Designing robust interventions

Some ideas don’t leave you, even if you lose track of them. The idea of robust intervention is one such idea. I first encountered it when I read Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz talk about it in a 2011 interview. It became my theme of the year in 2011, and I presented my thoughts at TISS, Mumbai, that same year. Last April, I got an opportunity to interact with K V Raghavan Fellows, changemakers, at Agastya’s Kuppam campus. Here is what I presented on “Designing robust interventions” on April 8, 2026. These are preliminary thoughts, and I hope to build on them. I am aware that nothing in life is black and white. And classifying interventions into robust vs non-robust is just for understanding purposes.

Joseph Stiglitz's definition of robust intervention: “interventions that are simple enough that you don’t have to very fine-tune to make them work, even if you have a bad president like President Bush.” from Times of India, 2011

Examples of non-robust interventions: The presentation mentions the Iraq intervention by the Bush administration in 2003 and Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) as non-robust. Iraq war was estimated to last 3-4 months. It lasted 8 years and 7 months instead, creating a mess in the region. 457 Atal Tinkering Labs were launched in 2016; now around 10,000 labs nationwide are supposed to be operational. There is no official data on how many are functional. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a significant portion could be either severely under-utilized or non-functional. The centralized NEET exam this year is also a good example of a non-robust intervention. A typical non-robust intervention severely underperforms in achieving its objective, incurs heavy cost-overrun, and leaves most stakeholders weaker than when it started, except for a few in power who derive immense benefit.

Examples of robust interventions: Two interventions in India that stand out as robust are Aadhaar authentication and Tihar jail reforms initiated by Kiran Bedi. Aadhaar wanted to create a nationally portable unique identity for people in the remotest parts and marginalized sections of the country. And it succeeded in creating such a system and enrolling people into it. Kiran Bedi began her Inspector General (IG) Prisons term in May 1993 with a vision of transforming a jail into an ashram. She initiated ground-up initiatives to gather grievances and to systematically address them. Bedi demonstrated how a jail can run small factories successfully, enable education, and run a meditation program. Most of these initiatives are still running twenty years later.

4 characteristics of a robust intervention:

1. Understanding all stakeholders: Understanding anxieties, aspirations, and biases from all stakeholders, including the designer(s).
2. Framing based on the crux: Framing should be based on the most critical issue that is hindering any movement towards a better state.
3. Response to crux based on the strength: Is the response based on the resources, skills, and technology that are strengths?
4. Iterative learning & improvement: Fail fast, learn fast at low cost

Between discovery of the crux and iterative improvement, which is more important? I think it is the latter. In complex situations, such as farmers' suicides or poor foundational literacy (grade 4-5-6 students unable to read simple sentences), it may take time to discover the crux. In fact, it may be uncovered through iterative failures. The faster we learn, and the lower the cost of each pilot intervention, the better. 

These were my thoughts behind the April 2026 presentation. Note that these characteristics don't capture the simplicity Stiglitz talked about in his definition. I feel it is important. Unless it is simple, its adaptability gets limited. A robust policy/strategy/intervention needs to be tweakable based on changing context. When a COVID vaccine is taken to tribal communities, it needs to consider their inhibitions. Perhaps this follows automatically if we move from robustness to antifragility, as the first step is to reduce fragility.

Was Ram real? A Nagarjuna's two truths perspective

One evening last week, I was enjoying chai-samosa with friends, and the mood was jovial. And suddenly the discussion turned to "Was Ram real?" Within no time, two camps got created, volumes increased, and the atmosphere grew tenser. To one group, Ram was a historical figure, while the other group believed he was a mythological figure. I tried unsuccessfully to divert the topic. Eventually, it subsided on its own. Perhaps because jalebi arrived. But the episode reminded me of how the second- to third-century Buddhist teacher Nagarjuna responded to a fictitious opponent who asked, "Was Buddha real?" in his famous work, the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (मूलमध्यमककारिका, MMK), translated as "The foundational verses on the middle way". For this article, I have used Mark Siderits and Shoryu Katsura's book, "Nagarjuna's Middle Way," as the primary source.

