Oxford India Short Introductions Public Policy in India

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What are the contours of the field of public policy? How has it evolved? What broad questions does it grapple with? How do policymaking. implementation, and evaluation work in India? What are the steps involved in law making and what often holds back its implementation? How well do the globally hailed policymaking theories actually work in India? This short introduction addresses such debates and more. Tracing the evolution of the policymaking process in India, with relevant examples and case studies, it provides a concise and lucid overview of how policies develop, how they are implemented, the techniques of evaluation, and the challenges in governance that the country faces. It demonstrates that formulating, implementing, and evaluating public policy is a cyclical process as changing times keep throwing up new choices and challenges.

For a subject that is central to most of media cover- age in the country-outstripping even cricket and Bollywood-public policy in India suffers from a drought of books. This gap is felt even more acutely because given its special nuances of colonial his- tory, administrative challenges, and a highly distinctive political culture, international books scarcely cover the policy realities of the country. So when Oxford University Press (OUP) approached us to write on the subject for the Oxford India Short Introduction series, we jumped at the opportunity.

Our attempt in this short introduction has been to strike a balance between rigour and accuracy on the one hand and accessibility on the other. We have applied a simple structure of formulation, implementation, and evaluation to span the subject. We have tried to present a fair amount of recent research.

For a multidisciplinary field like public policy, any choice of boundary would be necessarily arbitrary and there is absolutely no claim of comprehensiveness here. We have tried to serve up an appetizer rather than a sumptuous meal, to part the curtains to allow a glimpse rather than provide an all-encompassing survey of the landscape.

We owe a huge debt to the team at OUP, as well as the referees, for shepherding the volume through on a strict timeline. We alone are responsible for the errors that have doubtless escaped the scrutiny of many pairs of eyes.

Public policy is too important a matter to be left to policymakers alone. Our aspiration here is no less than bringing about greater appreciation of and participation in public policy in India, to contribute to the process of replacing heat with light in the area. To the extent that the volume kindles interest in the reader to further explore the fascinating subject, we shall con- sider our efforts amply rewarded.

It was a chilly November morning in Patna. The year, 2005. Nitish Kumar, the newly elected chief minister (CM), had called Abhayanand, a senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer with impeccable reputation for integrity, intelligence, and innovative thinking, to his temporary residence for an early morning meeting. Kumar's top challenge in fixing Bihar was law and order. The state was on the brink of lawlessness, where politically connected hoodlums roamed in jeeps bran- dishing firearms in open daylight. Kidnapping was fast becoming the state's signature industry. People in the capital feared to step out after dark. There was no hope of turning Bihar around without fixing law and order. Kumar hoped Abhayanand would know how to do it. (See Chakrabarti 2012.)