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Within the empowerment literature, "freedom of movement" or "mobility" are frequently used as indicators to assess empowerment programmes or whether women have become socially empowered. As women's self‐help groups (SHGs) engaged in saving/lending and livelihood schemes have emerged as the de facto vehicles for women's empowerment over the past two decades, their propensity for increasing women's opportunities for mobility has been an oft‐lauded benefit. This has been especially pronounced as the empowerment agenda's prerogative to collectively transform power structures became co‐opted by a neoliberal focus on fostering responsible financial subjects with entrepreneurial savvy. In this paper, I draw on multi‐year ethnographic research of women's SHG interventions in eastern and central India to critically explore the ways different mobile practices intersect with empowerment goals. I contend it is necessary to examine mobility as more than physical movement and also to analyse it as a meaning‐laden and embodied practice intimately bound up in the neoliberal development agenda. Using this analytic, I find that although newfound mobility is often experienced positively by women, it is far from "free," and remains embedded in power relations where women continue to engage on unfavourable terms – exemplified in women's inability to leisurely tour/wander. I conclude by reflecting on how empowerment interventions might more productively engage mobility less as a practice of increased economic and political participation and more as a site where women can experiment with new forms of being. Women's spatial mobility is seen as central to empowerment, yet remains undertheorised in critical and mainstream literature. This paper builds on scholarship examining how women navigate normative spaces of development through creative forms of self‐fashioning by analytically unpacking how mobility is central to these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses a drinking water supply project in rural Rajasthan, India, that deliberately sought to create greater equality across caste for water users through a combination of public taps and payment for water. Later, in the post-construction phase of the project, those goals were undermined by the counter-technologies of upper caste households and the village-scale institutions that supported them. The paper brings together geographic research on neoliberal water governance and caste processes in modern rural India to illuminate how neoliberal subjectivities deepened in the post-project phase. It shows the ways that caste norms, village water governance and state power converged to produce 'new' ways of thinking about water access and payment that undermined the social goals and the physical infrastructure of the project. The paper contributes to research on neoliberalisation and the creation of subjects by demonstrating the mutual constitution of caste inequalities and successfully marketised drinking water over the construction and post-construction phases of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]