Book review: M. S. Sreerekha. State without Honour: Women Workers in India’s Anganwadis

State without Honour is a much needed and timely intervention in understanding the role of the state in devaluation and exploitation of women’s labour. While there has been a considerable research on the occupational segregation, ghettoization and marginalization of women’s work, this book deals with the neglected field of anganwadi workers under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme. The focus of the book is to understand and analyse how a completely feminine occupation is constructed as voluntary work rather than an exchange-value labour, thus speaking to the heart of the debate on care work (England & Folbre, 1999). In doing so, it probes the relationship between the Indian state and women workers through a close examination of a social sectors that employs women as voluntary workers.

A case study of anganwadi workers (AWW) gives the author the opportunity to examine how the state views and defines women’s labour, and how welfare policies of the state are gendered to the extent that it exploits women using tropes of traditional femininity that allows women’s labour to be extended to the public domain without ascribing any/minimum economic value to it. Apart from such conceptual probing, the book also investigates the relation between social sectors and worker’s rights within a framework of a neo-liberal policies and the government’s retreat from crucial social sectors.

Chapter 1, however, tends to be repetitive and does little to link the existing literature review conceptually and analytically to probe further the linkage between ‘service-sector-work’ and ‘social-service-work’, as well as the gendering of the ideologies of service/seva that informs much of social/voluntary work. In post-colonial India, where women’s labour has been granted legitimacy when couched in a language of service rather than market transactions, it would have been a fruitful exercise to examine the discursive construction of honorary work.

Chapters 2 and 3 offer a more interesting read, as it examines the impact of the reconfiguration of welfare policies, in the context of macro-politics of privatization, NGO-ization and the retreat of the State from social welfare, on women working in this segment. Studying the history and growth of the ICDS allows the author to examine the first-hand changes within welfare schemes in the context of a neo-liberal regime.

Chapters 4–6, based on interviews with AWWs, take the discussion further to examine how larger policy changes have affected the lives and livelihood of those who work in these schemes. While there has been an expansion of responsibilities for the women workers, it has not seen a corresponding increase in wages, job security or terms of employment. Instead, privatization and NGO-ization has led to further exploitation, precarity, as well as lack of accountability and charges of corruption. Interviews with the workers lay bare the exploitation embedded in the politics of labelling AWWs as honorary workers: while all modern workplace disciplining is brought upon them, they are continued to be perceived as women working not for money but social good. Chapter 6 further pursues this line of thought to argue that the contradiction between voluntary work and workers’ unionization or fight for rights is a direct challenge to the construction of women’s labour as voluntary/social work.

The most important contribution of this book is the interrogation of the notion of ‘voluntary’ to lay bare the exploitation embedded in such gendered constructions as well as bring to the fore how essentialist tropes of feminine nurturance are deployed to exploit women and deny them the identity of a worker. The case study of AWW helps the author to locate this micro-politics of gendering within macro-processes of privatization, NGO-ization and neo-liberal policies to examine how it affects the people most responsible for the everyday running of the scheme at the grass roots level. While some parts of the book are repetitive, most of it is informative and gives us a clear picture of the challenges faced by women working in state social welfare projects.