Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how claims to deservingness contest categorizations of poor and non-poor in social welfare schemes in India. Failing, however, to yield any substantial outcomes, these claims shed light on how different state and non-state actors navigate, assess and process these claims.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, India – a country known for its under-funded and under-resourced healthcare sector – has started to introduce health insurance schemes in order to address the WHO’s call for UHC (2005). These so called publicly financed health insurance schemes qualifying as social welfare schemes aim to provide accessible and affordable quality healthcare to the country’s low-income population. The newest and most widespread scheme is the Ayushman Bharat - Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (scheme, henceforth). Introduced in 2018, the scheme, identifies its eligible and entitled beneficiaries based on a poverty survey known as the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research at a public hospital, a private hospital, and a government office in Haryana, India – this paper examines how claims to deservingness (Streinzer & Tošić 2022) contest categorizations of eligible and non-eligible, poor and non-poor created through such poverty surveys. In so doing, I show how notions of entitlement to the scheme are challenged by beneficiaries on account of being “genuinely poor”. Failing, however, to yield any substantial outcomes (Kruks-Wisner 2017), these claims to eligibility (through, prayer letters and contacting brokers) shed light on how different state and non-state actors (e.g., public and private hospital staff, government employees, CSC owners) navigate, assess and process these claims. Most importantly, as social welfare schemes are increasingly being distributed in digital ways, this paper investigates how these claims are subsequently entangled with being visible in a digital database and on a digital portal.