Editorial

The history of modern democracy is indeed a timeline of the development of institutions that are the enabling blocks of governance. These institutions have built the edifice of which the modern state rests and where checks and balances come with regulatory frameworks that are the watchdogs against all threats to democracy. As economies reformed and fostered market-based solutions, the need for such enabling institutions became even more critical. Globalisation brought in fresh threats to the superstructure that existed domestically, and the need for further improvement and refinement of institutions became vital to sustaining and protecting democracies and their forms of governance that promised power to people through representation in decision-making and in establishing the rule of law.

This special issue comprises a set of papers by academics and institution builders who have watched the evolution of the democratic process and its challenges through the fastest pace of growth that India has seen, coupled with a complete transformation in its political economy. In the last five decades, we started by giving power to the third tier through the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution and setting up Municipal and Panchayat-level bodies. This transition has now taken firm roots and has gone a long way in establishing a democratic ethos that has been studied by several scholars, highlighting the fault lines that came up and the gains achieved. Since then, the challenges to democracy have come through the growth of a new elite that benefited from an economy that opened up in the nineties. Multilateralism, with the advent of the World Trade Organisation and its agreements, tested sovereignty in various ways, and the institutions that it engendered required a further set of reforms to handle the pace of globalisation that was unleashed.

The papers in this special issue take a deep dive into the changes that have come up and discuss the various manifestations of a democratic system that dynamically stands up to its challenges. Jyotsna Jha’s paper titled Evolution of an Independent Research Institution: A reflective analysis identifies plurality as the most crucial principle that helped in the process of institutionalisation in this case. This paper examines the idea and the elements of the process of institutionalisation. Her paper uses the experiences that emerge in building an independent research organisation and running it successfully over 25 years. The author, heading this organisation for nearly 14 years, drawing from Scott’s three-pillar approach, reflects on how an organisation becomes an institution and the joys and challenges of leading the institution-building process. The real test of an organisation in becoming an institution is in the capacity to respond to the emergent needs both inside the organisation and to the external environment while sticking to the vision and perceived mandate, maintaining order and stability within available resources and legal frameworks that guide the functioning of the organisation.

Niveditha Menon and Archana Purohit, in A Conversation on Public Policy and Institutions discuss the conference on Institutions and Public Policy organised by the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies. The conference explored the relationships between institutions and public policy concerning the themes of independent institutions and policy discourse, gender and public spaces, education as a public good, public finance and governance, and health and social security. This descriptive paper, acting in part as the Proceedings for the conference, engages with the various dimensions of these themes and summarises the major arguments articulated within the conference.

Shantha Sinha then discusses the foundations, resilience, and spirit of democratic institutions in her lecture, where she gives a master class on the spirit of democracy and the importance of the Constitution as a radical document; the author engages with how the struggle for independence resulted in the imagination of India as a sovereign, democratic, secular republic. Because this history is being systematically erased to create an alternate singular narrative of nationalism that is against the core constitutional values, there is a need to revisit the foundational values and emotions that gave rise to the democratic institutions and ensure that these processes are put to work through informed, organised, active citizen participation keeping in view principles of equality and social justice. Active citizenship is indeed a powerful transformative force to expand and deepen democracy. The essay details the reason why the spirit of a democratic culture by citizens from the level of gram panchayats (GPs) and municipalities to the district, state and national level has the capacity to expose and resist the construction of Hindu nationalist hegemony, its falsity, and authoritarianism.

Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey look at the present state of the Independent Institutuons and the systematic process by which they have been diluted. They futher emphasise the need to build alernate cultural mode of protest in their paper titled Social Movements and Independent Institutions. Neha Ghatak and Rajat Chaudhary in the paper titled Beyond the classroom: A case study on the relationship between education as a public good, social justice and critical pedagogy focus on how education becomes transformative force central to education’s discourse. Building on evidence from ‘Bihar Mentorship Project’ which was an action research project at Centre for Budget and Policy Studies, Bengaluru, the paper establishes that ‘critical pedagogy’ can become a vital tool to actualise the idea of social justice in education systems and hence, is at the core of imagining education as a ‘public good’. However, with the evolution of societies at a rapid pace, the idea of education as a ‘public good’ stands challenged and needs to be further analysed in relation to contemporary societies. This article argues that the understanding of public goods stemming from the discipline of economics is inadequate to define the needs of the contemporary education systems. The article highlights that the idea/element of ‘social justice’ is central to understanding the concept of education as a ‘public good’ and even though Indian policies on education have an element of social justice, the practice needs reimagining.

Gayathri Raghuraman, John Kujur, Madhusudhan B. V. Rao and Sridhar Prasad develop a monitoring and evaluation tool that uses easily available, taluk level data, from various sources to compute a cumulative nutrition index that can serve as a dipstick for monitoring nutrition status by block/district level officials in their paper titled Assessing progress in nutrition: Proposing a sub-district tool for monitoring and governance. A lot of data is collected at state, district, block, and village levels across India as part of the monitoring and evaluation process for various government schemes ongoing in the country. Under the department of Women and Child Development in Karnataka a lot of data on children under 6 years of age and pregnant and lactating women is collected by Aanganwadi workers in the state. Although the current process of data collection, its analysis and interpretation require much more fiscal and human investment, it continues to generate large amounts of data. Interpretation of this data occurs largely at the national and sub-national levels ignoring district and sub district level variations in health and nutrition indices. Rarely are the results of this data analysis shared with district and sub-district level officials as they are not involved in policy formation. These officials also do not have training in data analysis and its interpretation and hence cannot use the vast information available to them.

Sowmya J., Abida U. C., Madhusudhan B. V. Rao and Sridhar Prasad raise the issue of how governance needs to include the welfare of children. In their paper titled Do child friendly panchayats mean good governance? An analysis on 10 gram panchayats in Karnataka The authors proposes a comprehensive framework that can help in analysing the underpinnings of what makes a GP child friendly. The framework is further extended to the overall governance of a GP as well. The institutional capability and governance of 10 GPs of Karnataka have been examined in detail using this framework. A ‘GP’ is the lowest tier of self-government within the Panchayati Raj Institutions and is entrusted with critical responsibilities such as poverty alleviation, delivery of welfare measures, primary education, empowerment of marginalised communities, etc. Apart from these, GPs are also endowed with responsibilities concerning the empowerment of women and the welfare of children.

Lastly, in this issue, there is a general article by Divya Chaudhry which makes a case for introducing actionable policy alternatives to address the human health hazards posed by agricultural use of pesticides in India. It discusses various aspects of the human health effects of prolonged pesticide exposure both in the international and national contexts.

Together these papers are a tribute to an institution built over the last quarter of a century and has chronicled and studied the transformation of the Indian political economy as a new millennium was ushered in, with unprecedented changes in technology, governance frameworks, international trade agreements and the enormous increase in awareness of rights and entitlements that accompanied some of the most successful peoples’ movements that modern India has seen. The papers read together then go on to address the challenges that the twenty-first century has thrown up as a discontent against globalisation creeps in, an impatience against the democratic process gives rise to uber nationalist tendencies and as majoritarianism rears its head to threaten the very democratic processes and institutions that enable the emergence of a variety of political processes. The future of inclusive growth in a manner that the ideals of democracy stand for the need a robust set of institutions that can stand up to strong dictatorial tendencies that tend to rear their heads in times of transition. The CBPS in its 25 years of existence and through this conference that forms the bedrock of this special issue underlines a few formidable challenges that have emerged and prescribes a strong set of institutional responses that will enable democracy in the twenty-first century.