India: lessons from serving a billion people

6 June 2024 | The 17th edition of The Apolitical View by Apolitical CEO and Co-Founder Robyn Scott. Subcribe to the newsletter

In this week's edition:

• India embraces micro-learning – 9 ambitious governments learning at scale – One monk, one vote, 10 polling officials

India has commanded the news in the last few weeks, with the unprecedented scale of its elections (more than 640 million voted) and its heat (which topped 50 degrees celsius). Both of these coincided with my trip to Washington DC for the World Bank’s Public Administration Global Forum, where senior Indian public servants gave a fascinating peek into what serving a billion people looks like from the inside of a civil service.

In Apolitical’s role as co-hosts for the Forum – with its theme of transforming governments for a livable planet – our team joined multiple panels. A highlight for me was a plenary discussion on skills alongside Adil Zainulbhai, Chairman of India’s Capacity Building Commission, who laid out the reality of training a civil service of 33 million public servants (for perspective, Australia’s population is 26 million people), to deliver what citizens expect of their state.

Adil Zainulbhai, Chairman of India’s Capacity Building Commission at the plenary session of the World Bank Public Administration Global Forum

To have any prospect of training this many people, India is doubling down on smart online learning. This means micro-learning of 7-20 minutes for a “TikTok generation” (an idea that ironically persists even though TikTok is banned in India). They’re also focusing on on-demand learning. By accessing what’s known as ‘just in time’ learning, public servants can quickly acquire the skills to tackle problems as close to in-the-moment as possible. In a subsequent deeper conversation, I learned how they take a discovery-based approach to learning demand, following the data closely. For example, when they released their first course on AI, they were surprised to see massive uptake by government security guards, wanting to better themselves in their free time. Yoga for public servants is also a hugely popular course (as it was when Apolitical ran virtual classes during the pandemic).

On the question of creating powerful incentives to learn, Adil Zainulbhai had a suggestion that should work for big and small governments alike. To sway government leaders wary of AI, he let it be known that the Prime Minister himself was using and excited about generative AI. A colleague of mine who’d been in the audience told me that, at this point of the panel, a senior civil servant from another country leaned across to her and asked which AI app he should download onto his phone. She proceeded to set him up with ChatGPT and Perplexity!

If you’d like to explore other inspiring examples of government training at speed and scale, check out our new Global Insights report that sets out how leading governments are betting big on strategic learning initiatives to deliver transformational change – the table on page 07 shows how it’s being done by nine ambitious governments.

Read the report

Robyn Scott

Apolitical CEO & Co-Founder

In my diary

9-15 June | Next week is Canada National Public Service Week — we look forward to hearing your stories and celebrating with you, Canada!

11 June | Civil Service Live | Birmingham | The UK’s biggest gathering of public servants takes place in different parts of the country — next week we’ll be up in Birmingham.

19 June | 4-5pm BST | Guarding Democracy in the Age of AI I’m looking forward to this online event, where I’ll be speaking to former Political Communications Manager Sagar Vishnoi about how governments can enhance democratic processes and protect against the risks of AI in governance.

Recommendations

Apolitical’s new course AI assistant is live and in testing with our team. Let us know if you’d like a preview. The AI will enable participants in courses to interact with the course content in chat form. In future versions, we’ll also be adding a country’s laws and guidelines to the content corpus so you can learn in the context of governing principles.

And finally...

With 969 million eligible voters, India’s ‘Lok Sabha’ (general election) is the world’s largest and most complex exercise in democracy. Indian electoral laws dictate that voters must travel no more than 2km (1.2 miles) to cast their ballot, which is how a team of 10 intrepid polling officials found themselves travelling two days to the remote Gir forest in Gujarat state to set up a polling booth for a lone Hindu monk. Thankfully their efforts were rewarded — voter turnout was 100%.

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