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Global frameworks, local contingencies: policy translations and education

development in India
Rahul Mukhopadhyaya; Arathi Sriprakashb
a
School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India b Centre for
Educational Research, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

First published on: 29 November 2010

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 Compare
Vol. 41, No. 3, May 2011, 311–326

Global frameworks, local contingencies: policy translations and

education development in India
Rahul Mukhopadhyaya and Arathi Sriprakashb*
a
School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India; bCentre
for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Compare:
10.1080/03057925.2010.534668
CCOM_A_534668.sgm
0305-7925
Original
Taylor
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Dr
arathi9@gmail.com
000002010
ArathiSriprakash
and
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Journal of Comparative
(online)Education

Policies and programmes pursuing the universalisation of elementary education

(UEE) in developing nations have been influenced by a set of complex forces in
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international, state, and local arenas. This paper explores how a large-scale
standardised assessment programme shaped by international and market-oriented
discourses has been differently re-worked in the south Indian state of Karnataka.
We draw on observation and interview data with educators and administrators to
shed some light on their roles in reconstituting the meaning and practice of this
programme. The intended frameworks of ‘borrowed’ education policies are not
always reproduced or sustained in local contexts. Our paper shows how policies,
rather than ‘borrowed’ from one context to another, undergo a process of
‘translation’ involving the contextualisation and inevitable transformation of
policies.
Keywords: policy borrowing; India; standardised assessment; education policy

Introduction
Policies and programmes pursuing the universalisation of elementary education
(UEE) in developing nations have been influenced by a set of complex forces in
international, state, and local arenas. In countries such as India, government and
non-government agencies, non-profit organisations, corporate philanthropies, and
international bodies have had a hand in shaping ‘official’ discourses of educational
development. On one level, this has been seen to reinforce a common commitment to
the goal of universal education that has been set in international fora. On another level,
the multiple players in educational policy and practice bring different meanings and
interests to development programmes. In schools and their regions, educators and
administrators interpret and reshape policy and programmes with relation to local
interests and resources.
This paper explores how a large-scale standardised assessment programme influ-
enced by international and market-oriented discourses has been differently re-worked
in the south Indian state of Karnataka. We draw on observation and interview data
with educators and administrators to shed some light on their roles in reconstituting
the meaning and practice of this programme. The intended frameworks of ‘borrowed’
education policies are not always reproduced or sustained in local contexts. Our paper
shows how policies, rather than ‘borrowed’ from one context to another, undergo a
process of translation. We argue that conceptualising the movement of development

*Corresponding author. Email: arathi9@gmail.com

ISSN 0305-7925 print/ISSN 1469-3623 online

© 2011 British Association for International and Comparative Education
DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2010.534668
http://www.informaworld.com
 312 R. Mukhopadhyay and A. Sriprakash

policy as a process of ‘translation’ provides the space in which to pay attention to the
changing nature of local alliances, and the interests, conditions and possibilities they
articulate. In this paper we use the concept of ‘translation’ following Latour (1986,
1999) to highlight the displacements and transformations that are inevitable in the
movement of policy across contexts.
The paper begins by introducing the research aims and methodology and the
bureaucratic contexts of education policy in India. We then review literature on educa-
tion policy borrowing, identifying the key arguments of this work, and implications
for how we understand policy processes, especially in development contexts. Through
this discussion we expand on the concept of policy ‘translations’, as a preferred
approach for analysing and understanding the movement of development policy. The
paper then takes the concept of policy translations to map the development and imple-
mentation of a specific education programme in the south Indian state of Karnataka.
We analyse the ways in which local actors differently constitute this specific
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programme with respect to bureaucratic and social interests and possibilities. In the
concluding part of this paper, our analysis is used to reflect on the conceptual contri-
butions of policy ‘translations’ to better understand the local contingencies of seem-
ingly ‘global’ development frameworks.

Research context and methodology

Our observations are based on in-depth sociological research conducted in a district
of Karnataka during the period 2005–2008. The research sought to trace the ways in
which educational policies and reforms for rural elementary government schools were
constructed by actors at different levels of the national and state education bureau-
cracy.1 The motivation of the research was to examine the plethora of ‘innovative’
programmes seeking to improve educational quality in government elementary
schools in the face of persistently poor quality of education in these schools. As its
point of departure, the study sought to respond to recent research on the Indian
elementary education system which identified ‘there are issues embedded more deeply
in the “system” or the institutional structures, processes and dynamics, which need to
be closely examined’ (Sharma and Ramachandran 2009, 3, emphasis in original).
Trailing a number of recent educational initiatives, the study found that a series of
transitions, displacements, and shifts characterise the trajectory of these programmes.
These drifts and changes in course were found to account for the seemingly contradic-
tory scenario where innovative educational programmes multiply without apparent
consequent improvement in the quality of government elementary schools. This paper
chooses the trajectory of only one such programme to emphasise our key arguments.
The research on which this paper is based involved multiple ethnographic methods
(participant observations, focus-group discussions, and semi-structured interviews
with administrators and educationalists) and was conducted at multiple sites (schools,
district offices, state and national offices). A total of 70 participants, including teach-
ers, head-teachers, junior and senior state officials, and national-level bureaucrats
were directly involved in the research. In this paper we primarily draw on field-notes
from observations as well as recorded interviews that have been transcribed and trans-
lated from Kannada to English. As we focus only on one programme in this paper, our
discussions below draw on ethnographic data that pertained more directly to the
trajectory of this programme. The examples we provide from field observations, inter-
views and observations of meetings, as well as relevant documents are, of necessity,
 Compare 313

