Child malnourishment has been a long-standing reality in India. The Global Hunger Index (GHI), based on four indicators such as undernourishment, wasting (low weight for height), stunting (low height for age) and under-five mortality ranked India 101 out of the 116 countries in 2021. According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) (2019-21), the proportion of children who suffered from stunting (low weight for their age) was 35.5 per cent and child wasting (low weight for their height) was about 19.3 per cent. The Anganwadi services under the Umbrella ICDS (Integrated Child Development Services) scheme are the backbone of India’s initiatives to address malnourishment. Anganwadi services are primarily aimed at overall child development, improving the nutrition and health status of the age group of 0-6 years. It also addresses the health and nutritional needs of pregnant and lactating mothers. The most pronounced aspect of pre-school non-formal education is only one of the components of the vast array of work undertaken by Anganwadi services.
The front-line workers and the last mile delivery agents of Anganwadi services are the Anganwadi Workers (AWWs) and Anganwadi Helpers (AWHs), an all-women workforce. Anganwadi services have over 2.5 million Anganwadi workers and helpers in India with a coverage of over 90 million beneficiaries. Despite being an indispensable workforce, the Anganwadi workers and helpers are constantly in struggles demanding basic entitlements. The year 2021, has witnessed several intense protests by Anganwadi workers across the country. The strike by Anganwadi workers which started in December 2021 in Haryana continued for months at all its district headquarters. Delhi witnessed large-scale protests by Anganwadi workers in the month of February-March, 2022.
The prolonged struggles of Anganwadi workers must be seen in the context of the massive informalisation of employment in public services. Over the last few decades, there has been a consistent decline in public expenditure in the social sector spending, particularly in health and education. This has been achieved through a process of contractualisation of the care economy, particularly the tasks that were historically seen as women’s tasks. Anganwadi workers and helpers are classified in government documents as ‘honorary workers’ who receive a monthly honorarium for the service they deliver. In Bihar, workers and helpers receive an honorarium of Rs.5950 and Rs.3250 respectively, the same for Odisha is Rs.7500 and Rs.3750. The monthly honorarium received by workers and helpers is way below the minimum wages demanded by the unions, Rs.32,000/month for workers and Rs.26,000/- for helpers. Kerala is one of the highest paying States, and the AWWs and AWHs receive an honorarium of Rs.12000 and Rs.8000, which is still below the demanded minimum wages, reflecting the reality of the extent of underpayment across states.
Over the years, a key demand of protests of Anganwadi workers has been seeking the status of a worker, and not of a social worker, honorary worker or voluntary worker. This urgent claim for regularising the worker and helpers, paying minimum wages and providing social security measures remained unaddressed. Since the status of the worker remained unrecognized, the work becomes nothing but the extraction of care work for women through public employment. The workers and helpers have also been at the forefront of demanding that the situation of malnourishment in the country demands ICDS be permanent.
In addition to these, in the recent protests, serious concerns were raised about a new mobile-based application for real-time monitoring and tracking of Anganwadi services named ‘Poshan Tracker.’ National Nutrition Mission (later renamed Poshan Abhiyan) launched in December 2017 has information and technology-enabled real-time monitoring of Anganwadi services as one of its main components. The website of Poshan Tracker says, ‘the purpose of the application is to provide a 360-degree view of the activities of the Anganwadi Centre (AWC), service deliveries of Anganwadi Workers (AWWs) and complete beneficiary management for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children.’ The All-India Federation of Anganwadi Workers and Helper (AIFAWH) has voiced its strong dissent against any proposal to link the wages of Anganwadi workers and helpers and allocation for the nutrition of beneficiaries to the Poshan Tracker application. According to the union, delay in maintaining the Poshan Tracker has also become a reason for memo and harassment of Anganwadi workers at the implementation level. Serious questions are also raised on the viability of the entire process of real-time data management, particularly considering the availability of the internet.
