nyone traveling some 7,000 miles and across 10 time zones to live in a country she’s never visited might reasonably expect a bit of culture shock. But to Anuradha Chagti, an Indian government officer spending a year at the Maxwell School, the biggest surprise when she arrived in Syracuse was the lack of surprise.

“When people used to go back [to India] from the U.S.,” Chagti recalls, “they’d say, It’s totally different. Maybe 10 years back it was. . . . But the way people used to say, It’s going to be a culture shock—it wasn’t a culture shock.”

Chagti’s smooth passage to America can be attributed, in part, to the growing presence of Indians and Indian culture all over the U.S. But the more telling explanation is the dramatic change in India itself since liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s opened the floodgates to foreign products and investment. Where shoppers could once buy mostly domestic brands, from Thums Up cola to Ambassador cars, India’s consumer class now finds racks full of Coke and Pepsi, showrooms lined with Toyotas and Fords, and malls stocked with Nikes and Nokia phones. MTV and the Cartoon Network flash on TV screens all over the country, and in dozens of locales from Agra to Vizag, Pizza Hut delivery is a quick phone call away. (Will that be double cheese or tandoori paneer?)

This, of course, is the famous globalized India, where young professionals in gleaming technology parks field our customer-service calls and troubleshoot our laptops, where broadband Internet cafés are on seemingly every corner, and even rickshaw wallahs carry mobile phones.

“In terms of way of life, urban India has seen a sea change,” says Jishnu Shankar, associate director of Maxwell’s South Asia Center, who was born in India’s “wild west” of Bihar and grew up in New Delhi. “Where I would go earlier and have a cup of tea for one rupee or two rupees or even five rupees at a swanky hotel, now you have got coffee shops like Barista and Costa where you pay 45, 50 rupees for one cup of coffee. And this is because a generation of young computer workers or call center workers has got the money to spend it that way.”

The economy of India grew an annual average of 6.8 percent in 1994-2004, and continues to gather steam. Growth projections for the current fiscal year top 8 percent, and the finance minister vows to push that rate toward 10 percent in the coming years. This economic boom brings a new international stature to India, and enormous opportunities for Indian business and for workers with the right education and skills. But along with the growth come new challenges and obligations for India’s government, as it strives to compete in the global marketplace while meeting the needs of its more than 1 billion citizens—from fundamentals like clean water, health care, and education to a modern transportation and communication infrastructure. The shift from centralized planning and government-controlled industry to liberalization and privatization—still controversial and far from complete—places India’s leaders in an economic and governmental context that is both unprecedented and continually shifting.

All these changes explain why Anuradha Chagti and other Indian civil servants are now on the SU campus, studying trends and innovations in public administration. Since 2002, the Indian government has been sending high-ranking officers to Maxwell for either an intensive seven-week seminar or, in some cases, a full year of study leading to an M.A.

Those exchanges, though, were just foreshadowing. Last year, Mitchel Wallerstein, dean of Maxwell, traveled to India, where he and his counterparts at the Indian Institute of Public Administration agreed to embark on a series of educational exchanges, and a number of India-related initiatives are in the proposal or planning stages. One is already beginning: Maxwell was selected through a global competition to participate in designing, developing, and administering a new high-level training program based in India for senior Indian government officials.

Maxwell’s blossoming collaborations with India are reminiscent, in some senses, of a decade-long relationship with the government of China. In both cases, the desire to expand its economy has compelled a nation to update its bureaucratic ways. The Indian government recognizes that this era of profound economic change requires new skills and perspectives from its civil servants, according to William Sullivan, director of Executive Education at Maxwell. “They realize that to be an economic power, they have to spend more time training and educating the bureaucracy,” he says. “Most corporations or outside parties are very critical about the bureaucracy of the Indian government, about how it takes forever to get things done. And there are always the allegations about lack of transparency and graft.” India’s international training programs, Sullivan says, signal to the world that they are “moving very aggressively to make a change. It’s all part of their desire to have the type of governmental system and people in place that will help them become the world power that they aspire to be.”

As India jockeys for position in the global economy, the most pressing challenges for its government are right at home, where the economic boom is felt in drastically different ways in different parts of the country.

In urban India, the infrastructure has experienced radical and rapid change—notably in communications, the backbone of the outsourcing industry. Ten years ago, even in a big city, local phone service was noisy and prone to disconnection; dial-up access for e-mail was primitive at best. Today, anyone with the requisite rupees can, within a few days, get up and running with a crystal-clear new land line, DSL connection, and cell phone—all from private companies.

At the same time, India’s major metros have exploded with construction, from malls and luxury apartments to municipal subway and light-rail systems and huge concrete flyovers above gridlocked intersections. Massive national infrastructure projects are being undertaken through American-style public/private collaborations that would once have been unthinkable in India.

For much of the country, though, needs are more basic than smoother roads and cleaner phone lines. As President Bush noted during his swing through South Asia in March, India’s middle class has swelled to 300 million, but almost as many live below the official poverty line. And a quick trip outside of the major cities (or, for that matter, outside of upscale enclaves right in the cities) provides a sobering perspective on development.

