Introduction

1The ASHA scheme is a core component of the National Rural Health Mission, and after its inclusion in urban areas, now a key part of the National Health Mission of India. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in India in 2021, which was a time of severe resource shortage for COVID patients, ASHAs were widely held as the main frontline workers. Celebrated at the international and national level and awarded by the WHO, the cadre of ASHAs in India have received widespread recognition and were touted by the State and the international community as being ‘heroes’. This discrepancy between how the State valorised its female healthcare workers, and the actual steps it took to reward their ‘heroism’ is paralleled by other situations in the world. Svea Closser’s ethnographic accounts of Lady Health Workers in Pakistan, which I explored in detail in chapter 3, also exposes a similar narrative of heroism and bravery that is pinned on community health workers, who are denied basic rights and living wages by the same government that glorifies them.

2The ways in which states mobilise and use women’s labour in development and social welfare schemes is therefore not only about how women are constructed as carers in the economy, but also how the onus of this is often placed on women who come from marginalised communities themselves. Furthermore, the two-way narrative of heroism and bravery serves to increase their vulnerability within the paradigms of service and care. The previous chapter focused on the narratives and mechanisms that the ASHAs of Seelampur construct and engage with, creating an image of their work, their communities, and themselves. This Chapter will explore how the Indian state has mobilised the idea of ‘seva’ or service in development as forms of affective citizenship that place the burden squarely on women, further illustrating how this has led to the construction of an ideal ASHA worker.

Seva and the State

3The discourse surrounding seva has a complex and storied history, with many historians and anthropologists tracing the current usage of the term back to Hindu and Christian religious ideologies, which shaped the prominent role of the term in Hindu political thought, particularly during the Independence movement. R. Srivatsan, in his book ‘Seva, Saviour, and State: Caste Politics, Tribal Welfare and Capitalist Development’ traces the discourse surrounding the term particularly in how it contributed to the development ideals of the early 1930s and 40s (Srivatsan, 2006). Srivatsan’s essays and analysis primarily focus on how seva has been mobilised as a form of selfless service from the orthodox Hindu upper castes and classes to the ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘underdeveloped’ sections of Indian society within the early years of the development paradigm. Seva as it has been used in development discourses and in religious thought dating back to the twelfth century has not just signified service or charitable service, but service within some form of hierarchy.

4Srivatsan traces how the concept of seva evolved from a primarily religious ideal, based on ascetic modes of charitable service and giving, to an integral but unnamed part of the development paradigm in the pre- and post-independence era of India. Much of the scholarship on seva, as it has been mobilised for political action, focuses on how it has fused together varied strands of caste, class, and gender, regardless of ideological orientation, yet has had a distinctly Hindu undertone (Ciotti, 2012). Echoes of this understanding of seva can be seen in social welfare schemes of the state today, although the ways in which seva has been mobilised by the government and by the people has undoubtedly evolved due to intertwining forces of modernism and neoliberalism.

5While the term seva can be traced back as early as twelfth century religious writings, scholars have pointed out that its context and usage in the first half of the twentieth century in India makes seva visible as a moral-economical and political instrument (Srivatsan, 2006, Ciotti, 2012). Seva was a core part of the nationalist commitment to social reform, and according to Srivatsan, a reactionary response to the dominant colonial mindset that the entrenched caste system in India prevented Indians from thinking outside their caste group in terms of a larger nation. Seva became about caring for the ‘other’, in part as a reaction of showing commitment to becoming a nation which then led to seva becoming a critique of colonial rule: nationalists argued that outsiders like the colonisers could not actually ‘care’ about the welfare of the Indian state. Seva was intimately tied to nationalist sentiments of brotherhood and sisterhood and unity, despite the fact that it emerged as a way to care for the other - the otherness of Indians was pitted against the much more visible and hierarchised otherness of the British colonisers.

6Beckerlegge (2004) particularly explores how seva was closely connected with Hindu religious thought by tracing the ‘tradition of selfless service’ within the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).1 While understanding the full scope and complicated growth of Hindu nationalist thought and ideology over the years, especially as it has manifested in present day India, is outside the scope of this paper, it is nonetheless interesting and informative to examine how the RSS, one of the largest organisations in the country that identifies itself with the ideal of seva has mobilised the concept in the past (Nair, 2009). Beckerlegge points out for example, that seva within the RSS distinctly conflated the Hindu identity with a national identity: ‘The “service” offered by swayamsevaks remained communal in nature, being restricted to the aid and defence of Hindus, Sikhs being included under this heading. It is thus more aptly described as “policing”, or “organizational work” (Zavos) than humanitarian service, as this latter phrase is normally understood’(Beckerlegge, 2004, 115).

