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.