Susan Wadley, the Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies, has studied village life in Uttar Pradesh for more than 40 years. She finds that mainstream media coverage of the economic boom—such as a recent report on India’s youth by a major newsmagazine—is often incomplete. “They assume India’s youth is speaking English and is upper middle class,” she says. “There’s no surveying of the rest of the population; there’s no acknowledgment that 70 to 80 percent of India still lives in rural communities, where the educational system is completely bereft.”

Chandan Sinha, an Indian Administrative Service officer who (like Anuradha Chagti) is on sabbatical to study public administration at Maxwell, describes India as a land of several “time zones”—and he’s not talking about how clocks are set. “Some people are living in almost prehistoric times, and some people are living in the cyber age,” he says. “You can’t generalize about growth and development in India. A large number of people are still very, very poor.”

India’s coalition government, which rules precariously over dozens of national and regional political parties, is far from unanimous about what sort of social policies will best address the growing divide between urban and rural India, and between the software engineer earning $20,000 a year and the laborer scraping by on a dollar a day. In any policy debate, says Dan Nelson, Maxwell’s coordinator of Executive Education programs in India, “you'll see one group taking a very market-driven approach, based on their assumption that the private sector is efficient and the government is not. But then you see another group arguing for the need for increased government control through regulation. They make an assumption that the private sector has the wrong incentives, or is otherwise ill-equipped, to distribute a public good. Both camps are strong. It’s fascinating to observe Indian public policy in action.”

Nelson says the scale and complexity of infrastructure projects—and especially the increasing role of private and nongovernmental organizations in the delivery of services historically managed by the government—pose many new challenges for government officers. “They deal with a much more dynamic work environment. They must continue to manage government resources while increasingly working with third-party providers, either directly or indirectly. You can see growing tension in the vast infrastructure developments going on across India.” He gives as an example long-term contracts with private contractors, negotiated by and signed by a civil servant who may well leave his post well before the contract is due to expire; his successor inherits the relationship with a private collaborator.

Indian government officers who have come to Maxwell for midcareer training have explored a wide range of infrastructure issues, from water rationing to telecommunications in remote villages, according to Larry Schroeder, professor of public administration. Some of the most pressing problems, he adds, stem from the profound demographic changes underway. “Given that nearly 300 million Indians live in urban areas, with projections that this number will rise to over 550 million by 2025,” Schroeder says, “the issue of urban planning is a critical one.”

Overlaid on all these fundamental changes in India’s economic and social landscape is an intensifying demand for government reform—of both the political realm and the bureaucracy. Jishnu Shankar, who began his career as a newspaper journalist in New Delhi, notes that trust in government has eroded steadily since the days of “stalwarts” like Gandhi, Nehru, and Sardar Patel. “The cynicism that exists in the Indian public mind,” he says, “is that it’s all a play of money and power, where everyone plays the system and things get done for convoluted reasons.” But he sees signs of a changing mood. Recently, 11 members of Parliament were caught on camera accepting bribes; they were ousted. “That at least shows that the media is becoming powerful,” Shankar adds, “and that the public is so fed up it actually wants politicians to be accountable. Never has this happened before.”

Chandan Sinha, who works in rural development for the state of West Bengal, says that a new sense of accountability and openness is taking hold in government institutions. Liberalization of the economy, he says, has ratcheted up pressure on the government “to perform more efficiently and in a more responsive manner, and to open up spaces that were earlier closed to other players.” He points to India’s Right to Information Act, passed last year, as a watershed in the movement to make the workings of government more transparent.

The training programs that now bring Indian government officers such as Chandan Sinha and Anuradha Chagti to the Maxwell School have a significant precedent in India’s even-larger neighbor, China. In 1993, Maxwell began a partnership with China at a point when that nation’s economic transformation was forcing governmental reform. In the years since, Maxwell has worked with the China National School of Administration to build scores of programs in public administration. “It’s a whole new professional opportunity,” says Maxwell’s William Sullivan, “that allows people to get into government because of skill and ability rather than loyalty to the Communist party.”

In India the historical and political context is different, of course, but the impetus behind government reform—economic change and globalization—is fundamentally the same.

Until recently, Indian government officers who went abroad for training generally took short trips to Great Britain, notes Chandan Sinha. But in the 1990s, India resolved to start its own training programs for senior civil servants and, in the spirit of the times, wanted to engage international institutions in shaping the content and methods of the training. Sinha himself played a role in this initiative. In 1998, while he was a visiting scholar at the Federal Executive Institute in Virginia, Sinha was asked by India’s Department of Personnel and Training to conduct a survey of America’s top public administration schools and identify the most promising international partners for new midcareer P.A. training programs. He traveled widely—to Harvard, Princeton, Syracuse, Duke, Stanford, and UCLA, among other institutions—and was struck by the “very balanced program” at Maxwell. “It was my choice also because it is very interdisciplinary,” he says, “and the focus is on public administration with all its complexities instead of any particular slant on it.”

