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• W2912677987 abstract "Reviewed by: Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India by Nayanika Mathur Kriti Kapila Nayanika Mathur, Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 203 pp. Paper Tiger is an engaging ethnography of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Indian state and the paper trail through which the state and its laws acquire life. The ethnography brings into view the intricate habits though which the state in India is made material and manifest by and to its functionaries on a daily basis. Specifically, the book examines the working of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005 in the remote Chamoli district in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Since its promulgation, NREGA has been widely regarded as an exemplary welfare legislation both in India and in the wider developmental context. Yet, local officials have found it difficult to make it into a success. At the heart of the book is the puzzle Paper Tiger sets for itself: why, despite its progressive objectives of guaranteed work, this legislation fails to provide employment in an area with high rates of unemployment. The book is based on fieldwork conducted in the office responsible for implementing NREGA in Gopeshwar, the district headquarters. Mathur’s privileged access to a unique participative position facilitated her ability to breach the zealously hermetic Indian bureaucracy and “work” as a functionary in the local NREGA office. This allowed her to uncover the various translational processes and entanglements through which NREGA transmogrifies from a statute into a program of work, or NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme—hereafter also referred to as Scheme). In and through its description of the implementation of NREGA and especially the translation of NREGA into NREGS, Paper Tiger [End Page 1475] argues that the very qualities that distinguish NREGA from prior welfare programs render its successful functioning as impossible. In particular, “words on which NREGA’s legitimacy crucially depends—transparency, accountability, audit, participation, guarantee, […]” (2) become the very obstacle to its implementability. Yet, the work of the state remains the stuff of enchantment, if not indoctrination, for those who work in the bureaucratic apparatus. The opening chapter introduces Gopeshwar, a remote town in Uttarakhand where Mathur conducted most of her fieldwork and takes up the formative role of its perceived remoteness in the minds of low-level state functionaries. The chapter ultimately argues that the state is never remote, even though at that distance, its presence is at best spectral (30). For most state functionaries based here, Gopeshwar is a “punishment posting,” a unique and ubiquitous turn of phrase in Indian bureaucratic parlance used to describe a place or role of physical and professional hardship with no attendant or commensurate compensation. Most functionaries relocate to Gopeshwar without their families due to its poor infrastructure and lack of modern trappings. They perceive Gopeshwar as “empty” and speak ad nauseam about devising exit strategies from its so-called emptiness. Because the book is so strictly focused on bureaucrats and bureaucracy, what receives ethnographic attention and elaboration is only that which touches or collides with the bureaucratic edifice. Mathur tends to speak of the neighborhood or “colony” where these functionaries live as if it were the whole Gopeshwar township. What remains curiously unexamined is whether Gopeshwar’s other inhabitants, who are not employed by the state, also perceive their existence as a result of some punitive divine arithmetic and/or characterize their lives and locality as empty. Unlike life outside the office, the daily bureaucratic routine is far from empty and pivots on the elaborate paper trail it produces. In the second chapter of the book, Mathur brings to view the practices of documentation and the gap between lived reality and its documented version. Ethnographically, this chapter is based on Mathur’s work as a member of a social audit team evaluating the implementation of NREGS in Orissa in eastern India. She describes the elaborate nature of transparency work that is undertaken by local officials and henchmen in order for the paperwork to look right for the purposes of this audit. It is on this visit that the actual working of NREGS, in all its..." @default.
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• W2912677987 date "2018-01-01" @default.
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• W2912677987 title "Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India by Nayanika Mathur" @default.
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• W2912677987 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2018.0079" @default.
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