Infrastructures of excess: Politics of biometric and data-based citizenship in Pakistan’s cash transfers program

What kind of political subjectivities are produced by digitally- and data-based social protection regimes? This paper addresses this question by conceptualizing Pakistan’s cash transfers programs – at various points known as Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) and Ehsaas Kafalat Programme (EKP) – as an infrastructure of inclusion that structures women’s political subjectivities and experiences of the Programme and the Pakistani state. Through ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2022 at payment sites where the women beneficiaries come to receive their regular cash grants in Lahore, a deeply contradictory picture of BISP’s/EKP’s implications for women’s citizenship emerges: As the primary beneficiaries they seem to gain in terms of formal citizenship but much of it is undermined by the mechanisms and the processes through which they navigate the state and its infrastructure of inclusion. While promising access to rights and entitlements – and the cash grants – in practice given the cumbersome and long processes they have to endure digital and data-based technologies seem to have become an infrastructure of excess.