Dryden-Peterson, SarahReuben, JulieGhosh, Abhinav2026-06-0920262026-05-122026Ghosh, Abhinav. 2026. Back to basics? Frontline actors and the implementation of foundational learning reforms in India. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.32701171https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42740290This dissertation examines how foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) reforms are interpreted and implemented in India amid a growing global focus on addressing a “learning crisis.” While recent FLN initiatives in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) emphasize instructional change, data-driven monitoring, and evidence-based interventions, we know little about how they are taken up by the actors responsible for their delivery. Drawing on a multi-year qualitative study across three Indian states, including interviews with 95 implementing actors and extensive field observations, this study investigates how frontline actors like teachers, principals, middle-tier bureaucrats, and NGO workers interpret, negotiate, and enact India’s flagship FLN policy – the NIPUN Bharat Mission. Adopting an anthropological approach to policy, the dissertation views education policy implementation not as a linear process of compliance, but as a complex social practice of meaning-making, appropriation, and contestation. Across three papers, I show that implementation is shaped less by formal policy design or institutional mandates than by the cognitive frames, epistemic assumptions, and positional pressures of diverse policy actors. The first paper demonstrates that frontline actors, despite awareness of low learning and support for reform goals, remain skeptical due to frame dissonance between their diagnoses of the problem and the instructional focus implied by FLN policies. The second paper shows that middle-tier bureaucrats, though motivated, interpret reforms through limited pedagogical knowledge and outcome-oriented policy signals, translating complex instructional support roles into simplified, codifiable routines. The third paper reveals how NGO grassroots workers perform core bureaucratic functions without formal authority, driving implementation through authoritative enforcement, entrepreneurial persuasion, and strategic depoliticization, thereby blurring boundaries between state and non-state governance during the implementation of NIPUN. Taken together, the dissertation advances an actor-centered account of policy implementation that foregrounds sensemaking and political labor. It argues that challenges to learning reforms stem not only from institutional constraints, but from misalignments between policy designs and the knowledge, beliefs, and roles of implementing actors. By reframing implementation as a site where policy is continuously negotiated and transformed, this project contributes to scholarship in education, public policy, and the political economy of governance in low- and middle-income countries.application/pdfenbureaucratseducation policyfoundational learningIndiapolicy implementationEducationEducation policyThesis or Dissertation2026-06-090000-0002-2183-7171