Before we explore Nagarjuna's response, which comes in chapter 22 of MMK, let's briefly look at what Nagarjuna says in the preceding chapters of MMK. The first thing to note is that Nagarjuna begins and ends MMK by saluting Buddha. In fact, in the last verse of the last chapter (27.30), Nagarjuna says, " I salute Gautama, who, based on compassion, taught the true Dharma.” (यः सद्धर्मम् अदेशयत् अनुकम्पाम् उपादाय तं नमस्यामि गौतमं, yaḥ saddharmam adeśayat anukampām upādāya taṃ namasyāmi gautamam).

Nagarjuna's key contribution in MMK is to bring out the significance of śūnyatā (शून्यता) or niḥsvabhāvatā (निःस्वभावता) or lack of intrinsic nature of all phenomena. He is particularly addressing a school of Buddhism called Sarvastivāda, which was a sub-branch of the Sthaviravāda school, which had branched off from the orthodox Sthavira school around the second-third century BCE. According to Sarvastivādins, the smallest irreducible constituents of reality, called dharmās (धर्म), are momentary but real. Each dharma has its own intrinsic nature (svabhāva), for example, a sensation, a feeling, or a momentary atom etc.

Nagarjuna begins with the Buddha's teaching of dependent origination (प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद, pratītyasamutpāda) and shows that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic nature. Some of the things that he shows as sunya are five skandhās (स्कंध) (five aggregates: sensations, perceptions, feeling, volition, and consciousness), dhātus (धातु) (constituents of the process of cognition), kartā-karma (subject-object), dukha (unsatisfactoriness), bhāva-abhāva (existence-non-existence), dharma (things with intrinsic nature), kāla (time), self, nirvāna, and kleśa. In fact, Nagarjuna says even sunyatā (emptiness) is also sunya (13.8).

One can see that Nagarjuna has already laid the groundwork for addressing the question, “Was Buddha real?” by the time he comes to chapter 22. All the key attributes, five skandhas, are shown to be śūnya in chapter four.  And, dharmas and the self are also shown to be śūnya. In this chapter, Nagarjuna says that Tathāgata, another name for the Buddha, is just as empty as all the other things he has shown in the previous chapters to be śūnya. For example, in the first verse (22.1), Nagarjuna says:

 

स्कंधा न नान्यः स्कंधेभ्यो नास्मिन् स्कंधा न तेषु सः ।

तथागतः स्कन्धवान्न कतमो Sत्र तथागतः ॥ 22.1 ॥

skandhā na nānyaþ skandhebhyo nāsmin skandhā na teùu saþ .

tathāgataþ skandhavānna katamo ’tra tathāgatah (22.1)

The Tathāgata is neither identical with the skandhas nor distinct from the skandhas; the skandhas are not in him nor is he in them;

he does not exist possessing the skandhas. What Tathāgata, then, is there?

 

And in the last verse (22.16) says:

तथागतो यत् स्वभावस् तत् स्वभावम् इदम् जगत् ।

तथागतो निःस्वभावो निःस्वभावम् इदम् जगत् ॥ 22.16॥

tathāgato yatsvabhāvas tatsvabhāvam idaṃ jagat  

tathāgato niḥsvabhāvo niḥsvabhāvam idaṃ jagat (22.16)

 What is the intrinsic nature of the Tathāgata, that is the intrinsic nature of this world.

The Tathāgata is devoid of intrinsic nature; this world is devoid of intrinsic nature.

 

In all this process of proclaiming everything, including the Buddha empty of intrinsic nature, one verse from this chapter (22.11) stands out like an odd one. It says:

 

शून्यम् इति न वक्तव्यम् अशून्यम् इति वा भवेत् ।

उभयं नोभयं चेति प्रज्ञप्त्यर्थं तु कथ्यते  || 22.11 ||

śūnyam iti na vaktavyam aśūnyam iti vā bhavet  

ubhayaṃ nobhayaṃ ceti prajñaptyarthaṃ tu kathyate (22.11)

“It is empty” is not to be said, nor “It is non-empty,” 

nor that it is both, nor that it is neither; [“empty”] is said only for the sake of instruction.

