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Short abstract

Focusiung on Pakistan's cash transfers program, this paper investigates how women beneficiaries navigate an unstable infrastructural assemblage of databases, digital technologies, officials and (non-)state functionaries, and hygienic regimes to enact their new relationship with the state

Long abstract

States across the Global South have increasingly sought to automate welfare by relying on data-based infrastructures and digital technologies. Hence, by fixing identities beyond the flimsy paper-based identification systems and by establishing systems that work as objective and standardized procedures these infrastructures are supposed to expand citizenship rights vis-à-vis the state. Focusing on Pakistani state’s social protection program, the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) – also known as the Ehsaas Kafalat [Compassionate Guardianship] Programme (EKP) – this paper investigates the contradictory politics of such data-driven and digital infrastructures to show how they encourage and undermine, valorize and devalue certain imaginaries of, and engagements with the state. Introduced in 2008, its official goals were poverty reduction and women empowerment: women, representing the poorer households, are Programme’s primary beneficiaries. To overcome leakages, improve transparency and the problems of human (political and bureaucratic) mediation and discretion, the Programme has come to increasingly rely on digitally-conducted surveys and on biometric verifications. Thanks to the largely favorable evaluations by the powerful international organizations, it has expanded exponentially even as four different governments have changed hands in the national capital: with less than two million beneficiaries in 2008 to over eight million beneficiaries today. By employing assemblage perspective, this paper argues that from the standpoint of the everyday experiences of women beneficiaries the Programme functions as a contingent and unstable entanglement of beneficiary claimants, databases, digital, biometric verification devices, state- and non-state functionaries, internet and electricity connections, hygienic regimes and even dust and sweat.