extracts of processes and documents which are more ‘thickly’ detailed. The examples
are used in this paper to mark the defining shifts in understanding and transformation
of the programme across various actors within the education department, and are
assembled here as only a partial mapping.
A basic idea of bureaucratic relationships and policy-making arenas in Indian
education will be useful for readers of this paper. Responsibilities for educational
administration in India are shared between the centre (national) and the state govern-
ments. The hierarchy at the state level can be seen at least at five levels: the State
Education Ministry; the state-level Secretariat and Directorate; district education
offices; block education offices; and schools. The assessment programme we focus
on in this paper is a state government programme (Government of Karnataka) but it
has substantial financial support from the central (national) government. Such state-
level programmes emanate from state-level offices which are headed either by offic-
ers from the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) or by senior officers of the
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state education cadre. There are important differences between the ‘elite’ IAS cadre
and the state education cadre. Not only do they inhabit different institutional positions
of authority and decision-making, but also often distinct social, economic and cultural
domains. This has significant implications for our arguments and will be expanded on
in our analysis. The design and delivery of education programmes in India is typically
a top-down process with the assumption that implementation by officers across the
bureaucratic hierarchy will follow a policy ‘blueprint’ (cf. Dyer 2000). We follow
one such programme as it travels through the state education department’s hierarchy
and explore the ways in which it is reconstituted by differently located actors in the
education arena.

From policy borrowing to policy translation

Our interest in mapping some of the translations of a specific education programme
stems from the need to engage more closely with the contextual specificities and also
the seeming ‘ad hocery and messiness’ (Ball 2006, 21) of policy processes, especially
processes influenced by global development frameworks. There has been a growing
body of work by educationalists on different aspects of so-called policy ‘borrowing’
that have accompanied processes of globalisation (cf. Dale 1999; Phillips 2007;
Phillips and Ochs 2004a, 2004b; Schriewer and Martinez 2004; Steiner-Khamsi 2006;
Halpin and Troyna 1995). Though the examples of policy ‘borrowing’ used in this
body of work are predominantly Eurocentric, there are also some exceptions which
have examined the movement of education development policy in the global South,
including cases from the African continent (Jansen 2004; Spreen 2004a, 2004b;
Vavrus 2004), Latin America (Luschei 2004), and Central Asia (Steiner-Khamsi and
Stolpe 2006). Many of these studies suggest that educational reforms have taken simi-
lar trajectories in recent decades. These similarities are characterised by: the
economic rationale of competitive growth that drives educational reforms; an empha-
sis on education that can feed into the new knowledge-economy driven by science and
technology; and the introduction of managerial practices within the domain of educa-
tion administration and delivery, intending to correct governance issues plaguing
state-driven education. However, as these studies also show, the circuits of globalisa-
tion through which education reforms and policy ‘borrowing’ processes work are
locally contingent. In this articulation of global and local relationships, global agen-
das may find resonance with existing reformatory demands and thereby a means of its
 314 R. Mukhopadhyay and A. Sriprakash

reproduction (Vavrus 2004), or they may be appropriated differentially and produce

