State sponsored, and globally popular, direct cash transfers such as Pakistan's Benazir Income Support Program (BISP), aim at reducing poverty and empowering women, constitute a new political technology. This research investigates these new 'politics of distribution' and the largely unexplored avenues they afford into shifting modes of bureaucratic (bio-) power and subject formation within the context of broader contours of state's interactions with various populations and communities it seeks to govern.