I work as Director (Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning), a senior management role at Indus Action. Indus Action is a leading policy implementation organisation working towards enhancing access to welfare entitlements for the Indian people. My overall role is to define, structure and implement the vision for Indus Action’s growth at an institutional level in collaboration with the CEO, COO, Lead – Tech. and Lead – HR, in consultation with the Board.
More specifically, in my role I aim to accomplish the following objectives for Indus Action over the coming years: Develop and sustain research & practice networks in India and abroad. Build research culture, data and management systems, and internal capacity for both analytical research as well as generating knowledge from practice. Consolidate and build upon IA’s existing monitoring frameworks. Enhance IA’s internal capacity for evaluation, particularly on systems evaluation. Improve capacity for knowledge communication, documentation and dissemination
I am also a Research Fellow at University College, London (UCL), where I work on a grant titled, “Relational State Capacity: Rethinking State Capacity and Welfare Delivery in the Developing World” led by Prof. Dan Honig. I am also a National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) Fellow at the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi.
After initial training in Electrical and Renewable Energy Engineering, I was a Postgraduate Fellow at Yale University, and received an MPP from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and my PhD in public management and quantitative methods from the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Currently, I primarily work on state capacity, state-citizen relations, and administrative reform. Before my current role, I worked as a Fellow with the State Capacity Initiative at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, where I led both research and practice on administrative reform, capacity building, and organisational norms and culture in the bureaucracy. Prior to this, I have worked for over a decade across engineering, monitoring and evaluation, and public policy research with a sectoral focus on energy access, climate change and sustainable cities. I have published widely on these topics, including in the journals Science, Nature Energy, and Energy for Sustainable Development. I was an Associate Editor for the Journal of Environment and Development and Lead Author of UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook on Cities 2021.
You can find my work at the links below:
My work currently is on Relational State Capacity, a European Research Council-awarded five year exploration of state capacity which argues we need to move beyond simply seeing state capacity as the technical ability of the state to “make” or “deliver” things. Public welfare improvement often involves not just technical, but also social, infrastructure (e.g. developing the best COVID vaccines or contact tracing system will not lead to desired public health outcomes without citizens taking vaccines or responding accurately to contact tracers). I think we will better be able to understand and build the state’s capacity to make citizens’ lives better if we conceive of capacity as in part a function of the relationship (and relational contract) between citizens and state agents.
Human Resources and Administrative Reform
- Debates on Administrative Reform in India. Conceptualised and lead the research and writing of 5 working papers on the key debates in Recruitment, Training, Performance Management, Expertise and Transfers, drawing on a number of commission reports with a focus on the higher civil services.
- Research support for the Human Resources Reforms Committee in Tamil Nadu. The people who work in government, or, in more technical terms, the state’s human resources capacity is central to the effective delivery of services and ensuring welfare among citizens. Recognising the importance of human resources, the Government of Tamil Nadu constituted the Human Resources Reforms Committee (HRRC) in 2022 to study the status of, and to propose reform measures to enhance the performance, as well as the social inclusiveness of the public sector workforce. The HRRC examined the processes of recruitment, workforce planning, and training and capacity building in order to identify opportunities for reform, and to highlight and learn from examples of existing reform initiatives across departments in Tamil Nadu. Throughout the period of 9 months over which the HRRC deliberated on reform measures, the me and my team provided research and analytical support as the Research Secretariat to the HRRC. My work involved conducting extensive fieldwork and interviews with government officials occupying diverse positions in Tamil Nadu, desk research to collate the latest knowledge and practices on human resource development, data analysis of existing human resources data to identify critical trends in recruitment, retirements, and social inclusiveness, and the drafting of the report itself.
Training and Capacity Building
Foundational training programmes for new civil service officers are an essential first step in their journeys towards becoming officers, not just because of the knowledge they acquire about the functioning of government and government programmes, but also as a site to hone their professional identities and skill sets as public servants. In India, the All India Services receive comprehensive training at apex institutes such as the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), however similar quality of training is largely not available for officers of the State Civil Services. Keeping this in mind, the State Capacity Initiative has worked closely with Administrative Training Institutes (ATIs), the primary training ground for state civil servants, across several states to reimagine and deliver novel training programmes. Our fist partnership was with the Meghalaya Administrative Training Institute (MATI) in 2021, followed by the Himachal Pradesh Institute of Public Administration (HIPA) and most recently with the Administrative Training Institute, Nagaland.
