Bureaucratic drift, or how digital technology shapes redistributive projects in India

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of data-driven visualisation in the ongoing evolution of welfare provision. Real-time data transmission and the visualisations these data feed make certain problems of redistributive welfare hyper-visible, while obscuring other concerns. Moreover, some of these concerns can be addressed by changing digital workflows or inventing new ones, while others elude such methods of remote resolution. The paper uses the particular case study of an Indian National Health Insurance project, observed over a period of fifteen years, to show how digital affordances came to shape the insurance, ultimately giving it an urban bias so that it was able to improve the health security of eligible poor citizens in cities, while leaving people in villages outside the scope of reformist action. This effect of transforming an insurance for all into a de facto insurance for urban citizens occurred gradually through bureaucratic drift and as a result of specific digital transparency regimes that shifted the goalposts from inclusion to surveillance.