Development is a contested concept involving abundant local-level controversies and  gotiations. Its multifarious workings on the ground are not always captured by the academic genre of esearch reports, with their classic methodologies of statistical sampling and objective questionnaires. Instead, this book offers a narrativebased ‘field view’ of development, with the aim of gathering an intimate understanding of development as lived, negotiated and told. Based on the author’s fieldwork in rural West Bengal in the mid-1990s and 2000s, the narratives presented here foreground the political, moral and experiential dimensions of ordinary rural people’s everyday encounters with development.