7Seva was also very clearly articulated in Gandhi’s political philosophy in a different but simultaneously similar way. Gandhi preferred to use terms like service and ‘constructive’ to describe work. Srivatsan analyses Gandhi’s correspondence during the civil disobedience of 1922, wherein he uses it to describe

the active “non-violent blows” of civil disobedience, strengthening the community and weakening the state. It was an essential element of satyagraha, seen as a complex of ethical political action. Thus the constructive work of community repair had to prepare the ground for Swaraj, and help Congress deepen its reach, moving beyond superficial parliamentary reform to a genuine representation sought by all the people of the nation. (Srivatsan, 2015, 46)

8‘Constructive work’ as it was used by Gandhi and others at that time also suggests a parallel between how seva was constructed, as an ethical obligation, prioritising duty, repairing the community and so on. Srivatsan argues that it was this conceptualisation of seva as a form of togetherness and care that became a core principle separating the Indian nation-state from the erstwhile colonial state. He points out that after the freedom struggle, the Indian state needed to demonstrate to the people that it was clearly different from the colonial one, despite the inheritance of overarching colonial legal, economic, and political structures. Therefore, the focus on development in this context had a ‘dual focus’: one on economic growth, and the other on welfare. The argument here is that the principle of seva was core to formulating these welfare strategies, conceptualising them as forms of charity and expressions of seva. As he articulates,

from its early days, it shaped the character of voluntary activism (alongside other principles such as Satyagraha). Seva was peaceful, non-confrontationist, opinion-moulding, and an institution-building activity. It advertised itself as such, and performed its actions in an appropriate manner. Seva was seen as constructive action in the deepest sense of building civil society and its values to a standard of ethics and care. This action was intended to be exemplary, and because of this character it was always a performance from the earliest stages of its emergence. This dimension of exemplary concern for the fellow human being (of the nation) is a legacy of seva we witness today in the various forms of activism. (Srivatsan, 2015, 6)

9The Gandhian understanding of seva, resting on a separation and otherness from those who needed care and service, is sharply contrasted with Ambedkar’s approach to the same.

Ambedkar's critique differentiated two approaches to seva: One, the implicit Gandhian one, which assumes that the untouchable and member of the depressed classes in general suffers because he has been vicious or sinful. Proceeding from this framework, seva attempted to foster personal virtue with education, gymnasium, cooperation, libraries, etc., to make the fallen individual a better moral being. Two, Ambedkar's own approach which, starting from the assumption that it is an unfavourable social environment which results in a person's suffering, led to programmes of action that would uplift the class as a whole. (Srivatsan, 2015, pp. 53-4)

10Ambedkar’s critique of seva was also a critique of the caste-based Hindu ideology that was dominating the paradigms of development, positioning the new sovereign nation as legitimate precisely through this claim of seva, of taking care of people regardless of their caste or class location. The development initiatives that followed, particularly when it comes to the welfare of tribal groups and women, but also of the oppressed castes, remained linked to this notion of seva as a top-down approach to the downtrodden others.

11While development paradigms in India have shifted greatly since the 1940s and 1950s when Srivatsan begins tracing this debate, current social welfare schemes still carry echoes of seva based work. The ASHA and Anganwadi schemes, for example, hinge on the notion of women caring for the community. The Mid-Day Meal Scheme is also framed as a seva for the underprivileged children across the nation. However, the idea of seva as it is used in government discourses has subtly shifted - seva is not about caring for the marginalised other, but about people from within these communities caring for their own. Of course, this is not to say that the top-down approach to social welfare has disappeared, or that upper class, upper caste social activism and volunteerism does not still exist within some frameworks of care and service. However, seva as a political context within development policies is mobilised by the state for certain gains through the labour of people, primarily women, who come from the communities receiving seva in the first place.

