Conclusion
Our report indicates both, strengths and weaknesses of how Bihar’s public sector is equipped and managed, and how well it delivers to its citizens. Our findings hint at several possible reform paths.
Among the strengths of Bihar’s public sector are a generally committed and satisfied workforce that is largely able to get a sense of fulfilment from their work. Encouragingly, our embedded conjoint experiment (reported separately) revealed a pro-marginalised potential among managerial bureaucrats that can be leveraged to fight multi-dimensional poverty. In short, the picture our report paints about the people behind the posts is generally more positive than widely believed.
At the same time, our report also indicates severe shortfalls. There is an urgent need for capital investments in frontline facilities and a need to ensure well equipped managerial offices. This includes across all levels female toilets to ensure that women find an acceptable and welcoming working environment. The high number of closed facilities, especially for anganwadis and health (sub-)centers raises serious concerns and questions the efficacy of tech-based surveillance to enforce staff attendance.
Our findings hint at possible reform paths than include dedicated career counselling and mentoring programs to make the bureaucracy more representative of the society it serves. This is particularly relevant for managerial positions where women, non-General castes, and those from marginalised socio-economic backgrounds are underrepresented.
To leverage the potential of the people staffing Bihar’s public sector, our findings suggest that trust is an essential ingredient to better worker motivation and thereby state effectiveness. This requires taking seriously voiced concerns by frontline staff about repetitive tasks and a lack of purpose. Instead of utilizing technology to surveil frontline staff (and at times increasing their reporting burden), technology can instead be used to automate odd tasks and to assist frontline staff. At the same time, more emphasis should be put on relational work between managers and frontline staff and among peers at the frontline. Our findings show a widespread sense of loneliness of frontline staff. Building bonds across administrative levels therefore appears as an effective way to improve effort levels. Encouragingly, frontline staff widely agreed that they are willing to work harder if others do so as well.
Our findings also indicate that state-cadre bureaucrats matter. Similar to IAS officers who have a leadership role in coordinating across departments at district-level, it is the state-cadre bureaucrats at block- and district-level who frequently interact with frontline staff and who hold an important leadership role. Recognising their importance and providing them with the training for this difficult role can allow to provide them with the necessary tools and mindset to coordinate higher effort levels across frontline staff in their blocks and districts.
Our report indicates severe gaps in service provision and some of our findings around closed health (sub-)centers and underresourced anganwadis are alarming. Ensuring a steady and high-quality provision of these services is key to realizing Bihar’s potential. To achieve this, both capital investments and rekindling public management are required. Building state capacity and reforming public service provision systems takes time and commitment. Bringing about change is not accomplished by tinkering formal rules (albeit this may be part of the process) or simply increasing fund allocation.
To make sure that all citizens of Bihar receive high-quality services, a broader reform effort is needed but we also want to stress that this is not impossible. Bihar has in the past shown how the state can be transformed. The challenges for health, education, early childhood services, and employment generation differ from those departments which mainly face logistical tasks. Unlike building roads, these services are more difficult to monitor from above – one cannot send an engineer to a health center to audit its service provision after the fact. The services in this report have a large human component to it and in order to improve them, recognising this fact rather than problematising it appears justified: our findings indicate that there is a positive potential among Bihar’s public sector workers across levels and management practices should build on this asset rather than meeting frontline workers with suspicion.