Postscript #11: ASHA Work And The Moral Language Of ‘Seva’

“It was not a lot of money, but I joined because I wanted to do social service and help the community.” This is Suman Jadhav, an ASHA worker from Kolhapur, Maharashtra, talking about why she joined the cadre back in 2009. The sentiment echoes among ASHA workers in the early years. In Bhind, Madhya Pradesh, Laxmi Kaurav, an ASHA worker and facilitator, drew inspiration from the state’s Women and Child Development programme that offered few incentives–but “if they have been making do with this and continuing this work for 40 years, we should keep doing it too…eventually, we will get incentives, fixed pay, or something else”.

Scholars such as Kriti Ramaswamy argue that ASHA labour is rooted in the idea of seva—service understood as women caring for their own communities—a logic that runs through many post-Independence welfare schemes. Within development policy, however, seva becomes a political tool, mobilised by the state to extract labour, primarily from women drawn from the very communities meant to receive this “service.”

This framing is reinforced through official interactions and kinship-based nomenclature—ASHA didi, ASHA bahu, ASHA behen—which naturalise obligation and render care work endless and unpaid.

ASHA workers’ own understanding of seva, however, is more complex. In the early years, many described the role as an “inspiring” job, a way to serve their communities and gain respect. At the same time, they expressed disappointment, and often anger, at the expectation that this labour would remain unpaid and unrecognised.

“Lekin mann mein dukh toh hua. It was confusing and disappointing. Yeh kya kiya humne, aise thodi kaam karna tha? We wondered what we had signed up for. This wasn’t a ‘job’ job.”

– Laxmi Kaurav, ASHA worker and facilitator, Madhya Pradesh

Most critically, the incentive-based structure fragments and devalues care work itself, erasing its wholeness. A lot of  care labour is emotional labour—of counselling, listening, being present, and allaying fears—work that remains unrecognised and hence unpaid. ASHA workers have spent years building trust, not easy or given, with the community. 

Netradipa Patil speaks of this labour. Initially she says there was little cooperation from families as workers went from home to home: people didn’t respond, or were rude and wouldn’t let ASHAs inside houses. “They thought we were salesmen. It pinched and I wondered why they reacted this way considering we’re there to check on their health. It took us two years to get them to trust us,” she told us.

Reducing such labour to tasks and targets devalues the skill in the labour and reduces them to unskilled workers, not worthy of an employee status. Not to mention that such labour must be performed at the community and state’s beck and call. Shashi Yadav, president of ASHA Union in Bihar, puts it succinctly: 

“Since women ‘take care’ of their households already, the state assumes their care should extend to their communities for free. It is the patriarchal devaluation of women’s labour.”