What is Nagarjuna up to? After writing twenty-two chapters where he is trying to show every phenomenon to be empty, he says we should not say, “It is empty, or it is not empty. I am saying it only for the sake of instruction.” What does he mean? The crux lies in understanding the two truths Nagarjuna introduces in chapter 24 in three verses 24.8-10. Let’s look at them:

 

द्वे सत्ये समुपाश्रित्य बुद्धानां धर्मदेशना ।

लोकसंवृतिसत्यं च सत्यं च परमार्थतः ॥ 24.8 ||

dve satye samupāśritya buddhānāṃ dharmadeśanā  

lokasaṃvṛtisatyaṃ ca satyaṃ ca paramārthataḥ (24.8)

The Dharma teaching of the Buddha rests on two truths:

conventional truth and ultimate truth.

 

ये Sनयोर् न विजानन्ति विभागं सत्ययोर् द्वयोः ।

ते तत्त्वं न विजानन्ति गन्भीरं बुद्धशासने ॥ 24.9 ||

ye ’nayor na vijānanti vibhāgaṃ satyayor dvayoḥ  

te tattvaṃ na vijānanti gambhīre buddhaśāsane (24.9)

 Who do not know the distinction between the two truths,

they do not understand reality in accordance with the profound teachings of the Buddha.

 

व्यवहारम् अनाश्रित्य परमार्थो न देश्यते ।

परमार्थम् अनागम्य निर्वाणं न अधिगम्यते ॥ 24.10 ||

vyavahāram anāśritya paramārtho na deśyate |

paramārtham anāgamya nirvāṇaṃ nādhigamyate (24.10)

The ultimate truth is not taught independently of customary ways of talking and thinking.

Not having acquired the ultimate truth, nirvāṇa is not attained.

Conventional truth, or customary ways of talking and thinking, is that knowledge which works while navigating the world. Conventional truth includes the embodied knowledge that enables us to breathe and walk, the recipes for our dishes, cultural beliefs that keep the society relatively friction-free, science and technology that create cars and computers, religious beliefs that support us in challenging situations, etc. One conventional truth is that a person such as the Buddha is a fiction constructed based on skandhas, and skandhas themselves are conceptual constructions, which are useful in realizing the ultimate truth. Ultimate truth cannot be acquired as a form of knowledge; it is the dissipation of all strongly held views about what is real. Nagarjuna says, “Sunyata is the dissipation of all views.” (13.8) (शून्यता सर्वदृष्टीनां निःसरणं, śūnyatā sarvadṛṣṭīnāṃ niḥsaraṇaṃ). Siderits & Katsura put this paradoxically as, “The ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.”

Was Lord Ram real? If you believe he was and if this belief helps you navigate life better, then that is as good as truth for you. On the contrary, if life works just fine for you with Ram as a mythological figure, then that is as good as truth for you. Alternatively, if you can have a productive discussion in the morning with archaeologists about the lack of evidence for the Rām-Rāvan war, and enjoy the evening singing devotional Tulasidās bhajans praising Lord Rām, why not?

Related article:

"Nāgārjuna’s śūnyatā through Mūlamadhyamakakārikā verses," October 19, 20222

Sources:

1. Mark Siderits and Shoryu Katsura, “Nagarjuna’s Middle Way,” Wisdom Publications, 2013. All the English translations in this article are from this book. For each verse, the book also gives key elaborations from the subsequent commentators of MMK like Buddhapālita (5^th-6^th century), Bhāviveka (6^th century), and Candrakīrti (7^th century).
2. Joseph Walser, “Nagarjuna in context: Mahayana Buddhism and Early Indian Culture,” Columbia University Press, 2004. This book goes into why Nagarjuna says what he says.
3. Dilip Loundo, “The ‘two truths’ doctrine (satyadvyaya) and the nature of Upāya in Nagarjuna,” Kriterion Revista de Filosofia, April 2016, 57(133):17-41. DOI: 10.1590/0100-512X2016n13301dl

Joseph Schumpeter, creative destruction, and the significance of business strategy

