Postscript: Learning To Care About ‘Care’ As India’s Future Of Work
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Hello Behans,
Last year, three Anganwadi workers from Maharashtra — Rohini Harale, Anjanabai, and Sageetha Jadhav — lost their lives to the stress and exhaustion that came with their work. Their supervisor had no knowledge of any state mechanisms to help workers cope with such strain. In Kerala, ASHA workers have been protesting for 258 days, demanding fair wages and recognition. For them, rest is a luxury. They sleep on footpaths, eat kanji (rice gruel) distributed by volunteers, and take turns using the few bathrooms nearby. At midday, they return home only to rush through their household chores before returning to protest again.
Both Anganwadi and ASHA workers form the backbone of India’s care economy — yet their labour remains undervalued, invisible, and unprotected.
When we tried to find an appropriate Hindi word for care, ‘dekhbhal’ came close — it captures the labour embedded in care — but it felt too ordinary. And perhaps that’s the point. Care work is so everyday, so invisible, that we rarely acknowledge it as work at all.
In this void, how do we understand and articulate care? Especially in a world grappling with the complexities of technology, automation, and artificial intelligence and when we have yet to reckon with the weight of human care itself?
We are building a ‘Care Vertical’ — an ambitious, deeply focused project to expand public understanding and discourse on care in all its dimensions: the economy, infrastructure, institutions, policy, delivery, and social and cultural realities. We want to go beyond the existing understanding of care to a more expansive one.
Through this initiative, we want to build an Indian language and lived experience–driven lexicon of care. We also aim to generate data on the time and labour of caregivers in ways that official statistics fail to. And as we always do, we want to produce in-depth reportage and editorial work that illuminates the structures and inequities shaping care in India.
We also want to democratise the idea of care — to take it beyond policy and academic spaces and root it in everyday lives and struggles. Especially those of oppressed castes, women, queer people, persons with disabilities, and people at the frontlines of climate change — the very individuals who sustain our societies but remain at the margins of recognition and policy.
We invite our readers and supporters to join us in this collective effort. Tell us:
What issues and ideas around care should we centre? Which groups and communities should we focus on?
What formats — stories, data projects, podcasts, or dialogues — would you like to see?
Help us shape this evolving, essential conversation. Write to us at contact@behanbox.com.
What's Coming
Being Single in India: Between State, Society, and Sisterhood
In India, being single is seldom just a matter of choice. For women, it is shaped by a complex interplay of social expectations, economic realities, and cultural norms that define — and often confine — their lives.
Yet, beyond society’s gaze lies another powerful force: the state. How does the government, the law, and the justice system see single women? Are they recognised as citizens with independent rights and identities, or viewed through the narrow lens of family and dependency?
In an upcoming two-part series, we delve into the layered realities of singlehood in India — where women navigate both societal stigma and state neglect. Through their stories, we uncover how being single is not merely a personal status, but a political condition.
We also bring you the inspiring story of a collective of single women in rural Maharashtra, who are rewriting this narrative — creating spaces of sisterhood, solidarity, and joy.
40 years of Bhopal: Remembrance and Resistance
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy — one of independent India’s darkest industrial disasters. Anniversaries are moments of remembrance, but also of reckoning. Four decades later, we must ask: what has truly changed since that night of horror? What progress have we made in ensuring corporate accountability, environmental justice, and state responsibility?
In a special two-part series, we return to Bhopal to tell the story through the eyes of women who lived through the disaster and its unending aftermath. Their lives reveal the long shadow of Bhopal — the intergenerational health crises, the struggle for compensation, and the quiet resilience that has defined survival. We also spotlight the women-led movements that, forty years on, continue to fight for justice — holding corporations and governments to account.
That’s all for this month’s Postscript, Behans. Our eyes, ears, hearts, and inboxes are always open for your thoughts. Write to us or comment below.
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