hybrid systems (Spreen 2004a, 2004b; Steiner-Khamsi and Stolpe 2006).
It is surprising that in the policy-borrowing literature, South Asia, particularly
India, has not received its share of attention. India has been one of the fastest growing
economies in recent decades. However, in spite of large-scale efforts towards the
universalisation of elementary education from the mid-1990s, India is still far from
reaching this goal and widespread inequalities prevail in both the access to and
achievement in elementary education. There has been a sustained presence of multi-
lateral funding agencies in Indian education policy arenas, taking a direct role as co-
funders of large-scale centrally-driven educational programmes, and an indirect role
through linkages with both state and non-state agencies (cf. Kumar 2006; Fennell
2007). In light of these recent movements, and older networks of knowledge transfer
in the colonial period (cf. Allender 2009; Tschurenev 2008), India is not new to the
attractions and influences of policies and programmes having origins in other parts of
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the world.
The model of policy borrowing emerging from the work of Phillips and Ochs
(2004a, 2004b) has been especially influential in research in comparative education.
They propose a four-stage model to assist the analysis of policy-borrowing processes.
This involves: cross-national attraction, decision-making, implementation, and inter-
nalisation/indigenisation. While the four-stage model has proved to be useful as a
guiding framework to examine policy borrowing under diverse circumstances, the
authors themselves have cautioned against the delimitation ‘of complex issues by trap-
ping an analysis within what appears to be a limited framework of possibilities’
(Phillips and Ochs 2004b, 781) that all models are susceptible to. Our concern with
the premise of ‘borrowing’ is similar, where the linkages between an implemented
model and its origin are often assumed to be amenable to analysis in terms of an unam-
biguous direction and a chain of influences. On the one hand, this can explicate the
broader markers of policy transfer, however on the other hand, it also fails to engage
with complex local particularities that arise to challenge the homogenising effects of
dominant policy prescriptions and regimes.
Indeed, a question that is of concern to us is how we understand the assumed
‘universal rationality’ of global development agendas (cf. Meyer et al. 1997), given
the complex nature of the Indian post-colonial state and the diversity and local speci-
ficities that characterise it. There is still a paucity of detailed research in the field of
international and comparative education examining how policies and programmes are
constituted in local settings, especially in contexts of significant political, social and
economic change. This has been identified by Spreen, who raised concern that such
methodological neglect could elide significant actors and contingencies in our under-
standing of education policy processes:

given the contested nature of global influences – particularly those lodged within distinct
historical first/third world relations – one must query whether and when international
references are useful, and at what point policy makers and governments attempt to
obscure traces of international borrowing to indicate local ownership and/or ensure rele-
vance in their particular national contexts. (2004a, 102–3)

This brings us to consider the notion of policy ‘translations’ as a preferred way of

conceptualising and researching the movement of policy across contexts. As we
describe below, the notion of translations can help make visible the numerous ‘local’
actors that contextualise and reshape ‘global’ programmes. Not only this, the notion
 Compare 315

of policy ‘translations’ also puts into question the assumed ‘universal rationality’ of
global development agendas which resonates in the work of world institutional theo-
rists (cf. Meyer et al. 1997; Chabbott 2003).
In his study of education reform in North America, Nespor (2002) makes an
important observation: that reforms are often portrayed in academic and policy litera-
ture as ‘kernels of innovation’ which encounter particular, discrete ‘contexts’. In this
configuration, we are unable to see the ways in which ‘reforms’ and ‘contexts’ are co-
constitutive; that reforms themselves entail ‘particular kinds of contextual relations’
(Nespor 2002, 366). Instead, if we trace the trajectory of reform programmes in situ
we are open to the possibilities of this contingent and contextual relation that emerges
between different actors and programmes, which in turn inform the ways in which
programmes unravel and are ultimately realised. Bruno Latour (1986), in a seminal
essay, used ‘translation’ to show that power can only be understood meaningfully as
a consequence of actions/practices rather than as something which can be called upon
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as an explanatory force. We use a similar notion of ‘translation’ to show how policies

and programmes are marked by continuous shifts and displacements as a consequence
of their being inflected by the actions/practices of different actors within the education
department.
This concept of ‘translation’ was particularly useful in our study of an educational
reform programme, as we were able to see how the programme itself was mutable. By
tracing the movement and translation of the programme’s development and imple-
mentation we can better understand the often unintended and unanticipated outcomes
of the programme. These outcomes of school programmes are often cast as the ‘fail-
ure’ of teachers or other local actors, in ways that isolate their practices from other
social relations. By tracing the ‘translations’ of a programme, we can acknowledge the
multiple relationships that reconstitute the programme and how it is taken up in local
contexts. The move to the ‘local’ in this analysis does not signal a split between
‘global’ and ‘local’ practices as has arguably been implied in much of the policy
‘borrowing’ literature. Rather, a connected ‘series of transformations’ suggested by
the concept of policy translation allows us to reclaim the local by ‘understanding it as
a contingent effect of relations stretching beyond its conventionally recognized
borders’ (Nespor 2002, 378). Through this move, a disaggregated and performative
view of power is made evident (cf. Latour 1986), rather than a hegemonic one
suggested by the notion of policy ‘borrowing’ and by a ‘universal rationality’ of
global agendas. As we show, even the currently dominant managerial discourse of
market-driven efficiency doing the rounds in systems of public delivery across the
globe is unravelled in and through the very actions and practices of education officials
at different levels.

