Transparent‐making Documents and the Crisis of Implementation: A Rural Employment Law and Development Bureaucracy in India

Abstract

This article examines an attempt by the Indian state to render its developmental operations “transparent.” It does so by tracking the implementation of India's ambitious social security legislation, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (NREGA). NREGA is premised on the introduction of a vigorous transparency into a notoriously flawed state delivery system. On the basis of long‐term immersion in the everyday world of government offices in northern India, I argue that transparent governance is, quite literally, made by documents. An ethnographic focus on “transparent‐making documents” leads me to argue that they had the ironic and entirely unintended effect of making this particular developmental law extremely difficult to implement. I demonstrate my thesis on the crisis of implementation by attending initially to the overwhelming volume and forms of labor expected from lower‐level development bureaucrats to produce the transparent‐making documents. Subsequently, I turn to the kinds of work these papery artifacts were doing to argue that they were posing a hindrance to the regular working of the Indian state.

Contractual dependencies:

“…Beggars’ use of state‐like bureaucracy to bring the image and form of the state into the field of begging thus goes beyond appealing to cross‐cultural symbols to calm tensions that delegitimize begging. Documents can realize desired realities (Bear ; Mathur ), a capacity that is closely related to the imagination and reproduction of state and civil society organizations (Gonçalves ; Hansen and Stepputat ; Poole ). Postcolonial bureaucracies often function by combining official regulations with informal norms, resulting in processes of “informal privatization” when government officials offer services for personal payment (Blundo ; Olivier de Sardan ).…”

Dealing with the digital panopticon

“…The lower-level bureaucrats who were forced to use technology find some benefits in that it makes their life easier to some extent to use software to maintain records as opposed to manually filling forms. The burdens of maintaining adequate records have increased with the transparency mandates of NREGA and a recent study in Uttarakhand argue that the extra paper work has created disincentives for the bureaucracy to take up NREGA work [22]. So, computerization did make it easier for the lowerlevel bureaucrats to do their job.…”

Esperarás y esperarás: trabajo sexual, gobernanza neoliberal y esperanza en Costa Rica

“…Se han realizado numerosos estudios sobre la evolución del papel de las burocracias estatales en contextos neoliberales, especialmente en el "Tercer Mundo", los cuales demuestran importantes variaciones regionales y locales (véase, por ejemplo, Auyero, 2012;Chua, 2011;Jeffrey y Young, 2012;Mathur, 2012;Matza, 2009;Sharma, 2005). Como argumenta Grewal, "el neoliberalismo produce sus propias geopolíticas en términos de cómo la lógica del mercado puede estar vinculada a las preocupaciones sociales de diferentes poblaciones según género, lugar y racialización " (2005: 19).…”