GLD would like to welcome you to our Spring 2025 Work-in-Progress Series. This series offers scholars from around the world an opportunity to present and receive feedback on their works in progress, including manuscripts, PAPs, conference papers, articles, etc. This series is virtual and open to anyone to attend; we look forward to seeing you there!
The Spring Work-in-Progress Series will be held on Zoom and in-person in Lilla Skansen at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. If you plan to attend virtually, please register at the link above - you only need to register once and you will have access to the whole series.
Anustubh Agnihotri, Ashoka University
Is the urban welfare state in India less responsive towards citizens? Cities are the centers of administration and are assumed to offer their residents easier access to state institutions and greater responsiveness from the bureaucracy. We use the attempts by more than 10 million citizens to integrate their Aadhaar biometric ID with the Public Distribution System (PDS), one of the largest food subsidy programs in the world, to examine differences in the quality of citizen-state linkages. We find that citizens in urban areas are more likely to fail in their efforts to integrate Aadhaar with PDS. These failures have been established to have a negative welfare impact on households dependent on subsidized food grains. We show that failure in Aadhaar integration is discontinuous at the boundary between the urban and rural administrative units and persists even after matching urban units with comparable units in rural areas. Based on qualitative interviews, we argue that these failures point towards the underdeveloped welfare state in urban India and more precarious citizenship in urban spaces. The paper contributes to our understanding of the spatial disparities in citizen-state interactions, the nature of urbanization at the local level in India, and the challenges of integrating the existing welfare system within a new technology infrastructure.
