. But for the first time, we have actual hard data that can help inform both what is broken and, in turn, what fixes might be applied.

Our paper, and the literature we review, tries to answer three questions:

What determines the career success of officers in the IAS? To what degree can individual officers influence tangible development outcomes in areas such as poverty, health, and education? And what impact does politics have on bureaucratic functioning?

The full paper can be found here. But for those who would like an easy, one-page summary of the key take-aways, have a look at this policy brief.