Towards this end, we designed two modules: The first on “Values and Skills for the 21st Century Civil Servant,” including training on uncovering the norms and values in the bureaucracy and those underpinning decision-making, and skills such as writing for civil servants, data analysis, decision-making, fieldwork and community based research among others. This module draws on our existing work and the growing global discourse on the importance of bureaucratic norms in shaping the dispositions and decisions of bureaucrats. The second module, titled “Essential Knowledge for Field Administrators,” which covered an overview of the Indian state like political systems, the Constitution and the civil service, the theory and practice of fiscal federalism, India’s macro-economy, elections in India, regulatory functions in India, issues relating to national security and more. This module focused on uncovering the global and national debates and core principles that inform policy action across different sectors of the economy.
- Related writing and opinions
- First mission of Modi’s Mission Karmayogi must be to not repeat mistakes of past reforms, The Print, 10 Sept 2020
- The steel frame needs some training reform, Hindustan Times, 03 July 2023.
Norms and Values in Public Administration
- Surveys of the Indian Administrative Services (IAS). I was responsible for survey questionnaire design, sampling and data analysis of 2 rounds of surveys of over 1000 IAS officers. The surveys focused on the norms and values that inform the decisions made by the bureaucracy in India.
- Related writing and opinions
- “Valuing Evaluation: Building Capacities for Evaluative Thinking and Learning in Indian States” for a Compendium of Essays brought out by the Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO), NITI Aayog on M&E @ 70: Strengthening India’s Evidence Systems for Accelerated Reforms and Inclusive Growth, March 2022. This paper featured Meghalaya’s approach to building a dynamic organisational learning culture at all levels of government.
- NGOs get thumbs-up from IAS officers, private sector faces distrust: Survey, The Print, 16 March 2021.
Sustainable Cities and Energy & Environment
Selected publications:
- Ramaswami, A., Russell, A.G., Culligan, P.J., Sharma, K.R. and Kumar, E., 2016. Meta-principles for developing smart, sustainable, and healthy cities. Science, 352 (6288), pp.940-943.
- Ganguly, R. Jain, R. Sharma, K.R. Shekhar, S., 2020. Mini grids and enterprise development: A study of aspirational change and business outcomes among rural enterprise owners in India. Energy for Sustainable Development, 56(June), pp.119-127.
- Sharma, K.R. and Bhatia, P., How just and democratic is India’s solar energy transition? An analysis of state solar policies in India. In Kashwan, P. (Ed.). (2022). Climate Justice in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Mohanty, P., Sharma, K.R., Gujar, M., Kolhe, M. and Azmi, A.N., 2016. PV System Design for Off-Grid Applications. In Solar Photovoltaic System Applications (pp. 49-83). Springer International Publishing.
- Sharma, K.R., Palit, D., Mohanty, P. and Gujar, M., 2014. Approach for Designing Solar Photovoltaic-Based Mini-Grid Projects: A Case Study from India. In Mini-Grids for Rural Electrification of Developing Countries (pp. 167-201). Springer International Publishing.
- Willcox, M.; Waters, L.; Wanjiru, H.; Pueyo, A.; Hanna, R.; Palit, D.; Sharma, K.R. Utilising electricity access for poverty reduction. Practical Action Consulting, Bourton-on-Dunsmore, UK (2015) 105 pp.
- Allen, A., Brugman, J., Sharma, K. R., Robinson, B. Chapter 5: Achieving Urban Transformation: From Visions to Pathways, Global Environment Outlook for Cities 6. Published by the United Nations Environment Program.
Monitoring and Evaluation
I have also consulted for several years with Sambodhi Research and Communications Pvt. Ltd., a renowned monitoring and evaluation agency in India. I have consulted with Sambodhi at the programmatic level on monitoring and evaluation, and research in the energy and environment sector including rural electrification and clean cooking. Two specific projects below:
- Monitoring and Evaluation activities for SMART Power Initiative (SPI), a USD75 M investment in decentralized renewable energy mini-grids by the Rockefeller Foundation.
- Systems-level evaluation of a set of programmes under the Uttar Pradesh State Rural Livelihoods Mission (UPSLRM)
Teaching
2024: Guest Faculty: State Capacity module at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bangalore. Faculty for the Urban Fellows Programme (UFP)
2019 – present: Faculty: Administrative Training Institutes (ATIs) in Meghalaya, Nagaland and Himachal Pradesh. Courses taught: data analysis, governance, waste management, values and skills for public servants.
Fall 2020: Teaching Assistant: ESM 210: Business and the Environment (Bren School, UCSB). Instructors: Matthew Potoski and Eric Masanet.
Spring 2018: Teaching Assistant: PS 130: India: A Case in Comparative Politics and International Relations (Political Science, UCSB). Instructor: Amit Ahuja.
Fall 2018: Teaching Assistant: PS 15: Intro to Research Methods (Political Science, UCSB). Instructor: William Nomikos.
Contact Information
rahul@rahulksharma.com | rahul.sharma@ucl.ac.uk