The unaddressed concerns are broadly around the practicality of Poshan Tracker, the expedited turn to digitalised monitoring and the unpaid labour of workers in the process of digitalisation. There has also been a sudden and unexplained shift between two different mobile applications within three years. In the early months of 2018, an application named ICDS-CAS (Integrated Child Development Services- Common Application Software) was launched. Then in January 2021, undoing ICDS-CAS a new app, ‘Poshan Tracker’ was launched. There is little information in the public domain about what happened to the data collected with the ICDS-CAS application and why the shift towards the new application was made. In short, in 3 years, the Anganwadi workers, already constrained by the work during the pandemic, had to familiarise themselves with two separate smartphone-based applications.
Scepticism of the possibility of real-time data entry comes primarily because of lacking internet coverage in rural areas. An Anganwadi worker who earns way below minimum wages now has to log data on the application in addition to maintaining eleven registers. It has been specifically advised to the workers not to do away with the physical registers. The allotment of smartphones and regularisation of provisioning of funds for data recharges are also observed to vary from state to state. Workers also talk about additional spending from their own pockets for data recharge. Further, workers point at the increase in work time to an extent that some of them sit up till midnight to enter the data on the application. ICDS supervisors share how sometimes the family members of older workers have to be trained to use the software application so that they get assistance at home.
Another open-ended aspect of the entire process has to do with the data that is collected through the application. The availability of regular data on child nutrition helps in assessing the progress in the nutrition situation. However, the data has not been made public. Recently, on 1st April 2022, the government conveyed in the parliament that according to the data collected through Poshan Tracker, the severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in the country is 2% as against the 19% given in the NFHS data. However, the existing dashboard of Poshan Tracker on the website only informs about the coverage of the application based on which no concrete inference on the situation of nutrition can be drawn. A reason that is given for not making the data public is to maintain the privacy of women and children who are serviced through the Anganwadi systems. However, it has to be made clearer how a system of transparency or accountability can be maintained in the entire process of data management. Aggregates that do not give away confidentiality and privacy need to be made available to the public.
The question however is whether the data obtained through Poshan Tracker be used to make the claims that are being made? Can a system of monitoring delivery services, provide robust data on the nutrition situation among children? Even if the figures given by the government are to be correct, they can only be treated as an indication of reduced malnutrition levels among the children who are presently covered under the ICDS. The inference then is a strong case to strengthen the ICDS and Anganwadi services, provide increased budgetary allocation and ensure the workers and helpers work with dignity. However, the macro picture suggests something different. As per the 333rd report of the Rajya Sabha Committee, Rs.1053 crore has been spent on ICDS-CAS and Poshan Tracker till March 2021. Even when over a thousand crores are spent on ICT-based applications, the budget allocation to Umbrella ICDS saw a dip of 30% from 2020-21 to 2021-22. The expedited digitalisation of Anganwadi services and a reduction in the total budget allocation happened in the same period.
At a more fundamental level, Poshan Tracker brings emphasis to the transparency, efficiency and accountability of Anganwadi services, emphasising only the problems that lie in the delivery end of services. The shift to digitalisation and insistence on real-time monitoring cannot be seen as a solution that addresses the nutrition deficits among the children of India. The accelerated push to digitalisation also needs to take into account the real labour that goes into the process at the ground level. The remedial measure for the increased workload of Anganwadi workers has been to provide incentives for the use of the software application. However, the demands of Anganwadi workers are not for service-based incentives, but for minimum wages and a basic recognition as a worker. It is also a reality that employment in public programmes such as ICDS remains a major source of regular employment for women in rural areas. By not providing the basic minimum wage or social security measures, the government is being subsidized by the unpaid labour of lakhs of scheme workers. Over that, the ICT based monitoring, in the current circumstances, is becoming a means of surveillance and punishment. It has only aggravated the extent of this extraction of unpaid labour from Anganwadi workers and helpers without providing a transparent system of nutrition delivery monitoring mechanism.
Link to the video trailer can be found here.
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Gayatri Balu works as a researcher at Society for Social and Economic Research (SSER), a research organisation based in New Delhi. Her research interests include gender, religion and labour. She holds a PhD in Women’s Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Recent publications of her include “Masculinity and Marriage: Interrogating Possession Among Velichappads of Kerala” in Men and Masculinities, May 2022 and “In Search of Writing: COVID-19 and Research” in Economic and Political Weekly, December 2021. She can be reached at gayatri.balu@gmail.com.