12In one of my interviews with a prominent public health policy maker who had been instrumental in conceptualising the ASHA scheme, we spoke of the uneven remuneration pattern, and why the ASHAs were not given the status of salaried employees. He paused for a second and then replied, ‘I think they should be paid better. But when the question of payment came up during our discussions, most people felt that giving them a salary would not be the right thing to do. They’re doing this for their own neighbours, family, friends - a lot of us felt it wouldn’t be right to make it a purely economic thing. At the same time of course, they are working so they need to be paid in some manner, so we decided to go with the honorarium and incentive based mode of payment. Maybe it will change now, but I don’t know.’

13The implicit—and sometimes explicit—understanding here is that seva is not something one should want to get paid for. Despite being a clearly moral-economic project, the ways in which seva is used in the discourses of the ASHA scheme harks back to an earlier understanding of seva as a pious mode of care, with religious and ascetic undertones, hinging on an idea of serving the nation selflessly.

14This understanding of seva is directly contrasted with how the ASHAs themselves use the term, as seen in the previous chapter - seva to them is seen as not necessarily a new mode of being that is imposed on one’s existing paradigms of neighbourly and familial relations. Rather, it is an extension of how several ASHAs already see themselves through their bonds with others: with their family, with the women of their community. Furthermore, seva for the ASHAs is not understood as selfless sacrifice. The self is squarely placed within the contours of service for ASHAs: as individuals, they mobilise specific social relations to perform the tasks required of them and also bring the work they do into other aspects of their life. The ASHAs’ understanding of seva allows for them to acknowledge that what they are doing is both service and work, acknowledging the help they are providing but also that they deserve recognition and compensation for the same.

Affective Citizenship

15Community health programmes are built not only on fulfilling a need for improving the health of neighbourhoods and village communities, but also on creating networks of solidarity, both within the community and in larger networks of public health systems. These networks are built upon the labour, as well as the emotional and ethical capacity of women. Studies on affective citizenship have often revealed how intimate, personal, and familial relationships form the basis of different conceptions of citizenship (Fortier 2010; Berlant 1997; Johnson 2008) and also how governments, politicians, and political actors draw on emotions and affect to define good citizenship as loyalty, attachment and belonging to the nation, and as compassion and care for one’s fellow citizens. Fortier (2010) defines governing through affect as ‘managing affect with the aim of community cohesion’; however, this governing brings about cohesion by treating groups and affects as desirable or undesirable depending on their influence on cohesion (Fortier, 2010, 23). Personal membership in a community thus hinges on the personal acts and intimate feelings of the ‘affective subject’: the citizenship that is then privileged is concerned with how citizens ‘direct their feelings towards the public’ (Fortier, 2010, 25).

16The paradigms of affective citizenship in this sense closely mirror how the Indian state has mobilised seva in the past, and continues to mobilise it - as both a feeling of wider belonging to the nation-state and as a more individual feeling of compassion, which are interlinked with each other and undeniably, with the state. Affective citizenship also relies on what Fortier dubs an ‘economy of feelings’, where some forms of interaction are given more value than others, such as the neighbourly interactions between the ASHAs and their community, or between ASHAs and other healthcare workers, as these are interactions suffused with affect both for the individuals of the community and by extension (or so it seems) with positive belonging to the nation and wider communities. The ‘affective subject’, according to Fortier, becomes the ‘affective citizen’ when their membership of the community goes beyond personal feelings and acts of the self with their ‘private’ realm of family, kin, and neighbours, but which are also directed towards the community. The ASHA scheme mobilises this concept of the ‘affective citizen’ by transforming the emotional labour of ASHAs as women within their
‘private’ family circles to members of the formal and informal economy, who are able to extend their compassion and caring into a feeling of broader membership and affinity.

17Fortier (2016; 2010) therefore asks when such acts of solidarity, empathy, hospitality, neighbourliness and belonging are struggles for survival or ‘performances of democratic freedom’ and when are they also about citizenship? Drawing back to Lambek and Das’s conceptualisation of ordinary ethics as morality interwoven through the fabric of everyday life, we can also ask to what extent can (or should) we think about models of affective citizenship or seva arising as spectacular events or modes of behaviour, as set apart from the everyday. Feminist theorists of affect, for example, approach affect as simultaneously deeply felt and embodied, and social and public (Ahmed, 2014), which is close to how we can see the ethical and moral paradigms of everyday care play out amongst the ASHA workers of Seelampur.

