Digitising Care: Anganwadi Workers and the Restructuring of Paid Care Labour in India

Aanganwadi workers, the backbone of India’s child nutrition program - Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), are one of the largest groups of state-dependent, low-paid care workers in the country. This paper examines how digital governance and digitisation of their routine work has restructured the everyday rhythms of labour and livelihood for Aanganwadi Workers (AWWs). The transformation of Aanganwadi Workers from caregivers to “digital footsoldiers” whose labour as “data collector” and “data uploader” has been proving as a basis for digital governance in India. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews, and participant observation conducted in Bemetara and Bilaspur districts of Chhattisgarh, India between 2023–2024, the study demonstrates how digital tools such as the Poshan Tracker App has converted care into surveilled, auditable data. Drawing on feminist scholarship on care, social reproduction and feminist STS literature, the study aims to bring how digitisation extends the managerial control of the state at the expense of redefining care as efficiency and data in place of social reproduction and nutrition welfare. Additionally how this digitisation of care has pushed AWWs into new dilemmas. Findings from interviews and participant observation tells that AWWs face significant challenges while doing their digital duties, like- lack of digital literacy, infrastructural challenges, complex app interfaces, and overburdening of tasks. The paper argues that digitisation of welfare programs has further devalued the women’s care labour and has put the burden of delivery of welfare onto them. Digitisation has also intensified surveillance and control, with workers monitored through GPS, real-time dashboards, which increases anxiety among the workers. While the data is made visible in digital welfare systems, the undervalued labour that produces it, remains hidden and precarious.