Artificial Intelligence (AI), the way it has progressed in the past few years, has surprised me, like many of you. And yet, it feels like a dejavu. It feels as though I have been here multiple times before. It felt uneasy to see many people in my neighborhood lose their jobs in the 1980s as cotton mills in Bombay (now Mumbai) shut down. Both my father and father-in-law were either forced to retire or lost their jobs. Today, we have super-tall buildings in their place in the Prabhadevi-Parel area, including one Trump Tower. Then came PCs and the Internet in the 90s. In 1991, Bill Gates announced that "Kodak is toast" at the Buffett Group gathering. It took time, but slowly most Kodak film studios in my neighborhood vanished. This was followed by the mobile revolution, and the landline monopoly of BSNL crumbled. Gone are the days when one could wave a hand and an auto/taxi would stop. The person who said that this phenomenon, which he called "creative destruction", is at the heart of capitalism is Joseph Schumpeter. A study of capitalism that ignores creative destruction is like "Hamlet without the Danish prince," said Schumpeter in the closing line of chapter 7 of his most famous book, "Capitalism, socialism, and democracy" (CS&D), published in 1942. What was Schumpeter trying to say in this chapter titled "The process of creative destruction"? And how does it relate to business strategy? Let's explore this in this article.

Schumpeter wrote CS&D from 1939 to 1942 while he was a faculty member at Harvard. He had just finished writing a massive treatise called "Business Cycles". It was published in 1939 in two volumes totaling 1095 pages. In 1941, he was invited to The Lowell Institute in Boston to deliver eight public lectures on "An economic interpretation of our times". This is where he first presented the ideas he had been working on that became CS&D. This was a turbulent period in Schumpeter's life. He was disturbed by the war in Europe. Moreover, in 1941, he was under investigation by the FBI for possible espionage, and he was ostracized in the social circles of Cambridge. He had begun to scrutinize his life and felt he was "worthless", "frivolous", "vain", and a "snob", and his life had been "a failure". It is remarkable to see someone produce such a marvelous book under such circumstances.

Who was Schumpeter responding to when he wrote CS&D, particularly the creative destruction chapter? This chapter is in Part II of the book entitled "Can capitalism survive?" In the first few chapters of Part II, Schumpeter is presenting his view of how contemporary capitalism works. He felt that most economists treated the economy as static and competition as perfect. Schumpeter felt that the economy is an evolutionary process. He says, "The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process." He gives credit to Karl Marx for emphasizing this aspect. Thus, he is primarily responding to the economists who treat the economy and capitalism as a static entity. Schumpeter says, "The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers' goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates."

Schumpeter says due to this process of creative destruction, competition is an "ever-present threat" even though a business may be a monopoly or a part of an oligopoly. He illustrates his point with the example of retail trade. "In the case of retail trade the competition that matters arises not from additional shops of the same type, but from the department store, the chain store, the mail-order house and the supermarket which are bound to destroy those pyramids sooner or later."

One implication of this evolutionary process undergoing "industrial mutation" from time to time is that "there is no point in appraising the performance of that process ex visu of a given point of time; we must judge its performance over time, as it unfolds through decades or centuries." The second implication is that "since we are dealing with an organic process, analysis of what happens in any particular part of it - say, in an individual concern or industry - may indeed clarify details of mechanism but is inconclusive beyond that." Schumpeter is saying that we shouldn't be analyzing the impact of AI on one company or sector; the effect is likely to spread to the entire economy over time. 

This is where Schumpeter brings in the role of strategy. The term "business strategy" wasn't as fashionable then as it is now. Schumpeter says, "Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only against the background of that process and within the situation created by it. It must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood irrespective of it or, in fact, on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull." The primary purpose of business strategy, according to Schumpeter, is to watch out for strong winds or waves - technological, regulatory, fashion, demographic - that are likely to disrupt the business and to prepare the organization to ride them with appropriate responses. 

I found the chapter "The process of creative destruction" both readable and quite significant for today's context. Eighty years after this chapter was written, many of us still feel ill-prepared to face the strong winds of AI and automation.

Sources:

"Capitalism, socialism, and democracy," Joseph Schumpeter, Routledge, 1994 (chapter 7)

"Prophet of innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and creative destruction", Thomas McCraw, Harvard University Press, 2007 (chapter 21)

Related articles:

A century of innovation economics: Schumpeter's 5 types of innovations, April 6, 2010
Joseph Schumpeter and the principle of indeterminateness, December 9, 2013