Wednesday
28
January 2026
4:00 - 5:30 PM IST
Location
Room 004, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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Citizen vs Labharthi?: How Technology Enabled Welfarism is Shaping Citizen-State Relations
Arts and Sciences Lecture Series
Yamini Aiyar
Senior Visiting Fellow
Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia and Watson Institute
Brown University
Speaker
India has had a dramatic scale-up in the use of technology for welfare delivery, especially in the direct benefit transfer of cash and in-kind benefits. Technology disintermediates traditional political structures and centralises political attribution into the personal authority of party leaders. In so doing it plays a significant role in shaping or rather reshaping the terms of the democratic contract between citizens and politicians. We term this phenomenon “techno-patrimonialism.” In this talk I will explore this phenomenon of techno-patrimonialism and reflect on the contours of India's fledgling welfare state and unpack its differing approaches to state-building, citizenship and democracy.
Speaker
Yamini Aiyar
Yamini Aiyar is currently Senior Visiting Fellow, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia and Watson Institute, Brown University, where she is working on a comparison of welfare states in the Global South. Previously, she was President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research, a leading multidisciplinary think tank in New Delhi, from 2017-2024. Yamini's research spans the fields of contemporary politics, state capacity, welfare policy, federalism and India's political economy. Her latest book, Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi Schools, was published by Oxford University Press in December 2024.
