Leaking at seams: Politics of technological fixing in Pakistan’s cash transfers program

Abstract

States across the Global South have been experimenting with different digital technologies to disburse welfare benefits. By circumventing various forms of human discretion and political interference these technologies allow the states to make greater claims for improving transparency and precision targeting and deterring corruption and leakages. Based on extensive ethnographic research on cash transfers in Pakistan – Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP)/Ehsaas Kafalat Programme (EKP) – in this paper I show the contradictory politics of such experimental statecraft. Arrogating itself the goals of poverty reduction and women empowerment, the program has provided regular quarterly cash grants to millions of women beneficiaries as representatives of the poorer households since 2008. Biometric technologies, and data-based systems are supposed to reconstitute state-citizen relationships and encourage or discourage certain imaginaries and ways of relating to and seeing the state. Employing the heuristic of “leaky states” in this paper I demonstrate how, the technological interventions to superimpose a fixity upon ways of seeing, and relating to, the state notwithstanding, multiple understandings and imaginaries of the money, cash transfers program and the state persist. In other words, not only do various forms of ‘leakage’ (‘eating money’) reproduce themselves often through the technological fixing, the visions and the ideas of the state also continue to leak and multiply.