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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how women state welfare workers navigate caste and gender hierarchies and digital governance in India's Dalit localities, showing how digitalization and financial reforms reshape their everyday labour and deepen inequalities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how women state welfare workers navigate policy reforms and digital governance in India’s gendered and caste-segregated geographies. It analyses the everyday labour of frontline women welfare workers in so-called Harijan (Dalit) colonies, where caste segregation shapes access and delivery of social welfare. The study investigates ongoing reforms in selected state welfare schemes - both structural and operational - to understand how workers negotiate daily practices, power relations and hierarchies within their communities and in their interactions with the state.

Drawing on qualitative interviews, state-level data and policy analysis, the paper traces how caste and gender dynamics intersect with expanding tools of digital governance and financialization. As some of the most marginalized and spatially isolated caste geographies, Dalit colonies reveal the uneven presence of the state and the growing role of private and non-governmental actors in welfare provision, along with the consequences of these shifts for frontline workers. The analysis shows how digitalization, financial reforms, infrastructural deficits and changing labour relations reshape workers’ lived experiences, reconfiguring the intersections of caste, class and gender in welfare implementation.

Focusing primarily on Dalit localities in Delhi and Karnataka, the study highlights how care work, caste discrimination, gendered precarity and unequal access to technology and education shape workers’ engagement with welfare delivery. The paper argues that the Indian welfare state - along with emerging private actors - plays an active role in administrative and digital practices that can exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the structural marginalization of historically oppressed communities.