Revaluing India’s Welfare Workers
Revaluing India’s Welfare Workers
by
Dr. Sreerekha Sathi
The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University The Hague, Netherlands
Date: 31st May 2021, Monday at 3.00 p.m.
Abstract
Covid-19 has dramatically impacted the labor and life worlds of women welfare workers in India. These workers are struggling to help the local communities to survive, however, they are also experiencing increasing incidents of violence against them along with long delays in their wages. While they are busy fighting the pandemic, hundreds of pregnant women from marginalized communities in India have died in the past year due to lack of access to basic health services. The impact of the pandemic has revealed the basic flows in our welfare system. It has also taught us to revalue the contribution of women in state welfare schemes. In globalized/ corporatized India, healthcare and subsistence work for the poor is continually at odds with political economic restructuring from above.
About the speaker:
Dr. Sreerekha Sathi joined the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of the Erasmus University in The Hague, Netherlands as an academic faculty in Gender and Political Economy in January 2020. Prior to ISS, she taught at the University of Virginia, USA, in its Global Studies Program, and at the Department for Women’s Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India. Her areas of academic interest span theories of gender and political economy, feminist theories of development, women in precarious work in the global south, women social welfare workers in South Asia, feminist research methodologies and epistemologies, social movements in the global south, caste politics in India and South Asia, Land rights in India and Kerala Model of Development. In the past, she has been involved in the struggles for rights of women, landless communities, workers and slum dwellers and has engaged with issues pertaining to indigenous land rights, capitalist globalization, and civil and democratic rights in India. Her first book State without Honour was published in 2017 with Oxford University Press, India.