Events of ADRI Patna
Patna, 2nd September 2026. Senior officials of the Government of Bihar joined departmental teams this evening at Hotel Chanakya, Patna, for the inaugural session of a two-day workshop on 'Government Analytics and Reforms', organised by the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI). After the inauguration and lighting of the lamp, a panel discussion of public officials featured Ms Harjot Kaur Bamhrah, IAS, Chairman-cum-Member, Board of Revenue, Bihar, and Shri Kumar Ravi, IAS, Secretary, Health Department, Government of Bihar. Shree Sparsh Gupta, IAS, AED, State Health Society, Bihar also participated in the event. Drawing on their long experience of district and departmental administration, the panellists responded to the teams' initial thinking and guided them on the problems most worth taking up in their ninety-day plans. The teams then presented their thinking before dinner.
The evening session capped the first day of the workshop, which brought together mid-level officers from seven departments — Finance, Health, Education, Social Welfare, Rural Development, Planning and Development, and Labour Resources — attending as departmental teams at ADRI. Each team is expected to leave the workshop with a concrete ninety-day action plan for its own department.
The workshop departed from the usual training format. Instead of long lectures on good practice elsewhere, each session opened with a short talk and then moved to hands-on work at the table, where officers examined their own department as a system — using data it already generates and the views of its own staff. Every team came with one reform its department attempted in the last five years, which it used as a live case through the day.
The day's sessions at ADRI covered three themes: seeing the department as a measurable system, drawing on the World Bank's Government Analytics Handbook; the findings of the ADRI–LSE study of public management in Bihar, with hands-on learning on how staff surveys are designed; and why reforms stick — and why they don't — based on evidence from over one hundred reforms across six countries. Dr Deepak Kumar and Dr Arpan Sharma, Assistant Professors at ADRI, presented various parts of the ADRI–LSE survey, walking the departmental teams through its findings. Ms Bandana Preyashi, IAS, Joint Secretary, Department of Fertilizers, Government of India, joined the Reform as Process session online, sharing her experience of leading and implementing reform within government with the departmental teams.
The workshop is grounded in a first-of-its-kind study of public management in Bihar, carried out jointly by ADRI and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) during 2024–25. The study surveyed 1,767 frontline and supervisory staff in elementary education, health sub-centres, anganwadis and MGNREGS across all 38 districts, with visits to nearly 3,000 facilities. It found a committed workforce with high levels of job satisfaction, alongside significant challenges of trust, duplication of work and gaps in basic infrastructure.
“What makes this workshop unusual is that Bihar now has hard evidence about its own administrative machinery, gathered from its own staff,” said Dr Martin Haus, co-author of the ADRI–LSE study and one of the workshop's instructors. “The survey shows a workforce that is committed and proud of its work. The question the officers worked on today is how to build on that commitment — by measuring how their offices actually run, and making improvement a regular habit rather than a one-time order.”
“For three decades ADRI has studied how Bihar's economy and government work; this workshop takes the next step by bringing that research directly back to the officers who run the State's programmes on the ground,” said Dr Ashmita Gupta, Associate Professor and Member Secretary, ADRI, and co-author of the study. “The measure of success is not what participants hear over these two days, but what each department begins doing differently in the ninety days that follow. Each of the seven teams will write its own plan, in its own words, for its own office.”
“Bihar has set ambitious goals for growth, service delivery and welfare, and whether those goals are met depends a great deal on how well government offices are run every day,” said Niraj Prakash, Programme Director, ADRI. “This workshop gives mid-level officers — the people who translate policy into action — practical tools for planning work, managing staff, using data and solving problems. We look forward to working with the departments as they take their ninety-day plans forward.”
The guidance received from the panel will shape the ninety-day action plans that the teams will develop and present on the second and final day of the workshop, tomorrow, 3 September, at ADRI.
The curriculum draws on four leading sources in the field: the World Bank's Government Analytics Handbook (2023); the ADRI–LSE study of public management in Bihar (2024–25); Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies (Columbia University Press, 2026); and the Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) approach developed at the Harvard Kennedy School.