18Towards the end of my fieldwork, I conducted interviews with two ASHAs in the nearby Anganwadi centre, instead of the usual SEHER office. Having befriended Jayashree-di, the Anganwadi, in the previous weeks, she said that she would get a few ASHAs to speak to me. The way she spoke made it seem like a very hierarchical relationship. ‘You don’t worry about getting interviews’ Jayashree-di said, ‘if I tell the ASHAs in my area to come and talk to you, they’ll come, you just see!’ While she was right in that the ASHAs were much more responsive to her because of their existing relationship, their equations also seemed to be embedded in a power dynamic. I was curious to see whether this would translate in their interactions with one another.

19While I was conducting the interviews, Jayashree-di left, returning once the interviews were done. All of us (me, Meena-di, Jayashree-di, and the two ASHAs: Babli-di and Kantha-di) stayed in the Anganwadi centre for a while, talking informally. There were only two toddlers at the centre that day, and Jayashree-di had to record their height and weight in her record book. Both she and the ASHAs did this work together, while playing with the children and fixing their clothes, giving them food and so on. The ASHAs had to get back to their rounds but stayed on a little longer because the Anganwadi helper, who usually assists Jayashree-di, wasn’t back yet. Despite the fact that taking care of the children was not a part of their job description, it didn’t occur to either ASHA to not help Jayashree-di in her work - and it was not something unique or particularly noteworthy to them that they did. While the hierarchical relationship between an Anganwadi and the ASHAs in her area was visible in their equation in terms of who answers to whom; their actual interactions were based more on mutual respect due to a similar age group and familiarity because they were from the same neighbourhood.

20Becoming a good person who is doing seva through their work and is simultaneously being a good citizen is, for the ASHAs, not an extraordinary rupture in their everyday lives, but part of their ordinary ethics and morality. Indeed, some works on affective citizenship bring to bear the extent to which affective citizenship is labour intensive. This includes what Arlie Hochschild (1983) has called the “emotional labour” involved in the transmutation of private sentiments into public acts.

21Much of the theorising about the summoning and directing of affective citizens has relied upon policy-based discourses and documents (see Fortier, 2010). Such an approach has tended to overestimate the effect of pedagogies that aim to cultivate ‘good feelings’ and to mobilise citizens into disinterested, other-oriented and unremunerated action. A growing literature examines how good citizenship has come to hinge on reconfiguring public and private affects, practices and responsibilities, and on the harnessing of private sentiments and energies for the public good.

22Examining care in the context of a rhetoric of compassion also shows how certain actors, such as migrant care-workers, can reformulate the ethics of care (Caldwell, 2007). Affective citizenship thus contributes to ‘destabiliz[ing] citizenship as a purely rational and administrative exercise of state authority’ (Di Gregorio and Merolli, 2016, 934), shedding light on negotiations of inclusion and exclusion in multicultural contexts that go beyond formal conceptualisations of citizenship (Di Gregorio and Morelli, 2016, 934; Fortier, 2010, 2013; Mookherjee, 2005).

23Marchesi (2021) examines these regimes of care and argues for a gendered understanding of affective citizenship. Through ethnographic fieldwork with Italian women volunteers at a Milanese association, she examines how the affect and motivations of people performing affective citizenship can deviate significantly from presumed understandings of what it means to ‘do good’. ParlaMa, the all-women volunteering organisation where Marchesi does her ethnography, is described as an organisation that emerged due to the restructuring of the welfare state in Italy. Marchesi argues that such a restructuring of the State and the devolution of its responsibilities on ‘ordinary people’ is a ‘central device in new ways of governing the social’ (Clarke, 2013 in Marchesi, 2021, 22).