The political background of a programme – the KSQAO in Karnataka

By the mid-1990s there was a decided neoliberal turn of the Indian state in response
to the structural adjustment programme. The sphere of state education saw an
increased dependence on external aid for national education programmes and greater
reliance on the private sector in government elementary education. It was during this
period that India also became a signatory to international commitments for UEE. In
this context, educational development and its associated programmatic imperatives
came to be shaped increasingly through a neoliberal paradigm (cf. Sarangapani and
Vasavi 2003; Kumar 2006; Sadgopal 2006). As we explore below, the emergence of
 316 R. Mukhopadhyay and A. Sriprakash

the Karnataka School Quality Assessment Organisation examinations (which we will

call the KSQAO, as it is commonly known) can be located at this political-economic
conjuncture.
The KSQAO is a large-scale assessment survey of elementary school outcomes
first introduced in the academic year 2005–6 in Karnataka. Having made considerable
progress on physical infrastructure to improve access to elementary education, the
state positioned the KSQAO as a means of addressing the persisting low ‘quality’ of
education. A number of inquiries both in India and globally have highlighted how
classroom pedagogy, school cultures, and the longer-term outcomes of school partic-
ipation are significant, albeit difficult to measure, indicators of school ‘quality’ (cf.
UNESCO 2004; Alexander 2008; Tikly and Barrett 2009). However, the ‘quality’
assessment of the KSQAO was conceptualised almost explicitly in terms of students’
academic performance on standardised examinations. The KSQAO aimed to ‘assess
the learning competencies of different subjects prescribed for the class by using
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universally accepted scientific methods’ (Government of Karnataka 2006, 3). The

broader objectives of the programme were to provide data to educational administra-
tors to inform educational planning for improved learning outcomes, and to provide
this data to parents as a means of increased accountability.
The KSQAO examinations have been conducted annually since the programme’s
inception, testing selected ‘competencies’ of children in their First Language
(Kannada), Mathematics, and Science and Social Science through a standardised test
administered by teachers and trainee teachers. The programme received significant
attention in terms of its potential for replication across other states in India, and has
been widely projected by the Government of Karnataka as the state’s ‘flagship’ initia-
tive. Table 1 summarises the extent of the KSQAO since 2005, showing the
programme reached well over a million students each year.
Tracing the genesis of the KSQAO reveals multiple actors and conditions through
which ideas around standardised educational assessment gained traction. One of the
primary motivators behind the development of the KSQAO was the Azim Premji
Foundation, a large-scale corporate foundation working in close collaboration with the
state government. The Learning Guarantee Programme, piloted in 2002–3, was one of
the earliest joint initiatives of the Azim Premji Foundation and the education depart-
ment in Karnataka. This programme set out pre-specified criteria for ‘learning

Table 1. The changing extent of the KSQAO.

2005–6 2006–7 2007–8
Type of schools All government and All government and aided All government and
assessed aided Kannada- Kannada-medium schools government-
medium schools. which scored less than 40% in aided schools –
Class 2 limited to the 2005–6 assessment. Kannada-, Urdu-,
two schools per All Urdu-, Marathi-, Telugu- and Marathi-, Tamil-
cluster. Tamil-medium schools. and Telugu-
Schools which volunteered to medium schools.
participate were also included.
Schools assessed 35,250 20,671 43,654
Grades assessed 2, 5 and 7 3, 5 and 7 5 and 7
Students assessed 1,617,683 1,291,953 1,555,623
Source: Government of Karnataka (2007, 2008).
 Compare 317

achievements’; high-performing schools were rewarded with cash incentives and there
were also awards for students and teachers at an individual level. The participation of
schools in the programme was seen to be voluntary and was decided by each head-
teacher. The design of the programme positioned education and ‘learning achieve-
ment’ in explicit market-oriented terms. Even a report produced by a central
government agency noted:

The idea of guaranteeing learning under the programme was borrowed from the market
ideology where the quality of the product is ensured and costumers [sic] are provided
with an opportunity to verify the quality of the product. (National Council of Educational
Research and Training [NCERT]2 2005–6, 4–5)

Indeed, the Learning Guarantee Programme did not go uncritiqued from within the
government education bureaucracy. The voluntary nature of such incentive
programmes and the focus on achievement-level instead of achievement-change were
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seen to encourage the participation of already higher-performing schools. The subse-

quent disparity of financial resources between participating and non-participating
schools arguably increased educational inequalities (cf. Barnhardt, Karlan, and
Khemani 2009). The pedagogic implications of the programme’s focus on examina-
tions were also viewed with caution; a central government agency reported in a study
of the initiative:

[t]he whole evaluation effort appeared to be examination oriented. The schools, which
opted for the evaluation, were found to be striving hard to prepare their children to clear
the tests in order to achieve ‘Learning Guarantee Award’ for the school. For this purpose,
children have been put to rigorous regular testing by the teachers. (NCERT 2005–6, viii–ix)

