Decentralizing Education: Navigating India's Reform Challenges

Today my guest is Yamini Aiyar, who is currently a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and the author of the recent book Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools. Her main research interests are contemporary politics, state capacity, welfare policy, and federalism.

We talked about the challenges of education policy and welfare in India, the lack of agency experienced by school administrators and teachers, the role of local governments in education, Delhi’s experiment with education reforms, portable benefits and school vouchers, and much more.

Recorded July 16th, 2025.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:01:27) - Delhi School Experiment

(00:12:45) - Education in a Welfare State

(00:28:34) - Incompetent Petty Tyrants

(00:38:17) - Federalism and Education

(00:50:18) - How to Build Empowerment

(01:05:39) - Is the Delhi Experiment Generalizable?

(01:18:52) - Portability and Education

(01:28:15) - Outro