Tara Beteille is a dear friend of mine, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D at Stanford University, Palo Alto.
At this point, I’m in the fourth year of a PhD program in the Economics of Education at Stanford. Many things brought me to this university and program, but two things stand out. First, my work experience at ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank, where I managed their non-profit funding in elementary education for four years. Second, the fact that I grew up in India, still a “developing” economy today, but also a large democracy — one that must contend with a deeply hierarchical, complex and changing social structure. Growth projections have been impressive, but these must be viewed against the fact that large sections of the population are deprived of basic health and education – and thereby the opportunity to participate and contribute to such growth – and potentially even jeopardize it.
I joined ICICI Bank within days of finishing my masters in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. This was 2000, I was 22 years old – and by most accounts, I had landed myself a pretty good job. I was going to head the bank’s non-profit funding in elementary education. ICICI Bank already had a long history in development sector assistance; now I would be helping them rethink their strategy, focus areas and terms of assistance. This was a very challenging job for a number of reasons, but mainly because there was no guarantee our new approach would make the kind of difference we were hoping for; unlike commercial work, social-sector work takes a while to show returns, and even then, many of these cannot be measured. Much of this would have been really intimidating had it not been for my coworkers, my immediate boss, who used to head the treasury mid-office operations and was a constant source of strength, and the big boss, who trusted our judgment and was always ready to stand by us.
As very young people, working on some very fundamental social problems, I think we achieved quite a bit. One of our initial battles was to be taken seriously by the people we wanted to work with: government groups, other non-profits, academia and multilateral agencies – they usually thought we’d come to sell credit cards. Nobody quite believed that an aggressive bank like ICICI Bank had any real interest in these matters. I think that changed very quickly; in fact, people began to come to us, not just for our money, but for help with strategy and thinking – and these were some of the best people in the field, people who had spent their lives working in the social sector. For me, one of the most rewarding moments was when my team was invited by the state government of a newly-formed state to coordinate setting up their educational systems. Related to being taken seriously was also the need to change corporate-sector participation in the social-sector in general, from being a publicity gimmick to a serious endeavor. I was nominated to the Confederation of Indian Industry’s National Committee on Primary Education and Literacy, where I would interact with different industry players regularly. I had a one-point agenda: to emphasize the importance of making real changes versus cosmetic ones. One of the other things my team and I did was build a research agenda, both for the work we funded and broader issues in elementary education. There was practically no rigorous impact evaluation of programs, but a lot of money going into whatever seemed like a good idea. I think we changed the culture on that quite a bit.
One of the main reasons for doing a PhD was my dissatisfaction with the kind of research proposals coming our way; policy research is very important, but it needs to be long-term, and we were not able to find good, long-term researchers. You know what they say about making numbers lie, right? That’s how most practitioner feel, and unfortunately, they are usually right. I’d like to change some of that. Being able to do serious policy-relevant research, stick with a research site, and use such research to improve the functioning of educational systems — that’s what motivates me. And Stanford is anyone’s paradise for learning such work.
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