24Marchesi’s work is centred on the argument that while the women volunteers at ParlaMa expressed their positive emotions of love and affection for the children they cared for, their display of affect and emotion was not confined only to positive motivations. They regularly expressed ‘anger, resentment, and disappointment’ (Marchesi, 2021, 23). There is a disjunction in what is assumed by governments and policy makers to be the positive emotions that motivate care work, and how care is actually enacted through a complex interplay of compassion, anger, sense of community and nationhood. The literatures on affective citizenship and volunteerism show notable consistency across diverse social, political and cultural contexts in identifying love, compassion and empathy as desirable emotions for animating active, solidary citizens (Hoffman and St John, 2017; Muehlebach, 2013). This has been criticised for replacing a politics of rights with a politics contingent on compassion (Ticktin, 2006, 42), thus ‘displac[ing] possibilities for larger forms of collective change, particularly for those most disenfranchised’ (Ticktin, 2011, 3).

25The previous chapter focused on how the rhetoric of doing good is more complicated than merely acts of benevolence and selflessness. The debates around affective citizenship that Marchesi tries to articulate also circle around the notion that often the affects and emotions that are mobilised for good need not always ‘be good’ in a traditional sense, as positive emotions of affinity and care. Good citizenship, as many scholars of the subject argue, has come to hinge on reimagining public and private affects, harnessing private sentiments and acts for public good. However, as Marchesi puts it, ‘the sentimental and relational alchemy of these emergent ‘regimes of care’ does not shape or work upon abstract citizen-subjects with equal relationships to productive and reproductive labour. Rather, it works through and is worked on by citizens with ‘situated relationships to the state’ (Marchesi, 2021, 35). The ASHAs of Seelampur, who enact care in their daily lives, also negotiate with the State, with their neighbours, with the doctors and ANMs in ways that need not always be positive but add to their positions as affective citizens of the state.

26Some of the most identifiable emotions that ASHAs regularly express are frustration, resentment, and despair towards the State. Each ASHA I met with spoke at length about how little they were paid and how the payment often didn’t come on time. When I asked one of them if she had participated in the protests and wage strikes, or had considered joining the ASHA workers union, she shrugged her shoulders and sighed. ‘Point hi kya hai’, (‘what is the point’) she said, ‘it’s not like they will listen’. When Pooja-di and I were talking about the new rules regarding accompanying pregnant women, she expressed her anger with the authorities in that conversation. There was anger, both for not doing enough and putting the onus on the ASHAs, and for not understanding that the boundaries of care and seva are not neatly drawn and separated in real life as they are in policy documents.

27Sometimes the ASHAs also expressed frustration with their neighbours, especially the ones who didn’t comply with their regular surveys or refused to provide identification. Deepti had a couple of houses in which the men of the house refused to cooperate with the ASHA workers, which she was irritated by. ‘We just had the COVID vaccination drives a year or so ago, I don’t know why they’re not cooperating now’. Sometimes the ASHAs frustrations and ‘negative’ emotions were also expressed along lines of religion, caste, and class. Seelampur is a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood, but all the ASHAs and Anganwadis assigned to these areas are Hindu. While most did not even bring up religion or caste as a factor to consider during their work, there were certain throwaway sentences or addenda to anecdotes along these lines.

28On the day of Deepti’s interview for example, Meena-di, Deepti and I were sitting on the large rug in the office space, waiting for K. to come back from her quick excursion home for lunch. Meena-di glanced around the room and noticed that it had not been swept. It seemed to me that she was both embarrassed and annoyed as she turned to me and Deepti and explained that it had been K., not her, who was supposed to sweep the room and then lay out the rug in the morning. Deepti smiled in understanding and said ‘Inn logon ka alag hota hai, unko saaf safai se itna lena nahi hai jitna humein hota hai’ (‘it is different for those people, they don’t care as much about cleanliness as we do’). It was clear that both Meena-di and Deepti were alluding to the fact that K. is Muslim, as contrasted to the two of them, who were Hindu. They also felt that there was a clear difference between the communities when it comes to standards of cleanliness and purity. In a similar vein, Deepti also alluded later in the interview that most of the families who were uncooperative tended to be Muslim. ‘Inka yahan alag hota hai’ she said, ‘it is different for them. They don’t put as much emphasis on education as we do - that’s why there aren’t any Muslim ASHAs here, because most of the girls aren’t educated to the level required.’

29I fall back to these instances not to critique either Deepti or Meena-di for these conversations, but to provide examples of situations wherein ASHAs do not always frame their work in the language of positive affect and emotion. What makes their work all the more complex, perhaps more than can be understood by state authorities, is precisely this constant intermixing of positive and negative emotion, of compassion and frustration, of anger and of care which are themselves shaped by, and further shape, structures of caste, class and religion based hierarchies.

