How the questions formed

I became interested in public systems in a slightly sideways way. For five years I ran a tuition centre in Delhi. The work was unglamorous and very exacting. A parent would arrive with a child who had already been told, in one register or another, that they were behind. The question was never the mission statement. It was whether Tuesday’s class would still exist in March, whether the fee was priced so that the household could continue, whether I had built a timetable that a tired child could actually inhabit. That is still how I look at a public programme. I look for the Tuesday.

Psychology, which I read alongside the business degree, gave me a second habit. People do not fail to claim a benefit only because a form is long, though forms are often long. They also fail because the office feels unreadable, because a neighbour’s story of humiliation travels faster than a circular, because the payment is promised in a voice that no longer sounds like it belongs to them. Administrative burden and shame are cousins. I do not treat that as a soft insight. I treat it as a design constraint.

The move into public policy and law was a decision to take those two habits somewhere they would be tested by institutions larger than a classroom. TISS has been that test: econometrics and impact evaluation on one side of the week, regulatory governance and the slow language of the state on the other. I like the combination. A regression that cannot survive a panchayat meeting is unfinished. A field story that cannot say what would count as evidence is also unfinished.

Fieldwork changed the questions I ask. In Hyderabad, at Pride Place, the Transgender Persons Act was not an abstract commitment. It was a petition register, a module officer, a station house that might or might not treat the person in front of them as a rights-holder. In two villages with Sanchay, a pension was a journey through a Block Development Officer’s office. For Transform Rural India, fourteen interviews across six states kept returning to a simple geographic unfairness: a service that exists in the district and still does not arrive. I left those rooms less interested in announcing programmes and more interested in the last mile of them.

I combine qualitative and quantitative methods because the problems I care about do not sit politely in one of those boxes. NFHS can tell you that own-use bank accounts raced ahead of household decision-making. It cannot tell you what a woman did with the account. An interview can tell you why a ration card stayed in another state. It cannot tell you how large the pattern is. I want both, and I want the writing to be honest about which one I have.

The problems I want to work on are concentrated, even when the methods are not. Social protection. Gender, including the implementation of rights that exist on paper. Rural public services and the panchayat as a site of delivery. Policing institutions where they are asked to do protection work. Strategy around those problems, including the unromantic work of costing and sequencing. I am early in the career. The work already has a grain. I would like the next few years to deepen it rather than decorate it.