Abstract: This article studies the World Bank’s Calcutta Urban Development Project (CUDP) in the 1970s through the lens of institutional projection. Specifically, it focuses on the World Bank’s effort to strengthen the administrative capacity of the state of West Bengal as part of and as a condition for the success of urban development. The article critically engages with the characterization of the World Bank as an ‘anti-politics machine’ and argues that case of the CUDP shows that the organization, rather than trying to depoliticize India’s development problems, acknowledged the distinctly political nature of these problems and tried to solve them with managerial means.