Yahan tumko kuch nahin milega, ‘you won't find anything here’, said the kindly senior bureaucrat. It was the September of 2006 and we were sitting in his large office, located in the Secretariat at the heart of Dehradun, the capital city of the State of Uttarakhand in northern India, which had recently (in 2000) been carved out of Uttar Pradesh (UP) as a separate political entity. I was dismayed. After weeks of petitioning, phone-calling, and waiting, I had finally managed to get 5 minutes with the topmost development bureaucrat in this new Indian state. I had just breathlessly reeled off my spiel about being a doctoral student desirous of studying the ‘inner functioning’ of the development wing of the state of Uttarakhand. To accomplish this, I had requested his permission to sit in his office for 12 months and follow through their implementation of the brand new and much-celebrated National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 (NREGA). He was taken aback by this request to access, and participate in, office life. To think it through, he called in his ‘Number Two’, i.e., his immediate junior in the Rural Development Department. Both of them together puzzled over my request, again and again asking me why I would want to spend a year in their office for, ‘there is nothing here other than papers and files’, ‘you won't understand anything of development by sitting here in Dehradun’, where ‘we are involved merely in routine business’. The ‘real work’ (asli kaam) of development schemes happened in the districts, according to both of them. They were not, I could plainly see, averse to my sitting in their office if that was really what I wanted to do, but they genuinely did not see any point in it. They gently suggested that I might want to have a look at the districts before I made a decision. If I did decide to work out of a district then I must, they said, give them a ‘report’ on what exactly was going on there for ‘God alone knows what those chaps get up to’.