Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : the will to improve governance : setting the stage for a technomoral, translocal politics -- The Indian right to information : an exceptional tale -- Rightfully worded : a law, a petition, and a few stories -- Where the state goes to hide : bureaucracy, bureaucraft, and the limits of transparency -- Whose law is it anyway? : the common man as subject of rights -- "A river that starts small and grows big" : corruption, state, culture, law -- On good governance populism.

"With a focus on the work of activists, citizens, and state officials, A Technomoral Politics offers an ethnographic account of the contradictions and dangers of good-governance politics in twenty-first-century India. Probing the relationship between transparency and bureaucracy, Aradhana Sharma illuminates the paradoxes, limits, and risks of a system that is meant to spread liberal democratic principles but that also ends up promoting antidemocratic, populist-authoritarian forms of rule"-- Provided by publisher.