Last week, a friend sent me a well-argued and passionate article on systems change by Anurag Behar, CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.
Most people understand systems change as measures taken—usually by civil society providing expertise or project management services to a specific government department—in order to influence government action. Anurag argues that, in such cases, deploying a few people can only result in surface-level engagement with the system. He adds that by funding such endeavours, donors and grantmakers are moving away from supporting grassroots work.
I believe many funders do this because they think that changing the system from the inside is a higher return on investment than supporting a few grassroots organisations, and that cerebral thinking to change systems is more useful than passionate activism that isn’t sustainable or doesn’t scale.
But the system doesn’t change that easily. Why is this the case? My experience within and around government over the past 31 years might provide some insights.
Governments are staffed with officers who have decades of experience. Since joining the sarkar, they have all engaged with development problems. The Department of Education is always running schools. They have institutional memory in their old files of why things don’t work. They have access to best practices from other states or even other countrie via all the workshops and seminars they have attended. They are not short on money. They are the system, and yet the outcomes have barely improved, even if the inputs and some of the outputs have increased because budgets for all government agencies have multiplied in the last decade. For instance, the Union Government’s health budget went up from INR 33,150 crore in 2015–16 to INR 89,287 crore in 2024–25. Similarly, the budget for rural development increased from INR 79,526 crore in 2015–16 to INR 1,80,233 crore in 2024–25.
The inability of the system to improve is surprising
The system, which is essentially the government, is part of a functioning democracy. Elected representatives who nominally supervise the system are answerable to voters who want better schools, hospitals, and housing and cleaner air. In recent years, election campaigns have been centred more around delivering development outcomes. This creates an expectation that, once elected, these political leaders will demonstrate tangible results, pushing them (at least in theory) to focus on improving how the system delivers.
But the system stubbornly refuses to change. Political will, bigger budgets, memory, and the addition of a few civil society ‘consultants’ working in project management units (PMUs) alongside the government hasn’t resulted in any significant change.
Everybody knows what’s wrong with the system, most of all the junior and mid-level officials who sit within it. And yet, for all the increase in inputs and democratic accountability, we continue to be the nation with the most number of people living in poverty, whom the system regularly fails.
Sure, infrastructure has improved and will continue to improve, albeit at a speed that nobody is happy with. However, all the well-meaning donors and experienced civil society consultants aren’t going to change the system when voters, elected representatives, senior officers, and junior officials together can’t make the system change.
So what can change the system? And what’s the role of civil society?
In a democracy, maybe it’s time to focus on influencing the politics of development rather than improving the expertise of officials. Wherever the system has changed, it is mostly because sustained political will has facilitated it. Systemic changes—such as government schools and primary healthcare in Delhi, public safety and bicycles for girls in Bihar, round-the-clock electricity in Gujarat and Delhi—are spreading across states and have become sustainable across parties.
Influencing politics to make the system change is extremely challenging. It is easier for civil society consultants and activists to talk to bureaucrats instead. They’re people like us; we could have been them. Talking to politicians is far more difficult. We believe that they are not like us, that they are corrupt, that they won’t give us an audience.
Civil society has attempted systemic change by trying to transform the official discourse through its experience and expertise on development problems. As Anurag pointed out in his article, this strategy isn’t working. Officials dismiss these efforts, noting that their experience outweighs that of anyone from civil society. At best, officials rely on them as consultants to prepare presentations and document meetings via a PMU structure.
The answer lies in politics
Systems will change when two things happen. First, there has to be political will. This means that civil society must give up its fear of punitive actions and engage with politicians directly instead of only with bureaucrats. After all, when companies need something done, they approach ministers as well as department secretaries. Why shouldn’t civil society do the same?
Second, the system’s rules, manuals, procedures, and incentives need to change. How can the General Financial Rules (GFR) be made more flexible to tolerate failure and thus give officials the leeway to take risks? How can incentives be created for better and more coordinated performance across departments? These are hard HR and organisational behaviour questions that no one has really solved for.
Civil society seems to view more learning and development, through workshops and seminars for officials, as the magic bullet. After these seminars, however, all the officials return to the system and to their earlier modes of operating.
Anurag is right: What civil society thinks is a systems change approach isn’t working. The answer though isn’t to dismiss systems change as a goal, but to approach it from the lens of politics rather than officials.
Smart politicians know this and welcome such inputs. For instance, Shashank Mani Tripathi, an MP representing Deoria in eastern Uttar Pradesh, established the Deoria Development Alliance to solicit both civil society and corporate inputs and ensure a dramatic increase in economic and social development for his constituents.
Civil society actors who understand the underlying human resources and other factors that determine why governments work or don’t work, and come up with practical, actionable solutions, will find an audience both with politicians as well as officials who care about strengthening the nation.
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Know more
- Read Anurag Behar’s article on the distortions caused by the growing preoccupation with systems change.
- Explore how philanthropy can fund systems change.