The Indian government was also attracted by Maxwell’s number-one ranking among U.S. schools of public affairs, and extensive international experience not just in China but in Korea, Russia, and other countries. Plus, the School once had a deep and meaningful connection to India. In 1952, shortly after India’s independence from Great Britain, Paul Appleby, Maxwell’s second dean, was invited by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to help evaluate and reform the Indian civil service. Although this thread broke—there were no Maxwell-India relationships begun then that continued—Appleby’s recommendations are still read 50 years later and carry weight.

For all these reasons, Maxwell has become a key partner in a new wave of training programs for India’s civil servants. Sinha and Chagti are among the select few who get to spend a full year in Maxwell’s executive program in public administration, earning the same M.A. (P.A.) degree that others do. These men and women are the crčme de la crčme of India’s civil service. They originally earned their posts through a process of exams and interviews that winnows down a pool of 250,000 or so applicants to about 600 who are placed in various civil services—among whom only 70 or 80 are chosen for the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Those who come to Syracuse have worked in the highest echelons of state and national government for at least a dozen years.

Others visit Maxwell in the seven-week seminar, coordinated by Maxwell and the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). Each fall since 2002, Maxwell has hosted a group of about 30 Indian government officers, from the IAS and specialized services, who are working toward post-graduate degrees in public policy and management. Guided by faculty from Maxwell and elsewhere in the University, the IIMB group explores policy issues ranging from international trade to education, population, and civil service reform. According to Larry Schroeder, the educational exchange runs both ways. “I believe that the faculty participating in the program, particularly those whose research does not generally focus on developing countries, gain a much better sense of the issues and constraints faced by public administrators in India,” Schroeder says. “Since the officers in the program have often had 10 or even 15 years of experience, they are very willing to question and debate the concepts that we faculty present.”

IIMB and Maxwell are also building a brand-new program. (At press time, plans had been settled in principle, and final details were being worked out.) This will be the most far-reaching collaboration between the Maxwell School and the Indian government ever: a two-month training program for IAS officers. Each year about 150 senior officers will participate. Faculty members from Maxwell’s public administration department will work alongside faculty members from IIMB’s Public Policy Centre and practitioners from the field who will assist the IAS officers further develop their policy analysis and policy formation skills.

“The whole idea is to help create a curriculum and improve the pedagogy,” says William Sullivan. “The traditional way of delivering training in India still is long lectures that go on for hours, so we will model interactive approaches that appeal to adult learners.” In conjunction with IIMB and the National Academy of Administration, Maxwell will run the training for the next three years, and then turn the fully functioning program over to the Indian government.

As part of the training, the IAS officers will spend two weeks in China, taking advantage of Maxwell’s long-standing ties there and the presence of Beijing-based program manager Caroline Tong (who, until recently, worked in Executive Education with Sullivan). As India measures its rank in the new global order, China is an ever-present point of reference and comparison—and competition. Facilitating high-level contact between the neighboring countries, which comprise more than half the world’s population, is a coup for Maxwell and an extraordinary opportunity for all involved.

“Because of the innovative design of the program, public managers in India will for the first time be connected directly with their Chinese counterparts,” notes Dean Wallerstein. “In other words, the Maxwell School is taking advantage of its standing and connections in both of these rising powers of the 21st century to build unique linkages among the three countries that we hope will endure for many decades and lead to additional cross-national learning and training opportunities.”

As Maxwell continues to expand its presence overseas, the School itself is becoming increasingly international, a hub for scholars, executives, and government officers from not only India and China but many other points around the globe. That’s been a bonus for Chandan Sinha, whose year at Maxwell is now winding down. “It’s been a wonderful time,” says Sinha, “because Maxwell has a large number of midcareer international students—from China, Korea, Bulgaria, Germany, Romania, Latin American countries, all over the place. So it’s fascinating to hear their experiences and compare our experiences. That is really enriching.”

Although it’s still morning in Mumbai while Syracusans are nodding off to sleep, and teeshirt weather in most of India when upstate New Yorkers are shoveling snow, never have the two places seemed so close or so connected, whether by technology or commerce or personal relationships. As Anuradha Chagti looks toward returning to New Delhi this summer, where she’ll resume her post in human resources at the Central Secretariat, she reflects that her time at Maxwell has been an invaluable chance to “see the latest trends in public administration, and to learn the theory behind what you do.”

While in upstate New York, Chagti says she’s missed the fervor in Indian temples during Hindu festivals such as Diwali and Holi. But she and her family don’t crave any particular foods because, she adds, “We are cooking the same way as we were back home.” And when they do step off the plane in Delhi, they won’t have nearly as much catching up to do as they would have in a previous era.

“Thanks to the Internet and voice over IP,” she says, “we have been talking to our families and friends practically every day.” 

This article appeared in the Spring 2006 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2006 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.