"On care and community: India’s frontline health workers", Vrinda Marwah

On care and community: India’s frontline health workers

India’s one million all-women community health workforce seems to excel at an impossible task. These frontline health workers are “paid volunteers” who form the lowest rung of an overburdened health system. Despite receiving little support or pay, they manage to connect marginalized and distrustful communities to governmental health services. Fittingly, their title is ASHA, the Hindi word for hope. But what drives hope? Drawing on ethnographic data from the north Indian state of Punjab, this talk expands the explanatory sequence that typically celebrates ASHAs as a social policy success, to reveal the gender, caste, and class inequalities that underpin this program, as well as the contradictory health impacts that result from it.

Vrinda Marwah is assistant professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida.