Long 2020 and the Informal Care Economy: Case Studies of Select Careworkers

The health system in India consists of a public sector, a private sector and an informal network of care providers. Though for the formal sectors there have been policies, schemes operative for long, in case of the informal network, due to various reasons (limited access, further worsened by the poor functioning of public health system is one among many), the act of ‘caring’ takes place mostly in an unregulated environment. It is important to realize that the healthcare crisis following COVID19 pandemic in India has been a result of collective economic strategies adopted by various governments which gave primacy to big capital, infrastructure and financial services and comparatively, less importance was attached to social sectors like health and education. COVID19 pandemic would have lasting impacts on public health, caregiving and informal care economy, human demography, etc. The sudden visibility that careworkers including the ones from formal as well as informal sectors, has gained during the pandemic should not be easily forgotten, and for that, discussions on public health, contagion, health security, etc., should keep focus on areas beyond medical, virological and epidemiological concerns. Based on personal interviews, articles and reports published during the pandemic along with other relevant documents, this paper has tried to understand how three categories of informal careworkers, namely ASHA workers, ayahs and safaikarmacharis, negotiated with the pandemic on one hand and societal expectations on the other.