30The rhetoric of affective citizenship links its potential to produce a better, more cohesive society to the cultivation of benevolence, compassion and empathy in citizens. Volunteering can also be associated with anger, frustration and resentment. This ‘improper affect’ of otherwise committed and invested volunteers suggests that affective citizenship needs to account more centrally for how differently situated citizens are interpellated. Feminist scholarship has probed the relationship between gender, care and the welfare state (Agnew, 1996; Lister, 1997), asking how gender, and particularly the gendered domestic ‘sphere’ is implicated in citizenship and welfare regimes. Feminist scholars questioned ‘whether “citizenship” is so imbued with gender specific assumptions related to the public sphere and the nexus of the market and the state that it is necessarily only a partial rather than a universalist project’ (Walby, 1994, 379).

In questioning whether the role of ‘being a carer [is] compatible with being a full citizen’ (Walby, 1994, 386), this literature reminds us that the privatization of welfare that characterizes transformations in social citizenship reworks rather than invents the politics and practices of care along gendered, classed and racialized lines (Balbo, 1987; Fraser, 2009; Tronto, 1993; see also Andall, 2000; Read, 2007). It is thus not surprising that gendered welfare regimes would give way to gendered post-welfare ones in which women in particular are mobilized into unremunerated care-work and in which the care work of migrant women is dismissed in moralized accounts of solidary citizens (Muehlebach, 2012). (Marchesi, 2021, 28)

Doing Development by Doing Gender: The Indian State and Women’s Work

31Creating ASHAs through mobilising affect, while at the same time entrenching certain gendered roles and distinctions between private and public domains, is one of the ways in which the state negotiates the value and use of the labour of women from the poorer sections of Indian society. At the same time, the state is able to mobilise the fact that ASHAs are paid in order to justify that work is being created for women, who are therefore being ‘empowered and emancipated’ through the ASHA scheme. However, what is the nature of the work and for whom is it done? Examining how women’s work is valued in the eyes of the state—particularly in the context of social development in India—is the focus of this section.

32As is visible in this research, women workers who do voluntary work in the public sector through welfare schemes are working within a narrative that they are performing an important social service for which they have been given a chance to contribute through seva. It is within this context that remuneration is often denied or reduced to women who are in economic conditions of need, as it is seen as being against the very concept of voluntary work itself.

33In the context of this work, an understanding of the relationship between the concepts of welfare state and social welfare from a feminist perspective contributes to a deeper understanding of women’s work and its relationship with the state. The term ‘social’ in itself has been argued as a way to distance the political and economic ambitions of development from the ‘social’, making it closer to the lives and lived experiences of families, women, and children. Scholars such as M. Sreerekha (2017) further argue that this creates a ‘feminised’ connotation of the word social, relegating it to the feminine sphere of the domestic, and the household. Social welfare and its economy are thus expected to contribute to the lives of those under welfare which is valued less in terms of priority in comparison to anything outside its purview. The state and the masculine world of the public, which is outside this social, feminine world is offering help so that women, children, and the space of the private family are intact.

34In my usage of ‘welfare’ here, I draw from Aspalter (2017) who prefers to use the term ‘welfare state system’ to describe India, rather than simply ‘welfare state’:

[U]sing the term “welfare state systems” has many advantages, as the reader instantly (I hope) gets the idea that there are (or ought to be) different kinds (types) of welfare state systems. Also, the word “systems” draws particular attention of the reader to the point that there are system structures, system designs and so forth that need to be investigated – and not just the overall size of the welfare state. (Aspalter, 2017, 347)

35Therefore, the use of welfare state and welfare systems in this section does not adhere to strict definitions of the criteria needed in order to qualify as a welfare state - rather, the focus is on acknowledging that there are certain features of Indian governance and social policy which undoubtedly draw from the principles of welfare; and that it is through this lens that we can capture a unique perspective on the ASHA scheme, which focuses on improving the sexual and reproductive welfare of women, through the work of women themselves.

