Moving mountains or providing the thrust to policy education in India?

By Harini Santhanam

Classical works on governance – be it the old treatise on statesmanship from India – Kautilya’s Arthashastra or, its successor in the form of the western charter on practical governance, the 1215 Magna Carta, have illustrated the need for education in Public Policy (PP). These works have shown all along that though PP is formed from the substance of everyone’s thoughts and actions, it has rarely acquired the right awakening to become part of mainstream education.

Cut to today, we live in a fast-transforming world driven by a dynamic socio-political machinery, where many mutually birthed technologies are considered critical to supporting the workings of Industry 4.0. In this new developmental narrative, humans have a pivotal role as innovators and as contributors to the ‘knowledge economy’, which has maximised the need for micro-level regulation and action planning of data policies for better governance. With the need to not only document strategies but also to ‘bank’ them or evolve them constantly, the global knowledge industry has vastly concentrated on exploring the criticalities of decision-making while exposing the impacts of these thought-based products on human societies.

In this era, policy education hence brings with itself the relevance of understanding and analysing the thought mechanisms and action recommendations from a practical perspective. Hence, in search of the thrust and the thirst to provide the domain knowledge, PP education today needs to overcome a ‘realisation barrier’ needed to create the thought leaders and public administrators. The fact that PP is capable of connecting societies with strategic planning, and the people with the right policies become their unique selling point for creating the right educational pathways in this domain.

Let us look at a survey of the leading Public Policy educators in India (Figure 1).

Survey of Institutions Across Major Cities and States in India Providing Exclusive Programmes in Public Policy (Compiled from pan-Indian institutional websites advertising courses in Public policy in India)

This reveals the need for more comprehensive courses that provide the educational space for the subject in the country. It is evident that the cities in the National Capital Region (NCR), especially, Delhi, enjoy being the seat of Public Policy education in the country, understandably due to their placement within the epicentre of national decision-making. Further, most of these courses are offered only at Master’s level across these institutions than at the Bachelors’ or Doctoral level.

Number of Courses Offering Public Policy (Compiled from a variety of internet sources, including websites listing announcements for Public policy courses in India)

A cursory look at these figures as well as the syllabi floated by the top institutions in the country reveal the following main problems in imparting PP education:

Only traditional or tried-and-tested programmes like Economics, Econometrics, Political science, International Relations or Law feature largely in the syllabi of PP courses or programmes. On the other side of the world, global PP educators are riding the high wave of sustainable development with the agreement that adopting science and technology into PP syllabi is critical to achieving the desired balance of perspectives and neutrality in decision-making via producing proactive policies. The triple-bottom-line approach has hence, become a crucial consideration of PP educators worldwide to inculcate core competencies in PP students.

Owing to the nature of the course, PP is mostly viewed as a “mature” student’s choice of learning (say, at the Master’s level), whereas, in the present world, successes in PP education attainment and adopting effective pedagogies to deliver PP programmes inherently rely on major skill development from a basic phase through learning core computational sciences including data analytics, strategies and decision making, design and innovation.

The points above illustrate the inherent need for better thought-out syllabi for PP from educators. The need to incorporate research competencies as part of PP course curricula across the country is also indicated. This can help to develop a strong framework for education as well as achieve the desired educational outcomes. On the other hand, a visible slump in the number of opportunities for carving out long-term careers in the public sector in India has discouraged many good educators from offering these courses consistently, especially at the Bachelor’s (basic) or doctoral (advanced) levels. One factor that distracts students who are passionate to study the subject but shy away from it is ‘placements’. For most students, the translatable success of their education is in the form of obtaining immediate placements within an institution and a decent paycheck.

However, the regular placement model is bound to fail in the case of PP, since internships and learning through experience from associating with policymakers are more in order. The gain on the investment in terms of time, money and effort, can only be measured in terms of the evolution of high-calibre professionals from students of PP, who can redefine societal policymaking, design better policy cycles, innovate the solutions to ‘wicked problems’ and finally, contribute to governance by solving multi-sectoral, inter-dependant policy riddles set in different time frames.

PP educators, who wish for the course to be taken as a serious subject of study, the catch comes in the constant push for a high level of external networking, in the face of dynamic socio-political changes undergone by society to prove the worth of the course. While the private sector roles recognise the skills and training in strategic planning and decision-making combined with analytical skills, normal-course campus placement opportunities remain limited for PP students at present. This discourages them from pursuing the course, even though the teachers adopt new and interesting pedagogy for delivering the courses. Even simply having highly motivated students in the course, may not adequately reflect on their employability post the completion of the programme.

It is important then to concentrate on value-building the course around the core concepts of accountability to a society’s growth – much akin to a doctor’s first line of duty – which can have an immense direct and indirect potential to contribute to our national GDP. Understanding the economic significance of the PP course can be a trend-changer for the knowledge economy. For example, policy research and education can contribute positively if talented policy professionals helped achieve multi-sectoral policy coherence, minimise risks and delays and provided scope for quicker decision-making.

On the other hand, inconsistent and/or isolated policy recommendations, and bad policy advice always impact growth at multiple levels, create obstructions in the development of the society and become the major causes for the stagnation of the economy. Global examples provide surprising snapshots of such impacts of policy approaches. Taking the case of trade policies, on the surface, inward-oriented policies are known to contribute to lesser pollution intensity of GDPs, compared to export-oriented trade policies! However, these trends are not easily apparent to a statistician or economist without an edge for policy impact assessments.