Gendered Vulnerability of Community Health Workers in Light of COVID-19: A Note from the Floodplains of Assam, India

Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) are community health workers (CHWs) at the lowest level within the hierarchy of the Indian public healthcare system. Unfortunately, during the peak COVID-19 waves of 2020 and 2021 in India, they were inevitably left overburdened with work, underpaid, unpaid, and ungeared. These were widely underlined as the factors of their vulnerability during the pandemic. While such a structural interpretation of vulnerability is important, it does not fully capture the struggles on the ground. In this chapter, I use ethnographic data from two floodplains of the Brahmaputra River flowing through the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, discussing the findings through the conceptual lens of social vulnerability. The chapter examines the gendered ways ASHAs became vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. It demonstrates that CHWs respond to the experiences of vulnerability with various forms of negotiations to continue with their jobs and assert their identity.