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Short abstract

In 2022, India abolished 4863 river data collector positions through bureaucratic omission. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside the national expert bureaucracy of the water ministry, this paper examines how administered absence quietly dismantles India’s water data infrastructure.

Long abstract

India’s rivers are under exacerbating climate stress, and the hydrological data needed to manage them is increasingly critical, for both domestic water governance and transboundary negotiations across South Asia. In 2022, the Indian Ministry of Jal Shakti abolished the work-charge cadre of the Central Water Commission, eliminating nearly 5000 positions held by government-employed river data collectors stationed across 1600 remote gauging stations. This paper examines how that abolition was accomplished through the managed non-production of a prime minister-level cabinet note that had anuthorized its existence. Drawing on interviews with 55 senior hydrocrats conducted during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside the CWC, I argue that this constitutes what I call administered absence, the deliberate management of what will not appear in a proceeding, as distinct from archival loss or the simple act of forgetting. Such administered absence, I argue, is bureaucratically productive: it generates plausible deniability while ensuring that a consequential decision continues to organize institutional life invisible publicly and without requisite accountability. The analysis attends to structural antagonism between the secretarial (procedural) and hydrocratic (technical) cadre, the silencing of expert voices in ministerial proceedings, and the cascading consequences for India’s river governance infrastructure at precisely the moment resilient futures demand it most. The paper further reflects on the ethnographic condition of researching administered absence: what it means to sit across from someone managing what they will and will not show you, and to treat that partial witnessing as methodologically constitutive rather than merely inconvenient.