36In the introduction to their book Women, Social Welfare and the State (1983), Baldock and Cass raise a fundamental question around the relationship between the three: to what extent do various state interventions reinforce, challenge, or transform some elements of the enduring but changing pattern of women’s unequal access to economic security and social autonomy? In their analysis of women’s work in advanced capitalist societies where strict sexual division of labour prevails and women are engaged in unpaid domestic labour, Baldock and Cass argue that the advantage of the existence of sexual division of labour is not only for men, it also provides support for the whole structure of wages and profits in the labour market and subsidises public expenditure in the state sector. Unpaid production and consumption in the family supplements the value of wages, and women’s care work in the family space creates an informal and private welfare system which allows the cost of state provision of welfare services to be minimised. For Baldock and Cass, the cheap system of private welfare services in this context is used efficiently by the capitalist state in situations of economic crisis with cuts in social welfare expenditure.

37Swaminathan (2015) examines this discourse by going a step further, scrutinising the Indian state’s agenda of development and welfare by analysing the different ways in which gender is ‘done’ through envisioning such goals. Doing gender, a concept that was pioneered by West and Zimmerman in 1987, has become a familiar part of feminist thinking to date. The crux of their paper was to advance a (then new) understanding of gender as ‘a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction [...] doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine natures.’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987, pp. 125-6). Doing gender has made its way to not only current sociological feminist theory, but has also become a cornerstone of popular, public understandings of gender. However, as Swaminathan and other scholars have pointed out, the themes of doing, undoing, and redoing gender need to be reformulated for contexts such as India, wherein gender is often mobilised by states in a different way.

38Chant and Sweetman (2012), for example, argue that the Indian state’s focus on development and welfare relies on using women to ‘fix the economy’ in the global context. Arguing that this is the State’s way of ‘killing two birds with one stone’, that is, introducing programmes and policies that are aimed at alleviating poverty, while at the same time feminising the responsibility of carrying out these programmes by relying on the labour and time of women workers. Chant and Sweetman refer to this as the ‘smart economics’ approach, which relies on making women work for development, as opposed to mobilising development to enable women to procure gainful employment. Instead, by instituting them as honorary workers such as the ASHAs, the Indian state is able to present the rhetoric of development and women’s empowerment while simultaneously formalising informal employment of these women. The involvement of women in the ASHA scheme is framed as essential, both in order to increase opportunities for women to work outside the home, and also because women are the only ones who can perform the tasks required.

39‘Do you think men could do the work of an ASHA?’. I posed this question midway through my interview with a policymaker in his office in Gurgaon. He seemed to find this question very amusing, and laughed a little before answering. ‘We did think about it, after coming up with the ASHA scheme. One of us suggested, why not have an ASHOK2 scheme also? We thought it would be good to target some of the problems that men face more commonly, like tobacco consumption and alcoholism. But we didn’t go through with it at that time. I definitely think that if we had male ASHAs, they can’t do what the women currently do like assisting pregnant mothers and so on. No family would allow that. And women also feel more comfortable with other women so I don’t think it would work.’

40I brought up this question a second time a week later, in a very different setting. Walking out of the SEHER office with Deepti, I asked her the same thing. Again, this response was preceded by a laugh as she gave me a similar response to the policymaker. But with her reply, there was a pause. ‘Vaise bhi aadmi log doosre kaam mein lage rehte hai. Mujhe nahi lagta humare mohalle mein koi aisa kaam karna bhi chahega. Aur jo hum karte hai, hum logon ke ghar mein jaate hai, unse rasoi ghar mein baat karte hai - yeh sab toh sirf hum auratein hi kar sakti hai na?’ (‘Anyway, men have different work to do. I don’t think any man in our neighbourhood would even want to do this work [that is, being an ASHA worker]. And the kind of work we have, we have to go inside people’s houses, we sit in their kitchens and talk to them - these are the kind of things that only women can do, right?’).

41Both the policymaker and the ASHA worker said very similar things - that this was work that only a woman could do. Despite the fact that India has had community health schemes which have included male community health workers, people in the field seem to find it appropriate that a community health worker is female. The ideal community health worker is constructed based on what Swaminathan terms a ‘feminisation of development’, wherein schemes for poverty alleviation and social development rely almost entirely on the imagined characteristics of women from poorer communities: not only are they integrated in the communities, but the burden of care and affect that falls on them within the sphere of their familial relations is further extended to care for the neighbourhood and, as seen in the previous section, for the nation at large.