Many takers for public policy studies, but that is unlikely to improve India’s governance problems

India is rapidly witnessing an expansion of public policy education that teaches students such subjects as data analysis, impact assessment and policy implementation. The number of policy schools has risen from around 10 in 2016 to over 130 in 2024.

New degrees at public and private institutions, policy labs and consultancy-oriented programmes have emerged with the hope and belief that graduates of these courses will be better equipped to assist in governance.

Yet rather than broadening how public problems are understood, this expansion often reinforces the idea that policy is best approached as a technical exercise, governed by metrics, models and operational optimisation.

This matters because policy education does more than train professionals: it shapes how governance itself is imagined. When public policy is framed primarily as problem-solving rather than political judgement, questions of power, issues of law and social conflict are pushed to the margins.

Such a framing of policy took shape alongside a broader redefinition of the state and governance.

The economic reforms of 1991 reshaped not only India’s economy but its understanding of public policy development. As the country moved away from a developmental state towards market-led growth, the state has been increasingly recast as a regulator and facilitator rather than a provider and employer.

One of the clearest outcomes of this shift is the contraction of formal public sector employment. The government and public sector undertakings were among the few institutions where constitutional commitments, particularly caste-based reservations, could be enforced in a stable manner.

As privatisation, outsourcing and contractual work expanded, this diminished. By 2025, only about 6% of India’s workforce was employed in the public sector.

This indicates more than a labour market shift. It narrowed the channels through which redistribution and social justice had been pursued and reframed public policy around efficiency and performance.

At the same time, the Masters in Business Administration emerged as the emblematic degree of aspiration. Although designed for corporate management, its influence extended into public administration. As the management scholar, Henry Mintzberg warns, business schools often “train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences”. When managerial thinking becomes the language of public policy formation, democratic consensus recedes.

Growth without critical engagement

India now hosts more than a quarter of all public policy schools in Asia. The growth in such institutions reflects rising student demand and institutional investment.

However, the expansion has been shaped less by an engagement with India’s political and historical realities and more by global educational influences and career-oriented market logic. As a result, policy education has been strongly influenced by frameworks rooted in economics and managerial thinking, with limited attention to political theory, law, social analysis or history.

This orientation shapes what is taught – and what is neglected. Students learn to analyse schemes and measure outcomes, but are less encouraged to ask who defines the public interest or how history shapes the access of dominant castes to state resources. Policy is framed as a neutral problem-solving exercise, focusing on technical solutions while downplaying the political forces that shape outcomes.

‘Technocratic neutrality’

A core assumption in contemporary policy education is that better technical tools will produce better policy. However, this is misleading. Technical analysis is never neutral. What is measured, how categories are defined and whose experiences become visible through data are shaped by institutions, history and power. Data often reproduces existing hierarchies.

This framing also alters how policy choices are understood. Decisions about public priorities, risks and trade-offs are presented as technical outcomes rather than political options.

As a result, policy appears to rest on expertise rather than consensus, narrowing democratic scrutiny and privileging dominant interests.

For policy graduates, short-term internships offer only fleeting exposure to lived realities, leaving deeper questions of power and inequality largely unaddressed.

No power analysis

When policy is taught as a neutral science detached from history and power, it produces practitioners fluent in technical solutions but poorly equipped to engage with the foundational ideas of public action.

Most policy curricula remain thinly grounded in political and social theory, constitutional law or history. Graduates are comfortable with data but less prepared to interrogate who sets priorities or why certain voices are marginalised. Terms such as “equity” and “justice” circulate widely, often without the analytical grounding needed to give them substance.

Stripped of context, they risk becoming rhetorical placeholders rather than tools for understanding inequality. What is reproduced is a view of policy as technocratic governance rather than contestation and of inequality as a managerial problem rather than a political and social condition.

This has concrete implications. India’s major policy challenges, from agrarian distress and healthcare inequity to educational exclusion and environmental justice, are embedded in political and socio-economic structures that cannot be understood through analytics platforms and indicators alone.

India’s public policy education is shaped by the managerial logic of liberalisation. As technical expertise displaces deliberative judgement and neutrality masks political choice, the space for democratic disagreement narrows. What is ultimately at stake is how policy-making is imagined and whose knowledge is allowed to shape it.

Vivek ND teaches Political Science in the School of Law, Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru.