India, Oct. 21 -- In the vocabulary of contemporary Indian statecraft, few words are deployed with as much rhetorical bravado - and as little rigorous verification - as "saturation." Prime ministers and chief ministers routinely declare flagship developmental schemes one hundred percent saturated, inviting citizens to believe that the state's welfare net has wrapped itself completely around the vulnerable.

Yet anyone who has spent an afternoon in a tribal hamlet in Bastar, a fishing settlement along the Coromandel coast, or an unauthorized colony on the fringes of an Indian metropolis understands the fiction behind these claims. In conventional bureaucratic parlance, a programme is often declared "saturated" simply because an administrat...