Who Cares?: Care Extraction and the Struggles of Indian Health Workers

The recent global pandemic highlighted the crucial role played by (mostly female) care workers in providing health services across the world. At the same time, it exposed the deep vulnerabilities and precarities of their lives—abysmally low wages, long working hours, social prejudice, notorious undervaluation—at the hands of an uncaring and exploitative economic system. The editors of this volume identify this as ‘care extractivism’, a strategy that enables the simultaneous extraction and undervaluation of care work, something in which governments and societies are both complicit. Further, they point to the impact of liberalization and professionalization on the political economy of nursing wherein the market principle of cost efficiency leads to informalization, contract labour and hierarchization of nursing in both private and public hospitals.

The contributors to this important and timely book draw attention to the varied histories of health care work in India and of Indian nurses abroad. They look also at the recent struggles through which workers have tried to improve their working conditions and which represent a silver lining as they imbibe the potential to disrupt the chain of undervaluation, cost cutting, and poor quality healthcare.

MAYA JOHN teaches history at the University of Delhi. She has been researching and publishing on the politics of epidemiology and the history of epidemics. She has also worked on the relationship between caste, gender and the labour market, the evolution of labour law in colonial and postcolonial India, gender-specific laws at the workplace, the history of educational inequality in India, and recent antirape agitations in India. John actively works with nurses’ unions in Delhi-NCR and with unions of domestic workers and teachers.

CHRISTA WICHTERICH is a feminist sociologist and scholar activist. She worked as a lecturer at Gilan University in Iran and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been a foreign correspondent for German newspapers and radio stations in Nairobi, and a guest professor at the universities of Vienna, Basel and Kassel. As a journalist and author she has researched and published extensively on globalization and women’s work, feminist political economics, feminist ecology and women’s movements. During an ICAS fellowship in the winter of 2018-19 in New Delhi she did research on care extractivism with regard to scheme workers and nurses in India.