Why India is relying on outside policy expertise

India has taken on the governing tasks of a much richer country while running the headcount of a poorer one. A second policy workforce grew into that gap, and the state now depends on people it does not employ. Somewhere in your extended family is a young person who says they work in public policy or the development sector. The answer gets a polite pause, then the question: so when are you writing the UPSC? They are not. Yet their days are unmistakably governmental, spent on a groundwater brief for a state department, or a grassroots school survey, as examples. A field that barely existed in 2005 counts nearly sixty policy schools and thousands of jobs. Why they keep arriving is easy. Why the country needs them is the harder question. 

Consider where governing happens. Whether the school teaches, the clinic is staffed, or clean drinking water arrives rests with states, which spend roughly three-fifths of all government money. What they govern has grown steadily more complex, from solar tariffs to urban transit financing. A district officer trained for revenue and law and order is now expected to negotiate a power purchase agreement, and nothing in their training covers it. 

Prosperity adds its own pressure. Richer societies, the economist Adolph Wagner observed, demand more from the state and more complicated things from it, faster than the machinery adapts. India crossed into that phase fifteen years ago. Regulators multiplied across telecom, securities, electricity and data protection, each needing people who read a statute and a spreadsheet at once. Politics compounded it. Election promises weigh far more than two decades ago, and governments try to honour them. Karnataka’s five guarantees consumed close to a seventh of the state’s revenue spending in year one. Behind each sits a beneficiary database, an exclusion protocol, a grievance channel, an audit trail. Somebody must build it all, fast. A fourth push came from Parliament. 

The Companies Act of 2013 made corporate social responsibility spending compulsory for large firms, conjuring overnight a pool of private money for public problems, one that now exceeds forty thousand crore rupees a year. That money needs people who can diagnose a gap, design a response, run it and judge whether it worked. 

In 2013, not many in India were trained for it. The obvious answer was for the broader ecosystem, led by the state to hire. It could not. Devesh Kapur has shown Indian public employment shrinking between 1991 and 2011, from 19.1 to 17.9 million, while the population grew by 350 million. Recruitment moves slowly, sometimes litigation stalls it. When the Union government tried a side door in August 2024, advertising forty-five senior specialist posts, it withdrew them within three days after a row over reservation. In reality? Rented capacity filled the gap. 

A recent RTI reply counted nearly 1,500 consultants hired across forty-four central departments, at 302 crore a year. Most state secretariats now house project management units, teams from consulting firms and foundations, a corridor away from the officers they support. Much of that work is capable, some excellent; the point is not scandal. The point is what we built without quite deciding to: a second governance workforce the state depends on and does not employ. It carries costs. Rented capacity departs with the contract, together with all capacity built and knowledge acquired, and a scheme whose unit winds down lands on a department that never built the muscle. The workforce stands on nothing: no clear entry points, no linear career pathways, not much recognition. Mission Karmayogi has put a competency and training framework before a crore of serving officials. Though that means the state is professionalising in earnest, but only for the people already inside it. The fixes are ordinary, and specific. A code for the policy analyst when the occupations registry is next revised, so the workforce shows up in employment data. 

Recruitment rules letting departments hire against sanctioned posts, as the Indian Economic Service has hired economists since 1961. States can turn the project units they keep re-procuring into permanent policy cells, at lower cost. Funders and foundations can write full salaries into multi-year budgets, not an overhead line. And the field can register who enters and leaves; professions curdle into guilds, which is why a register, not a licence, is the answer. This is not charity toward a young workforce. India has taken on the governing tasks of a richer country with the headcount of a poorer one, and the gap is held together by people on eighteenmonth contracts with nowhere to go next. So who will do India’s thinking? Whoever the state can rent. The question is whether we get around to hiring, training and retaining them. 

The author is the founder of Public Policy India and of STRIDE, a research initiative.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.