Missing Craft In Indias Public Policy Classrooms

Public policy has become something of a fashion statement in the university education world. Many will argue that they are advancing the Viksit Bharat 2047 agenda, training the public policy specialists the country needs. The intent is not in question. What deserves reflection is the experience of the past, as graduates of these programmes primarily enter five sectors: Think tanks, consulting firms, the government’s advisory roles, the media, and national and international organisations in the development sector. The question here is what sort of training these students require.A think tank needs someone who can turn a messy regulatory problem into a two-page brief a minister will read on the way to a meeting. A consulting firm needs someone to structure ambiguous questions and defend them before a sceptical client. A newsroom wants 800 words that are sharp, sourced and land an argument. Common among all is writing for decision-makers, working with data, navigating stakeholders, and operating within constraints. How much of a typical Master’s curriculum builds those capabilities? This is a reality check.The job is a 360-degree reading of the problem, a different discipline from the tidy policy-feedback cycle drawn on the classroom whiteboard. A professional must decipher the policy question itself to see the full field of stakeholders behind it: the individuals affected, the institutions involved, the rules that bind them, and the incentives that move each. That ability to frame the real question as a vaguely stated problem is the most valuable skill in the field and the least taught.The outcomes of a policy must be debated as seriously as its intent — above all, the inadvertent consequences. There is not a 100% efficient and effective policy; the task is to maximise every attempt at the goal while minimising damage, much of which falls outside the decision-maker’s immediate purview. A transport reform restructures the local economy; a subsidy redraws an industry. Both the bird’s-eye and the worm’s-eye views matter — the sweep of the system and the texture of the single affected life — and the rare skill is holding them at once.This is where the capacity-building comes in. First, students are trained more to write 6,000-word papers for academic purposes, but the job requires a concise 600-word note with the recommendation at the beginning. Second, data fluency should be considered a default skill rather than a speciality; individuals who add value engage with datasets directly instead of outsourcing the analysis of the numbers. Third, the political economy of reform, the most under-taught subject in the field: Students learn what the optimal policy is, but rarely why it is blocked — by incumbents, by permit raj, by the gap between a provider-state and a regulator-state. Kerala’s transport reform has stalled for two decades, though the right answer has long been known, while Tamil Nadu and Gujarat struck very different bargains between states, markets, and citizens. Indian students need Indian case studies of this kind, not the western examples on which they are too often trained. Teach the lessons of failure, not just the formula.The deeper error is to mistake the transdisciplinary nature of the field for a licence to staple a few subjects together. Public policy is not a sample of economics, law and political science compiled into modules; that way, it does more harm than good. The discipline lies in applying those subjects to the question at hand—assimilating the many faces of a single issue into one coherent answer. What should be taught is not a reading list, but a method for understanding the layers of governance from the Union to local bodies, grounded in the Constitution and informed by international, regional, and local economies, with an emphasis on data interpretation.None of this goes beyond the schools that teach the subject; it asks them to revise the curriculum and open the classroom to those who practise. A degree program alone cannot create skilled practitioners. A well-designed internship and a capstone built around a live policy problem do the work a syllabus cannot do—they place the student inside a professional environment with real stakeholders, deadlines, and consequences before graduation rather than after it on someone else’s payroll. The greater the engagement of practitioners in the learning process—designing briefs, mentoring the capstone, and teaching alongside faculty—the shorter the distance from the seminar room to the job. Practice is not an add-on to the degree; it is the bridge the degree is meant to build.The programmes in India are very good at producing graduates who can describe policy, but they are far less effective at producing individuals who can practise it. Almost every destination these students reach hires on practical skills rather than descriptive qualifications. That mismatch is the greatest constraint on their opportunities, and the institutions teaching the subject have largely failed to address it.The think tanks, the newsrooms, the ministries and the international agencies are all waiting for people who can do the work, not merely explain it. The task before our institutions is to stop treating practice as an afterthought and start treating it as the curriculum.Build the practitioner, and the opportunities follow.(The views expressed are personal)This article is authored by D Dhanuraj, president, Association for Public Policy Education (APPE) India and chairman, Centre for Public Policy Research, Kochi.