Based on his experience of observing how anganwadis function, an aspiring development professional makes a case for the importance of fieldwork for understanding ground realities which will help in policy making.
Would you prefer riding pillion on a motorcycle on dusty roads or riding in the back of a truck to a desk-based job where you could work in the comforts of an air-conditioned office?
Well, I do.
With my experience, I could have applied for jobs in development sector consulting, monitoring and evaluation, or sector-specific roles in any organisation, but I chose to not apply to any non-fieldwork roles before gaining some field experience.
If you wonder why I chose fieldwork, I will present some arguments in light of my recent fieldwork experience in south Rajasthan, where I interned at a large development sector organisation working with anganwadi centres (AWCs) on reducing malnutrition.
Before I give you my reasons, here is what my typical day looks like:
Anganwadis are open from 8 am to 12 noon. It’s important I reach before it opens. So I leave home by 7:30 for the anganwadi I have to visit that day. I typically travel to these centres with people from the organisation. When that’s not possible, I would hitch-hike my way – from sitting in tempos to motorcycles.
At the anganwadi, I talk to the worker and the helper about the functioning of their centre. Such conversations are the main source of my information. I rarely inspect things or do something that would alarm the worker, who might be afraid that I’d report her to higher authorities.
I also engage with the women who visit the anganwadis. From them, I learn about their livelihood, challenges related to water, what they eat, their ideas on nutrition, etc.
Some days I go to each house in the village to mobilise parents to send their children to the centre. After it closes at 12 noon, I come back to the office and note down my observations in detail. My field notes diary has crossed 12,000 words already.
Also Read: Perils of anganwadi worker not showing up for work
Given this experience, I would like to present a case for choosing field work in the early stages of a development professional’s career over a desk-based role.
Working in the field gives you access to realities that survey data cannot capture. Survey data can nicely capture key metrics and determinants of an issue. However, fieldwork offers a richer understanding of the issue.
For example, fieldwork can make you ‘feel’ a problem when surveys can only point to problems. When you go through issues with the people who experience it, you learn a lot more than what survey data can capture.
Only when you walk with the children and the mothers from their home to the AWC would you realise how difficult it is for the children to come. A 15-minute walk might seem fine on paper, but it’s quite a task for children aged 3 to 6 years, especially when they walk on the main road.
Additionally, the anxiety of mothers is difficult to capture in survey data, and can be only felt and perceived in conversations. Such an understanding comes handy when trying to understand low attendance rates in anganwadi centres.
In an increasingly data- and outcome-oriented development sector, it’s difficult to visualise, say, ‘One million women saved’ and ‘12.8 percent more households included’. By visualisation I don’t mean graphs, but the idea that these are individual women, each living her own life.
It’s when you visit each AWC, talk to each mother and play with each child, do you realise how each decision affects every Dinesh, every Shivam and every Laxmi Devi – faces behind the numbers in the data!
Also Read: Unsung heroes of Odisha’s anganwadi centres
When you interact with the affected and see issues on your own, you empathise and realise the gravity of each policy change. This makes me put in extra effort in making sure that what I do is right. It makes us more mindful of our policy suggestions.
For example, if I were to suggest guidelines for the location of new anganwadis, I’d remember the acutely-malnourished Dinesh (name changed) whom I met on the periphery of a village. Dinesh lives far from the AWC. The walk in the hot sun to his house made me acutely aware of how identifying the location for anganwadis cannot be left to the community as people with power, money and status would try to locate it closer to their home.
Now, I would recommend identifying hotspots of malnutrition and then locating the anganwadi near them. This might be an ‘obvious’ suggestion. But to fully believe in such a suggestion requires you to be empathetic, which fieldwork makes you to be.
If you want to understand issues in anganwadi service delivery, you need to be present in the AWC to see how each moving part relates to other parts. For example, you may want to understand why for the 50-odd children aged 3-6 years who are enrolled, only 3-5 may show up at the AWC on a day.
There are multiple interconnected issues. Often the anganwadi helper does not come and there is no one to bring the children or tend to them or cook food for them. If the anganwadi worker cleans and cooks, she does not have time to impart pre-school education.
Also Read: A mother’s determination brings mid-day meals to children in Odisha village
When children do not learn, parents view AWCs as feeding centres, and not as centres of learning, which only discourages them from sending their children. This is how the attendance of the helper impacts learning outcomes: the image of the AWC, attendance and the nutritional status of children.
This was just one example of one moving part creating multiple problems at the AWC level. In general, staying in one AWC gave me a holistic understanding of the implementation process, nuances and the challenges that might be overlooked while considering large scale policy reforms.
Fieldwork helps me understand how policies have the potential to positively or negatively impact lives: Take the case of anganwadi helpers (AWHs). One of their roles is to bring children to the anganwadi, since small children cannot walk alone, and parents are either at work or busy with domestic duties.
The Saksham Anganwadi Guidelines do not specify priorities in bringing children. When I accompanied the helpers, I noticed that an AWH typically visited 4-5 houses close to the AWC.
However, malnutrition is more likely to exist in families living on the peripheries of villages, which are never reached by the AWH on foot. Hence, a simple guideline may negatively impact the potential of nutrition services to benefit those who need it the most.
Also Read: Curbing malnutrition, one poshan vatika at a time
Take another example on how some workers interpret a feature on their Poshan Tracker app, which is used to track enrolled children and manage their attendance, food supplies, home visits, etc in a systematised manner. The app features a way to ‘migrate’ children who have, well, migrated out from the village.
However, the anganwadi worker’s understanding and usage of this feature often negatively impacts children. Many children (aged 2-3 years and above) enrolled in anganwadis are also enrolled in private schools and never come to the AWC.
However, AWWs, under pressure to show strong attendance rates often migrate these children. This denies children their fair share of benefits like home visits and health education. Just because a child does not come to the AWC does not mean they can be denied AWC’s other services. This example clearly shows how a well-intended policy impacts lives negatively.
I’m not the first one making these observations about the functioning of frontline workers, bureaucracy and core-periphery issues. Multiple researchers have studied how bureaucratic institutions deliver services and how they fail sometimes. Why not gain knowledge by just reading research papers and books?
I would still advocate for fieldwork on two grounds – one, I believe that fieldwork makes experiences ‘stick’ in your brain. Only when I went from house to house to motivate parents to send their children to the AWC, did I realise how hard it is. Researchers may capture this feeling by documenting the troubles of AWHs, but your perspective drastically changes when you are in the shoes of the AWHs.
Second, I believe fieldwork gives you a much more context-specific understanding, as I learnt from experience of working with AWCs. Hence, literature is great to cover theory, methods and case studies, but to apply these to your work requires immersion in the field.
For these reasons, I believe it is important that a development professional begins their journey by conducting fieldwork. A structured understanding of ground realities has been very beneficial to me, as I hope it will be to those who plunge into fieldwork.
Also Read: Community kitchens help tribal children overcome malnutrition
The lead image on top shows villagers, including anganwadi workers on their way to administer polio vaccine, walking down a dirt track. (Photo by Sattva Vasavada Sengupta)
Sattva Vasavada Sengupta, with a postgraduate degree from Ashoka University, is an aspiring development professional and researcher with a keen interest in creating impactful policies.
