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.

This paper describes the arrival of a man‐eating leopard in a small Himalayan town in India and the local state's subsequent struggle to control the big cat. By focusing on what went on within the apparatus of the state during this period, this paper attempts to contribute to the study of modern time in bureaucracy. It argues that the startling inefficiencies in the effective governance and regulation of the big cat stemmed from a clash of various social times that were unfolding simultaneously. It outlines five distinct forms of social time that were in play during this period, which led to long periods of waiting and allowed for the articulation of a searing critique of the Indian state by town residents. Ultimately this paper contributes a rethinking of current theories of bureaucratic time that focus on the production of disempowered waiting, risk analysis, and anticipation. Instead it argues that a study of low‐level bureaucrats and citizens shows that a central task of bureaucracy is to attempt to mediate conflicting forms of social time. Moving away from accounts of bureaucratic indifference, this paper depicts failure as an impasse arising out of attempts to bring incommensurable forms and representations of time into congruence. These failures importantly imperil the legitimacy of bureaucrats and can lead to a radical critique of the state.

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This article traces the introduction of the category of climate change into the Indian Himalaya. Climate change emerged as an explanation for recurring incidences of humananimal conflict and the disappearance of a protected species through the labors of the local state bureaucracy. Even as the narratives on climate change were being imbued with expert authority, counternarratives dealing with the very same phenomena voiced by long-term residents of the Himalayas were summarily dismissed by the state as constituting mere conspiracy theories. This article accords both these narratives equal space and details the effects of the explanatory force of climate change in this region. On the basis of ethnography centered on humans, big cats, bears, and musk deer, it argues for an enhanced ethnographic attention to the political work done in the name of climate change. The article questions the analytic utility of the concept of the Anthropocene and ends by outlining certain distinctive characteristics of climate change as a concept and call to act upon the world.

This article studies the impact of the creation of a new state in northern India through an analysis of space. The space under consideration is the town of Gopeshwar, which serves as the administrative headquarters of a district in the state of Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand was created as a distinct Himalayan state in 2000 after a prolonged period of mass agitation to this end. The movement for statehood had emphasized historical neglect coupled with exploitation of the mountains of Uttarakhand by the plains. Beginning with an analysis of the town plan, this article moves on to describe how this place is made into a space by everyday practices. In particular it concentrates on the narratives of agents of the state who express a longing to escape this 'remote' town. Through an interrogation of the trope of remoteness, this article argues that the creation of the new state has served, ironically enough, to accentuate the traditional characterization of the Himalaya as a backward, inferior space within India.