"Red Tape" presents a major new theory of the state developed by
the renowned anthropologist Akhil Gupta. Seeking to understand the
chronic and widespread poverty in India, the world's fourth largest
economy, Gupta conceives of the relation between the state in India
and the poor as one of structural violence. Every year this
violence kills between two and three million people, especially
women and girls, and lower-caste and indigenous peoples. Yet
India's poor are not disenfranchised; they actively participate in
the democratic project. Nor is the state indifferent to the plight
of the poor; it sponsors many poverty amelioration programs.
Gupta conducted ethnographic research among officials charged
with coordinating development programs in rural Uttar Pradesh.
Drawing on that research, he offers insightful analyses of
corruption; the significance of writing and written records; and
governmentality, or the expansion of bureaucracies. Those analyses
underlie his argument that care is arbitrary in its consequences,
and that arbitrariness is systematically produced by the very
mechanisms that are meant to ameliorate social suffering. What must
be explained is not only why government programs aimed at providing
nutrition, employment, housing, healthcare, and education to poor
people do not succeed in their objectives, but also why, when they
do succeed, they do so unevenly and erratically.
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