The same study also raised concerns about the programme’s encouragement of educa-
tional competitiveness and increased private tutoring of children. Despite such
critiques, the Learning Guarantee Programme was integrated into what became a
formal institutional structure and programme of the state government – the KSQAO.
We can speculate how this was so by considering a second political development in
the following year.
The second significant thread in the state government’s development of the
KSQAO involves the World Bank. In 2004 a senior consultant was hired by the World
Bank as requested by the state education department to develop the framework and
guidelines for the KSQAO. In this framework, standardised testing aimed to capture
the educational performance of schools with the intention of generating detailed
reports on which corrective interventions could be based. The report developed by the
World Bank consultant drew explicitly from international examples of school inspec-
tions and performance reviews such as OFSTED (UK), Whole School Evaluation
(South Africa), and Triennial School Review (Australia). Here, a managerial view of
education and an emphasis on arguably narrow outcomes became the founding ratio-
nale for KSQAO:

When all schools are to be periodically and reliably evaluated, the answer is to focus on
assessment of outcomes. This approach choice reflects the understanding that outcomes
encapsulate the existence (or not) of an appropriate mix of inputs and processes through
the results they produce (or not). (World Bank 2004, 17–18)

The genesis of the KSQAO can therefore be located within a conjuncture character-
ised by the following: the structural adjustment programme which then manifested in
 318 R. Mukhopadhyay and A. Sriprakash

conditionalities of borrowing and restructuring of the public service system; the

explicit financial reliance of the state on the involvement of both multilateral funding
agencies and large-scale corporate foundations, which were then accommodated
through collaborative partnerships in government elementary education; and a techno-
managerial discursive framework for education that anchored more firmly within the
context of the earlier two shifts. This conjuncture, therefore, not only made space for
external actors such as the Azim Premji Foundation and the World Bank to envision
and orient programmes which, till then, had been predominantly a privilege of the
state, but also allowed for the continuation of a market-oriented and managerial
discourse, from the Learning Guarantee Programme to the KSQAO. It is also worth
noting, not surprisingly, the international examples of performance reviews referred
to in the World Bank report were located in similar managerialist views of education
(cf. Case, Case, and Catling 2000; Heystek 2007). However, as we shall see, the initial
framework put forward by the World Bank did not come to define the logic of the
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programme at other levels of the bureaucracy.

The KSQAO and local strategic actors

Policies and programmes are continuously shaped by the different actors they travel
with. Grek et al. have described nations themselves as ‘strategic actors’ which have
different capacities to mediate supra-national policy pressures. In this process of trans-
fer and translation:

pressures from above the nation are always manifested in vernacular ways within the
nation, reflecting national histories, traditions and politics. (2009, 125)

In a similar vein, there are strategic actors within the nation-state who mediate policy
interests and pressures. These actors could very well be part of the same state appara-
tus through which supra-national agendas are channelled. They occupy different
places of influence, not only as members of a hierarchic bureaucratic apparatus, but
also as social beings who have unequal access to social, economic and symbolic
resources. In the Indian context, Kaviraj (1991) has theorised differences between
‘elite’ and ‘vernacular’ domains which are manifest in the bureaucratic apparatus. In
his characterisation, the ideals of modernity predominantly shape the discursive
domain of the ‘elite’. The trajectory of the post-Independence state has not been able
to easily enrol the everyday discourses of the ‘vernacular’ towards its political and
institutional ideals. On the different discursive domains in the Indian state apparatus
Kaviraj notes:

because the state continued to expand … it had to find its personnel, especially at lower
levels, from groups who did not inhabit the modernist discourse … By overstretching,
the state has been forced to recruit personnel from the groups who speak and interpret
the world in terms of the other discourse. Since major government policies have their
final point of implementation very low down in the bureaucracy, they are reinterpreted
beyond recognition. (1991, 91)

However, more recent work has shown that such dichotomous characterisations of
both the larger social domain and that within the state apparatus blur the ways in
which the ideals of modernity are also appropriated and articulated through a vernac-
ular idiom at the lower rungs of the social and institutional hierarchies (Fuller and
 Compare 319

Benei 2000; Corbridge et al. 2005). We are, therefore, cautious about the limits of
Kaviraj’s dualism, and do not suggest actors occupy such positions (elite/vernacular)
in any coherent, stable manner. Rather, it has been useful to observe how ‘elite’ and
‘vernacular’ discourses can produce certain alliances in policy processes by the inter-
ests of actors who are located differently – both socially and institutionally. In our
work we observed how the practices of ‘elite’ senior officials can derive from the
institutional authority of a modern bureaucratic apparatus and the nature of modernist
‘universal’ goals of education. At the same time, ‘vernacular’ discourses also shape
policy practices as actors negotiate, recontextualise, and reshape these practices with
respect to local interests and conditions of possibility. As an example, we describe
below some of the interests and alliances through which the KSQAO was constituted
in the state context.
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Translations of the KSQAO

