Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s Patching Development is conceptually and empirically innovative, with insights for our understanding of development as a dynamic and iterative process. It introduces the idea of “patching,” drawn from software development, to signify a top-down technocratic modification of bureaucratic procedures. This allows the author to highlight fine-tuned adaptation as a feature of implementation of policies at the “last mile of development” in Andhra Pradesh, India. Andhra Pradesh, a Southeastern state in India, implemented the national employment guarantee program (NREGA) successfully. The analysis of one state within a large multilevel federal system is used to illustrate how bureaucracies work by modifying their procedures to address local resistance and corrupt leakage. They do so by controlling and changing their procedures and thereby managing information flows in the recording process. It emerges that writing and production of records is profoundly political, “symbolic” (p. 23), and contested. Development is conceptualized as an evolutionary fine-grained process broken into its local and specific elements, incrementally done, but with a top-down official overseeing and monitoring the local processes in an “agile” (p.15) way. The notion of state power that emerges is a non-Weberian one with a focus on every day and infrastructural state power, a concept drawn from the sociologist Michael Mann.

The methodological approach utilized by Veeraraghavan is an ethnographic one of going deep into a specific bureaucracy, with a focus on implementation at the “last mile,” beyond policy formulation. The author is inspired more by social anthropologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, James Scott, Akhil Gupta, and Nayanika Mathur, even as the book engages with the political science and economics literature on NREGA. The study also dives deeply rather than engaging in a comparative analysis across states or deploying quantitative methods.

Patching is characterized by being “top-down, detail oriented, and iterative” (chap. 1, 69). Chapters 5, 6, and 7 provide a great deal of detail about the way in which patching works. The author tells us how local power holders may subvert the process of implementing a labor focused employment program and how higher-level bureaucrats attempt to mitigate the procedures at the margins. The book reveals how policies work at the local level especially at the implementation stage, which is a clear strength of the argument. The dilemmas of implementation are also described in a great deal of detail, which yields an inside the “black box” picture of what I would call “seeing within the state” (Aseema Sinha, “An Institutional Perspective on the Post-Liberalization State in India,” in Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan, ed., The State in India after Liberalization: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives, 2011, 49–68), building upon but also going beyond Scott’s ideas in “seeing like a state” (James Scott, Seeing Like a State, 1999).

An intriguing finding of the book is that top-down actions can be important for implementation of policies. Local discretion or decentralization is not always good for policy goals, as local power holders may use their influence to subvert the larger goals, and patching or top-down actions are needed to circumvent that subversion or collusion. Veeraraghavan argues that the local level embodies an antiworker ethos and nexus of competing interests that work against welfare of all citizens (pp. 11–14). This challenges the emphasis on decentralization common in development studies (and within the World Bank) and offers important details about how central monitoring and commitment may be beneficial. Interestingly, the centralized funding and monitoring design of the NREGA program (p. 29) means that it is designed to be so at its core. The author notes that Andhra Pradesh’s bureaucrats designed the social audit system (p. 69) and made it work well through patching, but a centralized institutional design is part of that possibility. Thus, the book’s conclusions have larger implications for the decentralization literature.

The book also directly addresses the power and politics nexus in local politics. The argument is that patching works to flexibly adapt the technical process to address local power struggles including elite capture at the local level. Veeraraghavan notes that “local policies must overcome local power structures” (p. 21) and that patching is a political process (p. 18).

How does the author define what is political? The book’s arguments define politics in terms of the ability of local caste and local notables to capture the functioning of NREGA for either personal bureaucratic ends—graft and leakage—or ensuring that the social power of local elites is not disturbed. In contrast, the higher-level bureaucrats are “committed” with a pro-Dalit Ambedkarite vision (p. 22) and deploy bottom-up social movements, especially the presence of NGOs (e.g., in Anantapur, pp. 77–78) to ensure that their bureaucratic tinkering power would counter both corruption and local elite capture. Negative politics and power work at the local level while the higher-level bureaucrats are facilitated by a political commitment by Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, the Chief Minister at that time (YSR), who gave remarkable autonomy to a civil servant, Koppula Raju, to oversee and implement the program.

Yet, faced with negative results the upper-level bureaucrats also took charge and made sure to control the agenda when the social audit in Anantapur became public (p. 79). In chapters 3, 4, and 5 there is evidence that higher-level bureaucrats’ goals and tactics were also aimed at continuing their power and control apart from achieving social progress, which could reveal a darker picture of higher-level bureaucrats’ purposes (p. 98). Certainly, centralized power worked, in some cases, to ensure better NREGAs functioning, but the political functioning and logic of higher-level bureaucrats is also consistent with a political and self-interested understanding of how they aimed to enhance their power and status. Patching was a political process across both local levels and higher-level bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh. The book takes seriously the different levels of bureaucracy in one state, but views the higher-level bureaucracy as a benevolent actor. It is apparent that the public choice approach in studies of bureaucracies and state agencies, wherein bureaucrats work for themselves, is not part of the larger argument although the empirical details show such motivations.

In line with Veeraraghavan’s tendency to see politics and power at local levels, the book briefly touches upon YSR’s motivations (p. 40) without exploring them too deeply. Learning more about what political struggles were essential to the emergence of bureaucratic autonomy would have enhanced the idea that patching is a political process and is missing in the book. How did Raju, the civil servant, continue to make a political case for autonomy faced with resistance at all levels? How exactly did political incentives align with bureaucratic commitment? We can speculate that YSR’s attempt to ensure democratic legitimacy and ensure his legacy could have been factors, but a more fleshed out analysis of the political struggles at the higher level might have added deeper insight into the politics of “information politics” and patching.

The title of the book is sweeping and claims to be about India. Yet, the author notes that his findings are very specific to the state he analyses, Andhra Pradesh. The specific constellation of factors that come together to create a successful process of patching are historically and context dependent. While the author did some field research in Bihar, he chose to focus on only Andhra Pradesh partly because the socioeconomic context is very different in Bihar in ways that affect the findings. We know from a larger body of work that Indian states are very distinct, and to understand “information politics and social change in India” takes either a comparative approach well used in studies of development within India or the need to highlight how the ideas travel to the rest of India beyond Andhra Pradesh. While the fine-grained attention to how patching works at the ground level are real empirical strengths, the methodological imagination of the book is not comparative across states. Similarly, the NREGA is a unique program, embodying the institutional design of centralism combined with monitoring. Do other state programs reveal patching? The author notes the uniqueness of the NREGA program and some illustrative comparisons are presented with other state programs without assessing this comparative claim too deeply. As a cautionary note, books relying on local levels should try not to inflate their specific and local claims to India writ large, especially when there is a strong tradition of comparative studies of India’s regions. The local and specific is surely important, but it does not exhaust the larger process of information and bureaucratic change across India and especially across a variety of states.

Despite that specificity, the idea of patching and the fine-grained attention to detail in how the state works in Andhra Pradesh means that the book will be an important contribution to the literature. The notion of bureaucratic patching, and an analysis of the role of information within policy implementation, is a pathbreaking finding that future researchers could attempt to assess in other states. Veeraraghavan’s ethnographic method and attention to struggles and contestations creates a new standard for research at the local level, heralding a rarely used political ethnography approach that yields many fascinating insights. It is a book worth reading.