Counting to be Counted: Anganwadi Workers and Digital Infrastructures of Ambivalent Care

Abstract

Data collection on the population is a key mode of public health management in the Global South. This information is seen as a means to improve health metrics through welfare programs. In this study, we examine the changes brought about by an ICT-based Real-Time Monitoring System to the infrastructure of a welfare program and the nature of work of Anganwadi workers in India. Anganwadi workers, traditionally serving as daycare providers and community health workers, are increasingly being asked to serve primarily as data collectors for the new digital system. We ask the question 'cui bono?' to this system by drawing attention to the precarity of Anganwadi workers whose care-work is standardized through this app for 'efficient' monitoring by the Indian state but remains contingent on their relationship with the local community and ability to mobilize resources on the ground. Using auto-ethnographic and interview methods, we find that Anganwadi workers are caught between conflicting demands of state bureaucracy and the situated nature of their care work resulting in forms of ambivalent care. We find that the real-time monitoring apps intended to collect data for efficient delivery of state services end up serving the state's need for performing care through data rhetorics produced at the expense of the professional and personal well-being of the workers, and arguably the communities they serve.