High pay, low presence: Economist explains why India’s teachers don’t show up

Development economist Karthik Muralidharan, in a podcast conversation, explained why the persistent issue of staff absenteeism in government schools and hospitals in India is about deep-rooted flaws in governance design.

Drawing on decades of field research, Muralidharan challenged the popular perception that government employees are simply not doing their jobs, and instead pointed to the institutional architecture that enables dysfunction and shields it from accountability.

“I started 25 years ago, my first PhD study was doing a nationwide study across 3,000 schools in 20 states – that’s when we did these surprise visits of measuring teacher absence and doctor absence,” he said in a podcast with Monika Halan for Groww. “Then the reality hits you about these governance issues.” 

Citing his data, Muralidharan noted that roughly 25% of teachers are absent, but he urged against painting all public servants with the same brush. “With 25% absence, remember 75% of teachers are still showing up,” he added. “You often have good people, but in a weak system.”

One of the key structural issues, he said, is that government recruitment is designed to attract highly qualified candidates through competitive exams — but these jobs are often located in rural areas that many of those candidates are unwilling to live in. “When you’re paid that much, you don’t want to live in the village,” he explained. “So even if they want to come, some days the bus won’t come, or something will happen…they’re not connected to the community.”

He argued that recruiting teachers from the local area, even at lower pay and without formal credentials, can be just as effective – if not more. “Study after study shows that hiring locally, even without formal qualifications, is often just as effective — or more — because you’re there, you’re connected, you’re accountable,” he said.

Muralidharan emphasised that the real problem lies in India’s extreme over-centralisation, where all hiring and control flows through state bureaucracies, leaving local communities powerless. “India is one of the most over-centralised countries in the world,” he said. “All these employees are state government employees. The community knows the teacher isn’t coming, but they’re absolutely powerless.” He pointed out that while local governments in many countries manage about 25% of public spending, in India that number is just 3%. “China — which we think of as highly centralised — has over 50%,” he added.

Why hasn’t this changed? The answer, he said, lies in political economy. “There’s a well-known idea in political economy: concentrated costs and diffuse benefits,” Muralidharan said. “If you try to take the action, the lobby is so strong that even if 2% of votes shift, that can be the difference between winning and losing.” 

“Because we have this very nonlinear relationship between seats and votes — a party can have a vote share difference of 2% and that can be the difference between a majority and a minority. So, which means that no politician wants to take panga with any group of people who are concentrated and a strong interest group. Which means that the payoff is much lower, so the risk of taking action is much higher.”

To solve the issue without falling into local-level nepotism or corruption, Muralidharan proposed a hybrid solution: continue to hold competitive exams to maintain quality, but give communities control over hiring from the pool of qualified candidates. “Let’s continue to have a competitive exam to set high standards — but passing it should only make you eligible,” he said. “Then the job is controlled by the community. If you don’t show up, you can be fired. But the community can’t hire anyone — only from the list of those who passed.”

He also traced the roots of over-centralisation back to India’s founding moment. “There were good historical reasons,” he said. “The framers of the constitution were concerned that because local elites were so entrenched…people like Dr. Ambedkar were convinced the local elites would never allow the marginalised to even exercise their rights.” Centralised bureaucracies, at the time, were seen as necessary to modernise a feudal society. “But now it’s become counterproductive,” Muralidharan said. “We have 70–80% literacy — yet communities are still completely disempowered.”

Ultimately, he argued, lasting reform must focus not just on punishing absenteeism but on building better systems that empower local accountability. “In the end, it’s the community that is the ultimate stakeholder,” he said. “The long-term answer to staff accountability has to be decentralisation.”