Paper Short Abstract:

This paper conceptualizes Pakistani state's cash transfers program (BISP) as a digital infrastructural assemblage in order to unpack the contradictory politics of (im)mediation and transparency that have become central to its dys/fuctioning.

Paper Abstract:

How are (gendered) material-human relations produced and enacted through, and within, a digital infrastructural assemblage? Drawing upon ethnographic research on Pakistani state’s premier cash transfers program, this paper follows the complex and contradictory politics of beneficiaries’ hopes and frustrations as they navigate the uncertain processes of biometric identity verification required to access cash grants. Since 2008, Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) has sought to reduce poverty and empower women who, as representatives of over 5 million of the poorest households, are identified as the primary beneficiaries of the program. As in the case of many similar programs across the global south in the recent years, the desire to secure transparent and objective procedures that are supposed to safeguard against the various forms of human mediation has made the infrastructures of biometric verification and data analytics becoming central to its workings. While the officials themselves and the evaluation reports by the powerful global institutions applaud the program for not only learning from but also contributing to, the of socalled best practices repertoire of socio-economic inclusion through transparency the actual everyday experiences and interactions between the state functionaries and the beneficiaries remain absent from their accounts. Not only have the digital infrastructures multiplied human labors of governing and of being governed, they have made the procedures and their outcomes more opaque and uncertain while producing novel and perverse forms of (human) mediation undermining its own promises of inclusion and empowerment.