‘What is your name?’ ‘My name is______’.
Written on the book’s cover, this simple sentence caught my attention immediately. It is often the first question we ask a child, but the answers I’ve encountered over the years through my fieldwork have been anything but uniform. Some children respond fluently, adding their age, grade, and even their favourite subject. Others pause, gather courage, and take time to speak. This seemingly minor observation has stayed with me, reminding me that even the most basic question reflects the profound inequalities in confidence, fluency, and trust that define our school system in India.
Reading Yamini Aiyar’s Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools felt like being handed a vocabulary for questions I’ve always grappled with—about the nature of the Indian state, about reform and resistance, and about what it takes to build institutions in a democracy as complex and unequal as ours. The book is not merely about Delhi’s education reforms; it is a pedagogical offering on how public systems function, adapt, and sometimes stall despite the best of intentions.
As an economist in training, I have often been inclined to think of state capacity only in quantitative terms such as budgets, personnel ratios and survey outcomes. But after spending time in government departments and remote school sites where piles of files and broken furniture coexist with hopeful citizens and overburdened officials, I began to understand state capacity differently. It is not only what the state delivers, but how it delivers; not only what the state promises, but how those promises are negotiated, reshaped, or abandoned on the ground. Crucially, these experiences taught me that the state cannot be understood by isolating its institutions or actors. The schools, district offices, local politics, bureaucratic hierarchies, and community expectations form an interdependent system, and it is in the interaction between these parts that the multiple layers of state capacity are revealed.
Aiyar’s scholarship is significant in this context, as she critiques the dominant ‘plumbing’ view in public policy, where problems are seen as technical bottlenecks to be fixed by better design. Instead, she centres the lived reality of institutions, showing that systems are shaped as much by relationships and histories as by rules. Through vivid ethnographic detail and sharp institutional analysis, she unpacks what happens behind the scenes of a policy success story—the celebrated reforms in Delhi’s public schools under the Aam Aadmi Party government. The book moves beyond metrics to explore the daily lives of teachers, mid-level bureaucrats, and policymakers, each entangled in the dual pressures of political ambition and administrative logic. The ethnographic accounts reveal a deeper structural paradox: systems that relentlessly demand accountability from the bottom often undermine the very autonomy that enables frontline actors to respond with purpose. By tying every action to compliance with hierarchies, reforms risk hollowing out the discretionary space teachers and bureaucrats need to innovate or adapt to local realities.
One of the early chapters draws a powerful distinction between capacity and capability. Individuals may have skills and commitment, but unless organizations are structured to align and harness those skills, capability cannot emerge. This distinction resonated with me deeply, especially in education, where teachers often operate in environments that neither empower nor support them. One of the book’s most enduring questions stayed with me long after I turned the last page: Why do mission-mode reforms, despite short-term success, often fail to institutionalize themselves? She points to an uncomfortable but necessary truth: political will, charismatic leadership, or even increased budgets are not enough. Real reform depends on long-term investment in bureaucratic trust, routine systems, and institutional memory. Here, she charts how Delhi’s education reforms managed to partially transcend their ‘mission mode’ origins by embedding certain practices and reworking relationships between political and administrative actors. But this was not automatic; it was built slowly, often against resistance, and remains fragile.
The book’s portrayal of mid-level bureaucrats is particularly compelling. These are not villains in the story, nor are they passive implementers. Instead, they are often emotionally and professionally stretched, tasked with ‘delivering’ on reforms while navigating unclear procedures, frequent political changes, and limited autonomy. Her reading of their role dismantles the usual binary between reformers and resistors. It also challenges the casual use of phrases like ‘systemic change’ that permeate policy discourse. It shows us, in granular and processual terms, what that change actually looks like: messy, incremental, shaped by contestation and compromise. It reminds us that the state is not a black box, but a living institution shaped by the people within it, which always needs careful study. Her research involved being present with the state capturing real-time activities, talking to multiple stakeholders offering rich and rare insights that most case studies or official documents do not capture. She studies state capacity through observing and engaging with the state’s ability to initiate reforms and work on them to foster deeper transformation in teaching and learning. As Iyer puts it eloquently in the book: ‘State capacity is, after all, a voyage of discovery in which all actors have to be taken along.’
A particularly insightful section examines the contradictory role of government school teachers expected to be professional educators but burdened with non-teaching tasks ranging from surveys to election duty. This has shaped a dominant narrative of victimhood among teachers, one I frequently encountered while surveying schools in rural Odisha for my thesis work. Nearly every teacher I spoke to expressed frustration at being pulled away from the classroom. Yet, as she rightly argues, this narrative can also deflect accountability. The classroom is not just a site of constraints; it is also shaped by teachers’ own choices. Many adopt a narrow view of their role, focusing on syllabus completion for top-performing students to maintain exam performance, while neglecting foundational learning for the majority. This creates what Aiyar calls the ‘classroom consensus’—an unspoken agreement among teachers, parents, and administrators that education is about examination scores, not learning. This insight was particularly striking for me. The classroom consensus, as Aiyar argues, mirrors a societal consensus about the goals of education in India, where success is defined by select achievements rather than universal learning. Reform, then, must confront not just institutional bottlenecks, but deeply embedded social norms.
Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools is not just a case study of Delhi or education. It is a book about the Indian state—its rhythms, its frictions, and its capacity to both inspire and disappoint. It cautions against over-reliance on performance metrics and quick fixes, and urges a long-term commitment to building institutions that can reflect, learn, and adapt. The involvement of political leaders who turned into reformers restoring the dignity of government teachers and schools, engaging in a new language of participation and deliberation while navigating the tussle between bureaucracy and reformers, reveals what ‘systemic change’ actually comprises.
As I closed the final chapter, I realized that Aiyar’s work is not just an exploration of Delhi’s education reforms, but a methodological guide for how to study the state itself. Her insistence on immersive, ground-level engagement, speaking with teachers, sitting in classrooms, navigating cramped district offices, pushes back against the tendency in policy research to rely solely on aggregated data or neat theoretical models. For me, this built an understanding that meaningful scholarship requires patience, humility, and the willingness to embrace messiness. In this sense, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools is both a compelling narrative and a quiet manifesto for the craft of public policy research in India. It reminded me that state capacity is not just a matter of design, but of politics, relationships, and trust. And most importantly, it reminded me that it is important for policy scholars to be present in the lived realities of the state, to understand how and why the process of change is slow, and why it requires societal participation as an everyday task.