Social exclusions in India are not merely a consequence of marginalised, personal identities. They are equally because the state has either failed to recognise those identities or expects them to adhere to certain standardised, state-recognised patterns of claim making. Any failure to do so leads to procedural deviations, creating the justification for the state marginalisation of the already excluded. The social welfare/protection schemes created by the state serve as the sites where such exclusions get embedded and normalised.
In this paper, we address two key issues pertaining to exclusions in social protection schemes in India. Firstly, we build a typology of exclusions, identifying the multiple pathways through which potentially eligible beneficiaries remain outside the safety net of the state. The typology is a layered one, encompassing failures of outreach, rejections of claims, and inclusions in the schemes coinciding with exclusions from the benefits. Secondly, we showcase how the exclusions are deeply gendered; women are more vulnerable to fall through the institutional cracks.
Methodologically, this study draws its cases from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with sixty-one single women conducted during April 2020-May 2021 in the drought-prone Latur and Osmanabad districts of Maharashtra (India). The study is aligned with an ongoing, participatory action-based research being conducted by the authors to collectivise single women such that they can engage with the state for integration into government schemes of social protection. In particular, it provides the background research for the Wadarai Prakalp, an initiative for supporting farm widows, a subset of single women, in the Latur and Osmanabad districts of Maharashtra (India). We thank People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) and HALO Medical Foundation, Andur for making this research possible at different stages.
