DISINTERMEDIATION BY FUNCTION: DIGITAL PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE SELECTIVE PERSISTENCE OF WELFARE MEDIATION IN INDIA

India\'s Digital Public Infrastructure — Aadhaar, Direct Benefit Transfer, and the payment rails built around them — promised to move welfare directly from the state to the poor, removing the officials and agents who stood between. The evidence is contradictory: some studies find that digital systems cut leakage and improved delivery; others find that intermediaries endured and new exclusions opened. This article treats the disagreement as a problem of aggregation. Welfare delivery bundles distinct operations — establishing eligibility, verifying identity, disbursing benefits, cashing them out, and resolving failures — that respond to digitalisation differently. Using MGNREGA wage payments and Aadhaar authentication in the Public Distribution System, it develops a functional account built on two properties: a function\'s administrative computability, which governs whether it can move from human hands to a system, and the design of its failure-handling, which shapes what automation does once it breaks down. The same authentication technology improved delivery in one state yet cut 1.5 to 2 million people off from their rations in another — a divergence explained by failure design, not technology. Digitalisation, then, does not abolish mediation but redistributes it: across functions, and toward those who design the rules.