Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how welfare governance via digital technologies in India constrains ground-up social transformation by deepening divides and dependencies, as well as posing challenges to activism. Simultaneously, it sanctions digitally skilled intermediaries who are subject to little scrutiny.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study in four administrative blocks of rural Jharkhand, India, this paper interrogates how the Government of India’s singular focus on welfare governance via digital technologies influences ground-up social transformation. It argues that the incessant pressure to implement the digital innovations, namely Aadhaar-based biometric verification, online management systems, and digital-data driven monitoring, facilitates a deep conviction in and aspiration to be a part of technocratic solutions. This conviction influences the administration’s approach to problem solving at the lower levels. Consequently, welfare governance is treated as an apolitical information system in which siloed and short-sighted solutions – patches (Veeraraghavan, 2022) are considered sufficient. However, patching welfare governance ignores the complex local ecosystem, particularly factors that sustain corruption and leakage such as information asymmetries, as well as digital and other inequities. Simultaneously, it serves to deepen divides and dependencies. Activists are also confronted with the opaque and continuously changing digital processes, which are a challenge to keep up with. Alongside being confronted with this takniki jhamela or technological mess, they also face administrative angst because they are seen as disruptive. Instead, private entrepreneurs who are licensed to run digital service centres by the government, are permitted significant space but subjected to little scrutiny. This tendency is particularly noteworthy because it creates space for the emergence of an officially sanctioned intermediary in the form of the digitally skilled service centre operator.