India’s 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act presents an idealised social contract which assigns roles to multiple actors to uphold a mutual duty, or collective responsibility, to secure children’s access to a quality school education. This article explores how the social contract assumed by the RTE Act misrepresents the conditions required to enact mutual responsibilities as well as actors’ agreement to do so. Qualitative data from Bihar and Rajasthan show how state actors, parents, community groups and teachers negotiate and contest the RTE Act norms. The analysis illuminates the unequal conditions and ever-present politics of accountability relations in education. It problematises the idealisation of the social contract in education reform: it proposes that if the relations of power and domination through which ​‘contracts’ are entered into remain unaddressed, then expressions of ​‘mutual’ responsibility are unlikely to do other than reproduce injustice. It argues that policy discourses need to recognise and attend to the socially situated contingencies of accountability relations and that doing so would offer an alternative pathway toward addressing structural inequalities and their manifestations in education.

Eight essays in this compendium, written by experts with long years of experience in administration and academic research take a critical view of governance responses during the three waves of Covid-19 pandemic in India and recommend measures to address governance challenges that India is likely to face after the pandemic. The essays survey the institutional, procedural, legal, and socio-political implications of the Union and the State Governments’ responses to the pandemic-induced crisis in a range of areas such as public health, education, environmental regulation, urban planning, management of vital statistics and reliance on technology-based solutions. A series of policy recommendations have been made in each of these domains to address the problems that the pandemic has left behind, and to make the governance system and processes better equipped for any such future catastrophe.

The compendium has been brought out jointly by the School of Policy and Governance (SPG) at Azim Premji University, and the Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG), which is a is a group of retired officers of the All-India Services and Central Services.