The education department of Karnataka did not adopt recommendations made in
the World Bank Report to gradually expand the KSQAO programme through
voluntary school participation. Instead, the KSQAO testing process came to be a
census of almost all government schools. This was noted by junior state officers to
be a unilateral decision from a senior bureaucrat. Inquiring into the reasons for
these changes revealed the influence of what one junior officer called ‘power
speak’ by the elite officers of the IAS.3 In an interview the senior bureaucrat
behind the decision explained that the KSQAO could be expanded and conducted
compulsorily because large-scale examinations (such as the school leaving certifi-
cate) were being carried out by the education department in any case. He went on
to emphasise that such testing activities were part of the department’s ‘core compe-
tence’. However, some of the junior officers in the department expressed in inter-
views that the move to abandon voluntary participation was driven more by an
interest in accountability by the state: voluntary participation would not generate an
adequate response from government schools which were generally regarded by
senior officials as insufficiently accountable. Possibly, the equity goals of UEE also
enter into such decisions, as voluntary participation may be seen to produce
unequal access to state development initiatives. The decision to have a large-scale
assessment exercise also impacted the World Bank Report’s recommendation for
parental involvement in the KSQAO process. Parental participation through opinion
surveys (as a means to enhance accountability to communities) was drastically
pared down to involve only the collection of general information4 from parents’
associations.
We begin to see how the KSQAO programme was shaped by the interests and
representations of certain actors, in this case a senior state-level bureaucrat. The inter-
ests behind the expansion of the programme were reworked and incorporated into the
department’s ‘official’ rationale which underlined both a pragmatic and democratic
intention for state-wide participation (cf. Government of Karnataka 2006, 4), and
junior officers were now expected to align themselves accordingly. The ways in which
a programme comes to be represented by the interests of specific actors (here, the
senior bureaucrat) shows how power can be diffused by:

those who are able to enrol, convince and enlist others into associations on terms which
allow these initial actors to ‘represent’ all the others. (Murdoch and Marsden 1995, 372)
 320 R. Mukhopadhyay and A. Sriprakash

The ‘official’ top-down formulation of programmes and their perceived dependency

on senior bureaucrats create contexts where junior officers regard programmes and
their continuation to be contingent upon the presence of specific bureaucrats in the
upper echelons of the administration. For example, during a departmental meeting a
sub-district administrator inquired whether forthcoming KSQAO plans should be
discussed with schools. At this the district academic head, amidst much laughter,
cracked a joke about movie theatres being compelled to restart film-screenings when
local town bigwigs arrive late, even if it means inconveniencing other viewers.
Reflecting on such hierarchies within the education bureaucracy, he continued:

Why do we need to do it [discuss ensuing KSQAO plans with schools] now? We anyway
have to do it again when the state people [senior officers] start the process and tell us to
do it.

He added that it would be more prudent to ‘wait and see’: the KSQAO was primarily
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driven by senior state officials, and a recent transfer of one official meant that the
district-level officers were unsure how the next senior bureaucrat would be inclined
towards the programme.
Through its process of translation, the KSQAO generated a number of unintended
outcomes in schools. Teachers and head-teachers interpreted and re-worked the
programme’s aims. For example, guidelines about the types of questions expected in
the examinations were distributed to teachers in the months preceding the test. This
caused many teachers to view the KSQAO as a model for ‘drilling’ students based on
the guidelines. Repetitive rote-based instruction was legitimised, despite parallel
programmes by the state to move away from such exam-centred pedagogies. Further-
more, teachers interpreted the KSQAO programme as one which would have punitive
implications for them due to the focus on examination results. A lack of consultation
and information appeared to compound such perspectives, as one teacher described:

When KSQAO was first introduced, there was an atmosphere of fear created among
teachers. First … why is it being done? What is its objectives? What benefit will it have
for our children, our teachers, for education, and for literacy in our state? What is it said
to be? … Nothing was known to teachers.

Indeed, there was an absence of clear communication about the objectives of the
KSQAO to teachers, a lack of consultancy during its conceptualisation, and only a
marginal role for them in its implementation. Programme follow-up emphasised the
role of officials outside the school; teachers, as in many government education
programmes and interventions in India, were relegated to the background (Dyer 2000;
Kumar 2005). Thus, not only was there an ‘atmosphere of fear’ in schools but also a
feeling of scepticism towards the KSQAO. For example, during a focus-group discus-
sion one head-teacher’s comment revealed how the KSQAO represented yet another
government programme without clear objectives:

Because it was something the government had given, we had to do it. So we followed
the rules and used the formats given.

Remonstrating against the burdening of teachers with numerous such programmes, the
head-teacher continued that these programmes were only being implemented by the
government because of spending mandates by external agencies such as the World
Bank. In a tone of challenge she added:
 Compare 321

Do they [the government] even have the records to show that the entire money has been
utilised?

