What the DACP fight taught me about how reform actually happens
We won DACP because we were patient, honest, and willing to hold a position for years without theatrical escalation. The lessons go beyond doctors.
The Dynamic Assured Career Progression scheme came to Odisha’s government doctors in 2024, eighteen years after the Centre introduced it in 2006. The state’s official position, for most of those eighteen years, was that the scheme was being studied. OMSA’s position, for most of those eighteen years, was that the studying had been thorough enough.
I was Secretary-cum-Treasurer of OMSA during part of that period and President during the final push. I want to write down what the campaign taught me about how reform of this kind actually happens — because I think the lessons generalise beyond doctors and beyond Odisha.
First lesson: the timeline of reform is measured in years, not news cycles.
When we began making the case for DACP in earnest, none of us thought it would take as long as it did. Reform of this kind is slow because it has to pass through too many rooms, each with its own incentives and its own pace. Each room is reasonable on its own terms. The cumulative effect of their reasonableness is that nothing happens for years.
Second lesson: patience is a strategy, not a virtue.
When we threatened a relay strike in February 2023, the threat was the result of years of quiet pressure that had not worked. The strike threat was not anger. It was strategy. We had been patient long enough that no one could accuse us of being impatient, and the threat carried weight precisely because we had earned the right to make it.
Third lesson: be honest about what the reform costs.
We never pretended DACP was free. We told the state, openly, what implementation would cost over five years and over ten. We did not soften the financial ask or inflate the benefits. I think it is part of why the state, when it finally moved, moved on terms that were stable.
Fourth lesson: the qualities that win institutional reform are not the qualities public discourse rewards.
The qualities that won the DACP campaign — patience over years, honesty about cost, willingness to hold a position without theatrical escalation — are not the qualities that tend to get attention. Public discourse rewards visibility, urgency, the well-timed statement, the dramatic moment.
This is a tension I think about often. If genuine reform requires the slow, patient, honest work that DACP required, and the surrounding noise rewards the opposite, then anyone trying to do the slow work has to be deliberate about not being swallowed by the noise.
I do not have a clean answer to this. I am still working out what I think. But I believe part of the answer is to write carefully and specifically — to resist the summary and stay with the detail, even when the detail is less interesting to share.
That is what I am trying to do here.