Decoding education experiment in Delhi

THE AAP'S DELHI EXPERIMENT WAS NOT AN UNAMBIGUOUS SUCCESS BUT IT DID SUCCEED, AT LEAST IN PART, IN CHALLENGING OUTDATED BUREAUCRATIC NORMS AND HABITS, AIYAR SAID

- HT Correspondent

NEW DELHI: One of the most talked about policy experiments in India in recent memory is the reform of government schools in the city-state of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Under the leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party, the Delhi government has implemented an innovative program to equip students with foundational literacy and numeracy. But while these reforms are much discussed, they have been surprisingly under-studied.

A new book by the scholar Yamini Aiyar tries to remedy this gap. Aiyar's new book, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi's Schools, draws on three years of ethnographic research where she and a team of colleagues were embedded in a cluster of schools across the national capital. She shared lessons from the Delhi experiment on last week's season premiere of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy coproduced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.