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

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Data collection on the population is a key mode of public health management in the Global South where this information is seen as a means to improve health metrics through welfare programs. Anganwadi workers, widely seen as daycare providers and community health workers, are increasingly being asked to exclusively serve as collectors of data on the population. In this study, we examine the changes in the infrastructure of a welfare program in India with the introduction of an ICT-based Real-Time Monitoring System. We ask the question \textit{`cui bono?'} to this system by drawing attention to the precarious positionality of Anganwadi workers whose care-work is subjected to standardization 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 that anonymizes caring for its subjects in the form of statistics and the situated nature of care work on the ground producing forms of ambivalent care. An overlaying of a technological reimagination of service delivery on an existing unequal structure of class and labor in India works to the detriment of the anganwadi workers, and in turn, to the very quality of data the projects seek to improve. We conclude that the real-time monitoring apps end up serving the state's need for performing care through the myth of data-driven efficiency at the expense of the professional and personal well-being of the workers, and arguably the communities they serve.