India’s welfare architecture has undergone a significant transformation with the increasing adoption of digital identification, electronic payments, online registration, biometric authentication, interoperable databases and other forms of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). These technologies have been promoted as instruments for improving transparency, reducing leakages, strengthening administrative efficiency and expanding access to public services. Yet the digitalisation of welfare also raises an important political question: what happens when access to a formally guaranteed welfare entitlement becomes increasingly dependent upon an individual’s ability to successfully navigate a technologically mediated system?

This paper examines the relationship between digital welfare and substantive citizenship in India. It argues that digitalisation should not be understood merely as an administrative or technological transformation. It is also transforming the relationship between citizens and the state by introducing new conditions through which welfare entitlements are recognised, verified and delivered. While digital systems can make citizens more visible to the state through improved identification and data integration, they can simultaneously make some citizens effectively invisible when they lack reliable connectivity, digital literacy, documentation, authentication capacity or access to responsive institutional support. The paper therefore conceptualises digital exclusion as more than a technological deficit; it is a potential form of institutional and citizenship-based exclusion.