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This book offers a narrative-based ‘field view’ of development, with the aim of gathering an intimate understanding of development as lived, negotiated and told. Based on the field work, conducted in rural West Bengal in the mid-1990s and 2000s, the narratives presented here foreground the political, moral and experimental dimensions of ordinary rural people’s everyday encounters with development.

Further it explores the themes of rural backwardness, NGO efforts at building civil society in villages, the potentials and limitations of ‘people-centred’ development endeavours, the failures of well-intentioned development programmes, the travails of village women’s self-help groups, the predicaments of research teams in the field and the often unpredictable outcomes of their interventions, and the everyday rural practice of ‘chat-behind-the-back’ through which villagers in West Bengal exercise critical citizenship vis-à-vis the development process.