There are better practices to “best practices”.

Beyond the Borrowed Blueprint

An eye surgeon from Madurai once found his most famous inspiration in an unlikely place: McDonald's. Dr. G. Venkataswamy saw that a fast-food chain could serve the same burger, at the same quality, to millions of people at low cost. He did not copy the restaurant. He asked what its logic could mean for cataract surgery in India, where millions were going blind for want of an operation they could not afford. The answer, Aravind Eye Care System, became one of the most studied hospital models in the world, performing high volumes of surgery at a fraction of Western costs while treating many poor patients free. The lesson of Aravind is the lesson of this topic. A "best practice" is someone else's answer to someone else's problem; the better practice is to understand why it worked, adapt it to one's own context, and keep improving it.

The phrase "best practice" carries a hidden claim: that there is one right way to do something, already discovered somewhere, waiting to be copied everywhere. The quotation marks in the topic question that claim. Practices are born in particular soil, shaped by local institutions, resources, cultures and constraints. Lifted out of that soil, they often wither. Better practices begin from the opposite assumption: that solutions must fit their setting, that learning never ends, and that the people closest to a problem are partners in solving it.

The idea is not new. Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of Laws that laws should be suited to the people for whom they are framed:

"They should be adapted in such a manner to the people for whom they are framed that it should be a great chance if those of one nation suit another."

India's own Constitution is a living illustration of this wisdom. Its framers borrowed widely, from the British parliamentary system, the American bill of rights, the Irish directive principles and the Canadian model of federation. Yet when critics in the Constituent Assembly called it a patchwork of borrowings, B.R. Ambedkar replied that there was nothing to be ashamed of in borrowing, and that the variations made were meant to remedy faults and suit the needs of the country. The result was not a copy of any best practice but a better practice: a quasi-federal, parliamentary democracy with a strong Union, designed for a vast, diverse and newly partitioned nation.

In development economics, the cost of ignoring context is well documented. In the 1980s and 1990s, many developing countries were advised to adopt a standard package of liberalisation, privatisation and fiscal austerity known as the Washington Consensus. Where it was applied mechanically, without attention to local institutions, results often disappointed and social costs were severe. The economist Dani Rodrik summed up the lesson in the title of his book One Economics, Many Recipes: the principles may be universal, but the recipe must fit the kitchen. The development scholars Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock went further, describing how governments adopt the outward forms of admired institutions without their substance, a pattern they called isomorphic mimicry. Their alternative, problem-driven iterative adaptation, asks reformers to start from a locally defined problem, experiment, learn and adjust.

Moreover, even genuine successes carry hidden costs when copied without thought. The Green Revolution was a triumph for India's food security, and its package of high-yielding seeds, fertiliser and irrigation transformed Punjab and Haryana. Yet the same package, pushed as a universal best practice, led to falling water tables, soil degradation and a cropping pattern ill-suited to the region's ecology. The better practice for rain-fed and drought-prone regions has turned out to be different: watershed development, millets, crop diversification and natural farming suited to local conditions.

India's governance offers equally instructive examples of adaptation done well. The midday meal had early roots in Tamil Nadu, was expanded there into a universal scheme in 1982, and was taken nationwide after the Supreme Court's orders in 2001. Its spread worked because each state could fit menus, kitchens and delivery to its own conditions. Social audit grew out of the public hearings of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan in Rajasthan, and was institutionalised by Andhra Pradesh from 2006 for rural employment works, later through an independent social audit society. Each step borrowed an idea, but none copied a template.

The Aspirational Districts Programme, launched in 2018, shows another way to move beyond best practices. Instead of asking every district to imitate the most advanced one, it measures each district's progress against its own baseline and ranks them on improvement. This shifts the focus from copying a model to steady, measurable betterment. Similarly, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the containment effort in Rajasthan's Bhilwara district in 2020 was hailed as a model, but its value lay less in a fixed formula than in fast local decision-making, house-to-house surveys and coordination suited to that district's scale.

Building upon this, the better alternative to best practice is not the abandonment of learning from others but a different attitude to learning. Japan's tradition of kaizen, or continuous improvement, treats every practice as provisional, something to be refined by those who use it every day. Indian frugal innovation, from the Jaipur Foot developed in 1968 for amputees who sit cross-legged and walk barefoot to low-cost medical devices, shows how constraint itself can produce designs that rich-country best practices would never have imagined. The physicist Richard Feynman warned against "cargo cult science", the imitation of outward forms without the underlying method. Better practice is the opposite of the cargo cult: it copies the method of inquiry, not the outward ritual.

This is not to dismiss best practices altogether. Standards save lives in aviation, surgery and food safety, where a checklist borrowed from elsewhere can prevent fatal errors, and the World Health Organization's surgical safety checklist is a strong example. Benchmarking also guards against complacency and reveals what is possible. The point is that best practices are a starting point, not a destination. They work best where the problem is technical and well understood, and least where the problem is social, political or cultural, which is where most governance challenges lie.

What, then, makes a practice better than "best"? First, it is contextual, designed for the people, resources and institutions on the ground. Second, it is participatory, drawing on the knowledge of those who will live with its results, as the gram sabha and the social audit do. Third, it is iterative, tested on a small scale, measured honestly and improved continuously. Fourth, it is humble, willing to admit that what worked yesterday may fail tomorrow as circumstances change.

For a civil servant, this attitude is especially important. An officer posted to a tribal district will fail if she simply transplants a model from a metropolitan city. She succeeds by listening, piloting, measuring and adapting, using the best practice as a source of ideas rather than an order to obey.

Dr. Venkataswamy did not open a fast-food restaurant; he opened his eyes to a principle and built something new for the people in front of him. That is the spirit this topic asks of individuals, institutions and nations. A country as diverse as India cannot govern itself by importing finished answers. It must learn from the world, think for itself, and keep improving its own solutions. Best practices tell us what has worked somewhere. Better practices ask what will work here, for these people, now, and stay open to finding something better still tomorrow.