Another teacher in the focus-group discussion, reflecting on why the government was
not attentive to their voices about such programmes, remarked:

In sum, there is no respect for the teachers. Everyone talks to them like husbands talking
to their wives.5

In this context, we can see how acts of resistance and subversion can emerge in
everyday work settings at the lower levels of the department, including schools. One
of the junior officers monitoring the implementation of the KSQAO programme
cited instances where teachers photocopied and distributed the question booklets to
schools that were to be tested later in the assessment cycle (the exams were stag-
gered in the first year). We found that teachers’ fear of punitive action was height-
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ened in the second year of the KSQAO when the selection of schools into the
programme was based on those with previously low performance. Indeed, a number
of junior officers in the study observed how such unintended messages conveyed to
teachers had transformed the nature of the KSQAO and its perceived aims. The need
to ‘show results’ started dominating the process and actions of both teachers and
lower-level officers as the KSQAO became increasingly associated with targeting
low performance. Cheating and other malpractices became common knowledge as
schools attempted to ‘show results’, such that even senior state officials came to
regard KSQAO performance data with scepticism. It was not uncommon to observe
in internal meetings senior officials dismissing and even laughing-off suggestions
that the KSQAO data could reliably inform follow-up interventions. In one such
meeting senior officers discussed how the only benefit of the KSQAO was that
teachers were at least compelled to teach something, even though their teaching was
dominated by ‘drilling’ students on the sample questions found in the programme’s
guidelines.
In the absence of a comprehensive vision for the longer-term intentions of the
KSQAO, multiple and seemingly hasty follow-up programmes took shape. One was a
remedial teaching programme (Parihara Bodhane) which was launched in 2007 in
response to the significant proportion of schools which had achieved less than 40% on
the KSQAO tests.6 A newly available central government budget allocation for ‘reme-
dial teaching’ was also seen to drive the interests of senior officers in such a
programme. The junior officer in charge of the KSQAO in the first year angrily
questioned this interest:

Why Parihara Bodhane? [in an angry rhetorical tone] Not because there will be some-
thing good from it; it is because there are … funds for Parihara Bodhane.

For the Parihara Bodhane programme teachers were expected to take an additional
hour of classes for underperforming students outside of the regular school day. Along-
side this programme, two other ‘remedial teaching’ efforts were introduced.7 Teachers
were expected to respond to multiple messages and work requirements of the different
‘remedial teaching’ programmes, including the production of detailed records of
student participation and achievement for the monitoring purposes of senior officers.
As the President of the teachers’ association commented, the pedagogic aims of such
programmes became sidelined:
 322 R. Mukhopadhyay and A. Sriprakash

The senior officers are bent on giving jaasti gourava (more importance) to the 60
minutes of Parihara Bodhane (out of hours remedial teaching programme) than the six
hours of regular school teaching. Teachers were therefore doing what it takes to satisfy
only the requirement of records these officers want.

Actors involved in the planning of such programmes did not enrol teachers into delib-
erations of their motivations or intended objectives. Teachers re-worked these
programmes with respect to their local contexts, and through this we begin to see how
the KSQAO and follow-up programmes were variously asserted, contested, under-
mined, and reshaped through the process of translation. As Murdoch and Marsden
(1995, 378) argue, the outcome of such translations is dependent on which set of alli-
ances (configured by actors and their interests) remain strongest and which meanings
become dominant.
Another unintended outcome of the KSQAO in schools was more troubling. The
construction of students from lower castes and classes as ‘backward’ by teachers is
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well-documented in India, particularly in rural government schools which serve the

majority of marginalised populations (cf. Sriprakash 2009; Mooij 2008). The institu-
tionalised need for remedial teaching in government schools was seen to strengthen
such deficit assumptions of students. For example, one teacher in the study described
how remedial teaching measures initiated after the KSQAO were trying to address the
‘backwardness’ of students. He went on to remark of his government school students:

The seeds are not of good quality in the district and teachers have to struggle with this;
productivity is higher when the seeds are of good quality.

We see here how the aims of an education programme claiming to be located in global
agendas of education development can come to be reshaped locally in ways that do
not reflect social equity ideals. Following the KSQAO to this particular and disturbing
point makes evident the need to pay attention to local constitutions of global education
and development discourses.

