Offering a fresh approach to the issue of government and administrative corruption through 'everyday' citizen interactions with the state, this book explores changing discourses and practices of corruption in late colonial and early independent Uttar Pradesh, India. The author moves away from assumptions that the state can primarily be associated with the top levels of government, and looks at citizens' approaches to local level bureaucracies and police. The central argument of the book is that deeply 'institutionalised' corruption in India could only have come about through the exercise of particular long term customs of interaction between agencies of the state - government servants and police, and their interactions with local politicians. Because the social hierarchies that condition such interactions are complicated by individual and family connections to state employment, periods of traumatic state transformation lead to a reconfiguration in the meaning of corruption in the local state. Based on principal primary sources and extensive field interviews, this book will be of interest to academics working on political science and Indian and South Asian history.

Lines of the Nation radically recasts the history of the Indian railways, which have long been regarded as vectors of modernity and economic prosperity. From the design of carriages to the architecture of stations, employment hierarchies, and the construction of employee housing, Laura Bear explores the new public spaces and social relationships created by the railway bureaucracy. She then traces their influence on the formation of contemporary Indian nationalism, personal sentiments, and popular memory. Her probing study challenges entrenched beliefs concerning the institutions of modernity and capitalism by showing that these rework older idioms of social distinction and are legitimized by forms of intimate, affective politics. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research in the company town at Kharagpur and at the Eastern Railway headquarters in Kolkata (Calcutta), Bear focuses on how political and domestic practices among workers became entangled with the moralities and archival technologies of the railway bureaucracy and illuminates the impact of this history today. The bureaucracy has played a pivotal role in the creation of idioms of family history, kinship, and ethics, and its special categorization of Anglo-Indian workers still resonates. Anglo-Indians were formed as a separate railway caste by Raj-era racial employment and housing policies, and other railway workers continue to see them as remnants of the colonial past and as a polluting influence. The experiences of Anglo-Indians, who are at the core of the ethnography, reveal the consequences of attempts to make political communities legitimate in family lines and sentiments. Their situation also compels us to rethink the importance of documentary practices and nationalism to all family histories and senses of relatedness. This interdisciplinary anthropological history throws new light not only on the imperial and national past of South Asia but also on the moral life of present technologies and economic institutions.

Study covers interaction pattern of the bureaucratic personnel in Raipur City, the divisional headquarter of Raipur Division, Madhya Pradesh.

India's governance structure a throwback to the Raj days has to meet the challenges of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and empowering them' as citizens of a democratic polity. The development and welfare orientation at the normative level in India does not get translated too well in positive terms into actual results of a progressive and just society. More and better plans are constantly drawn up but the bureaucracy's capacity to deliver never worth bragging about so far as development is concerned has noticeably declined over the years. Political masters and the civil service elite often resort to collusion and connivance to use public office for private gain thwarting all good intentions. Corruption and inefficiency combined with callousness in dealing with the public certainly are very serious problems. However we really ought to be looking more closely at fundamental systemic problems in administration. Our basic civil service structure at the all-India level the focus of this book suffers from several maladies including: Lack of specialization and discrimination against specialists; insularity; lack of accountability; unsuitable recruitment and testing procedures; and faulty personnel management. That the country persists in having such administrative setup in this day and age is nothing short of tragic. The situation is so bad that tinkering with the administrative structure even overhauling it will not do much good. The need clearly is to reform the system drastically to re-engineer it so as to have competency technical and otherwise and professionalism accountability and transparency and responsiveness and civility; let us make our civil servants civil and servants of the people. After all aren't these the imperatives of democratic governance within the overall goal of achieving rapid economic and social progress?

Covers the period 1858-1947.