An Interview with Ms. Neha Prakash, IAS
Director, Employment, Government of Uttar Pradesh
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Ms. Neha Prakash, IAS, currently serves as the Director, Employment, Government of Uttar Pradesh. She has previously held key administrative positions including District Magistrate and Collector of Shrawasti and Auraiya, and has served as Special Secretary in the Secondary Education, Electronics and IT, Institutional Finance, and Irrigation and Water Resource departments of the Government of Uttar Pradesh.
In this conversation with Ms. Neha Prakash, The Policy Edge team explores how governance unfolds across varied administrative contexts and reflects on Uttar Pradesh’s growth story. The discussion also probes the gap between policies that appear robust on paper and the challenges of ensuring their effective implementation on the ground.
You have worked in diverse administrative contexts, from districts to line departments, where your governance directly shapes people’s everyday lives. Yet for many outside the system, the workings of the bureaucracy can feel opaque. What do you wish civil society, the media, or policy students better understood about the effort it takes to get even the small things done? How can we bring more empathy into the way we talk about policy and public systems?
Public policy planning and execution is an extensive activity that involves a lot of coordinated effort among various departments and fields of expertise. The success of any policy is dependent on the community and stakeholder engagement with the vision of the policy. Administrators have, on many occasions, dealt with recalcitrant families unwilling to avail themselves of free government immunization/vaccination. At the same time, schemes like the Swachh Bharat Mission have achieved landmark progress, largely due to Jan Bhagidari or active community involvement.
Digital divide, gap between urban and rural infrastructure along with gender disparity pose challenges for the welfare policies to reach the most disadvantaged. The dearth of technical and professional skills among government staff, accompanied by budgetary constraints greatly impedes the policy design and implementation process. The need of the hour is to create institutionalised, sustainable solutions that endure even after the administrative shuffles within the department.
These challenges highlight why implementation must be seen not just as a technical task, but as a human process shaped by relationships, judgement, and on-the-ground constraints. Implementation happens in the middle space between policy intent and local reality, where frontline officers, development partners, and local networks must align despite institutional limitations.
For researchers and civil society to truly contribute, they need to move beyond top-level evaluations and engage with how administrative decisions unfold in context. It requires stepping into the lived experience of a field officer balancing competing pressures, or a department trying to innovate within legacy structures. As an administrator, I would actively support efforts that start with listening: researchers sitting in review meetings, joining district visits, or co-designing feedback mechanisms with officials. The questions we need are not just “what worked” or “what failed,” but “why did it play out this way, for whom, and what can we learn from it?”. The more we bring that lens of shared responsibility, the closer we get to policy that doesn’t just look good on paper but works in people’s lives.
Uttar Pradesh has been growing at a healthy rate, yet continues to face structural challenges, from enrollment to service delivery. Reflecting on your work as District Magistrate and Collector, where do you see opportunities for public systems to collaborate with universities or civil societies to help bridge these gaps?
The opportunity to collaborate with universities or civil societies exists in almost all fields. Universities can provide academic expertise and research data on social issues. Surveys and projects done by universities can lay the foundation for policy formulation. Civil societies have a massive reach and can help publicise government schemes and programmes, generating awareness and mobilising the public.
One useful way forward is to engage with us by helping build real-time, district-level diagnostics: simple, evidence-based tools or dashboards that track implementation gaps, citizen feedback, or service delivery patterns in focused areas like employment, education, or health. Often, we lack timely and disaggregated data to course-correct quickly or understand why certain schemes are underperforming in specific blocks or demographics. If universities can support this with grounded, rapid research that complements our administrative perspective and is actionable within the government calendar, it would greatly enhance local governance.
This experience illustrates how critical inter-agency coordination mechanisms can be under pressure, and what organisational principles enable such success. The lesson is simple: bring all stakeholders together, keep communication open and documented, and don’t let bureaucratic inertia stall progress. Leading solution-focused meetings, setting deadlines, and maintaining transparency can transform potential chaos into effective action - even when stakes are high.
Such collaborations can also help institutionalise knowledge. When officers are transferred, continuity often suffers. Research partners can help us build a knowledge repository by documenting what worked, where bottlenecks arose, and how communities responded. This would create a system memory that benefits future administrators and improves long-term planning.
Some policies aimed at generating employment and improving digital access often appear well-designed on paper, yet their implementation falls short, with social and cultural frictions contributing to the gap. Do you feel that on-ground research is also limited when it comes to informing practical tools for implementation? What kinds of questions should civil society and academic institutions be asking to improve implementation outcomes?
Many a time, policies are unable to reach their intended objectives due to social issues such as lack of education and awareness, gender discrimination, preconceived notions, superstitions, biases and prejudices. On-ground research on these issues is often limited to specific geographical areas or to a particular field of study. There is a need for integrated data collected from diverse sources and across all these topics to enable informed and rational policy decisions. Civil Society and academic institutions should delve deeper into the structural issues that require attention. Questions about the way people perceive outcomes and their valence to their everyday life, need to be studied for effective policy outcomes.
Well-designed government schemes for skilling, employment, and digital access fall short not due to poor planning, but because of how people perceive and engage with them. In rural areas, families may hesitate to enrol women in digital training, due to safety concerns and reputational risks. In urban settlements, informal workers may avoid job registration schemes fearing they could lose ration benefits or come under increased scrutiny. These behaviours reflect not just awareness gaps, but deeper beliefs around trust, risk, and relevance.
To bridge this gap, research must explore what a policy means to its beneficiaries, in particular their fears, hopes, and social realities. Civil society organisations and academics are well-placed to ask such grounded questions and design better outreach models rooted in everyday experience.
Yet even the best behavioural insights have limitations if schemes are assessed in isolation. When multiple programmes run side by side, weak convergence and fragmented data prevent meaningful course correction. Integrated data can help pinpoint structural barriers, for instance, why certain groups consistently drop off or why some districts lag despite high participation elsewhere.
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Views are personal.