Conclusion: ‘translations’ as a policy mapping tool

Increasing homogeneity is often associated with the notion of a globalising world. The
influences of supra-national organisations often lend credence to this conceptualisa-
tion (Boli and Thomas 1997). When the ‘borrowing’ and ‘transfer’ of policies are
often from the North to the South, especially under conditions of grave economic
crisis and related dependency, the policies of the North are imputed with an expertise
that is ‘free-floating and untied to any specific context, that is so easily generalized,
and so easily inserted into any given situation’ (Ferguson 1996, 258–9). This, as we
saw, was similar for the KSQAO. In the context of a neoliberal turn of the state, the
techno-managerial expertise of the World Bank and the Azim Premji Foundation
came to define a programme that had as its referents other such initiatives in the devel-
oped world. However, a shift in gaze towards the local displaces a uniform and
smooth reading of transitions of policies and programmes across global boundaries.
Following Steiner-Khamsi and Quist (2000), we contend that actions in local
contexts have not always been attended to carefully in studies of policy borrowing. In
unravelling aspects of the local context in the case of the KSQAO, we came across a
number of different, interrelated, actions and motivations. Imperatives of a globalised
world and international pressures appeared to operate in contradictory ways. The
 Compare 323

design of voluntarism and gradual expansion of the KSQAO proposed by the World
Bank Report was transformed into a compulsory large-scale survey, possibly under
the compulsions of UEE and expenditure outlays that guide this effort. The logic of
numbers overtook that of institutional prudence where little effort was made to enroll
teachers into the school-improvement aspects of the programme. Institutional
processes of top-down implementation of policies and programmes are seen to orient
lower-level officers to see programmes as driven by the motivations of specific senior
officers. The actions of ‘elite’ senior officials are often rationalised in terms of power
derived from a modern institutional apparatus and programmes that endorse modernist
goals such as UEE. However, these actions leave open spaces for the re-interpretation
of such directives by actors in what might be understood as the ‘vernacular’ domain.
‘Strategic actors’ bring with them different interests within the state bureaucracy and
through this we saw a re-shaping of the KSQAO programme.
Teachers in their own context of disempowered professional engagement, ‘deliv-
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ered’ what the bureaucracy (via the senior officers) wanted from the KSQAO: consis-
tent year-on-year improvement of student performances. Similar to Woods and
Jeffrey’s (1998) observations of England’s OFSTED inspections, teachers develop
their own coping mechanisms, contestations, and undermining actions in response to
the institutional interests of a new testing regime. These mechanisms can have as their
denouement ‘unintended’ outcomes for programmes; in the case of the KSQAO this
was seen for instance by the ‘drilling’ of children on examination content. In the
context of the deep social inequalities which remain in the face of education and other
development interventions, processes such as the KSQAO can lead to the reinforce-
ment of deficit assumptions about the ‘educability’ of marginalised groups.
What we have hoped to show from our partial mapping of the travels of the
KSQAO programme is that global neoliberal frameworks are not homogenising as
they are often assumed. They are re-worked, re-interpreted, and re-enacted contextu-
ally; the outcomes of which would vary from one context to the other, one country to
the other. Such translations of policies, within a confluence of differently situated
actors and their interests, are likely to be particularly marked in countries such as India
where the polity is significantly heterogeneous in terms of social contexts and institu-
tional positions. In these contexts, seeing policy as ‘translation’, rather than borrow-
ing, would orient our research inquiries and responses arising out of these inquiries
differently. The notion of ‘translation’ keeps alive the possibility of ‘strategic’ actors
at different levels: at the level of the nation state and also, as in our case, at sub-
national levels of a state education bureaucracy. This in turn makes it imperative to
account for the interests, motivations, and alliances of these actors which are other-
wise bypassed in simplistic dichotomies of the ‘centre/periphery’ and ‘global domi-
nant/ local subjugated’ that have prefigured much ‘policy-borrowing’ literature.
Seeing policy as a process of translation keeps us attentive to the conditions of possi-
bility that connect global policies to local contexts. The outcomes of such processes
are not always benign, as we saw by the legitimisation of socially deficient construc-
tions of students. This must call the attention of policy-makers and education stake-
holders in India, and elsewhere, to map possible translations of ‘development’ policies
in local contexts.

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and insightful feedback.
 324 R. Mukhopadhyay and A. Sriprakash

Notes
1. Elementary education refers to the first seven years of schooling in India. Primary educa-
tion usually refers to the first five years of schooling.
2. NCERT is the apex government body in India which advises the central and state govern-
ments on academic issues pertaining to school education.
3. In Karnataka the seniormost posts by rank are held by the elite IAS cadre while the junior
posts are held by a provincial cadre popularly known as the Karnataka Education Service
(KES). As shorthand we have used ‘senior officials’ for the IAS cadre and ‘junior officers’
for the state cadre though even the state cadre has a multi-tiered hierarchy.
4. This included details of membership of parents, number of meetings held, and a check-list
of activities the association had undertaken to increase enrolment and attendance.
5. This can be a common discursive construction in some parts of India to imply gendered
hierarchies.
6. Approximately 25% of the schools evaluated the previous year scored less than 40%.
7. One programme called the School Academic Plan, was introduced by a senior IAS officer
of the department in response to the poor results in that year’s school leaving examination.
Another programme, OduveNaanu (I Will Read) was the initiative of one of the Joint
Downloaded By: [University of Western Sydney] At: 22:40 26 April 2011

Directors of the department and focused on reading skills of children.

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