Digital Overreach: How the Poshan Tracker App Burdens Anganwadi Workers and Undermines Welfare

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In March 2021, the then Minister for Women and Child Development declared in a social media post that the Poshan Tracker “gives a 360-degree view and tracking of the Anganwadi Centre, nutrition service deliveries, and complete beneficiary management for pregnant women, lactating mothers, and children.” This statement reflects the state’s optimism about technology-driven governance as a panacea for systemic failures in public welfare delivery. However, the on-ground reality experienced by Anganwadi workers (AWWs), who stand at the frontline of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), tells a different story—one marked by intensified precarity, alienation, and loss of autonomy in their essential care work.

Poshan Tracker App Burdens Anganwadi Workers

The introduction of the Poshan Tracker App burdens Anganwadi workers by adding significant digital labour to their already heavy workload. AWWs, the backbone of these childcare centres, have been staging protests across the country against the app, voicing concerns that its implementation diverts their attention from core responsibilities of nutrition counselling, growth monitoring, and holistic care for mothers and children towards time-consuming and repetitive data entry tasks. Their protests underscore a broader trend in social sector governance: the adoption of top-down, techno-deterministic approaches that lack meaningful social participation and fail to accommodate local contexts, lived experiences, or infrastructural realities.

The ICDS, launched in 1975, remains one of the largest food safety nets globally, aiming to break intergenerational cycles of malnutrition and poverty by providing essential health, nutrition, and education services. Anganwadi centres deliver Take Home Rations, Hot Cooked Meals, immunisation support, growth monitoring, and early childhood care and education services to improve outcomes during the critical first 1,000 days of life. These services are indispensable for marginalised communities, where undernutrition is often compounded by social exclusion, caste hierarchies, poverty, and gender inequities.

Despite this long-standing programme, India’s performance remains dismal. The 2025 Global Hunger Index ranks India 105th out of 127 countries, with a GHI score of 27.3, categorised as “serious.” Indicators of child stunting and wasting remain alarmingly high, pointing to persistent structural failures in addressing the root causes of malnutrition, such as food insecurity, poor sanitation, inadequate maternal health services, and poverty. While the government has contested international rankings on methodological grounds, its own National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data reveal minimal improvement, and in some areas, worsening nutritional outcomes.

In an attempt to respond to criticism and demonstrate accountability, the government has increasingly turned to digitisation, seeing data scarcity as a primary bottleneck to effective programme implementation. Under the National Nutrition Mission (Poshan Abhiyan), the Poshan Tracker App was introduced with technical and financial support from the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to monitor service delivery by AWWs.

However, the reality is that the Poshan Tracker App burdens Anganwadi workers instead of empowering them, as it has come to be perceived as a mechanism of surveillance and control, extracting data without accountability to those who generate it. AWWs have described this as a sign of mistrust, reducing them to mere instruments for data collection rather than recognising their role as community health and nutrition champions.

The app’s introduction has significantly altered the working conditions of AWWs, who are predominantly women from marginalised caste and class backgrounds. They now face additional demands to collect biometric data, including facial recognition, fingerprints, photo uploads, Aadhaar seeding, and bank account linkage for all beneficiaries. The Ministry’s recent notification mandates that services be delivered only upon completion of these identity verification processes. Attendance tracking, meal documentation, and uploading real-time photos with liveliness detection have further intensified the burden.

Such measures signify a paradigmatic shift from universal rights-based welfarism towards conditional welfare, where citizens’ access to essential services is contingent upon compliance with intrusive digital protocols. This approach risks excluding the most vulnerable who lack identity documents, live in areas with poor connectivity, or are unable to navigate digital systems, while undermining the dignity of beneficiaries by subjecting them to surveillance and conditionalities that erode their rights-based entitlements. Moreover, the inability of AWWs to access, analyse, or use the data they input reinforces their role as mere data entry operators rather than informed care providers engaged in local decision-making and community empowerment.

The infrastructural realities further complicate implementation. Many AWWs do not own smartphones or reliable internet connections. Poor last-mile connectivity, frequent power cuts, and high data costs hinder their ability to comply with app requirements. Gendered disparities within households also mean that many AWWs have limited control over digital resources, often relying on family members for smartphones or internet recharges, exacerbating their challenges. The assumption that digital solutions can seamlessly overlay pre-existing infrastructural and social inequalities reflects a techno-utopian mindset detached from realities of rural India.

Unlike the Computer Application Software (CAS) piloted in 2017, which simplified record-keeping without mandating live data entry, the Poshan Tracker App has been criticised for adding complexity without offering tangible benefits to frontline workers. This reflects a systemic devaluation of their labour, rooted in their classification as ‘honorary workers’ with minimal remuneration, lack of social security, and limited recognition of their contributions to social reproduction and public health. The feminisation and flexibilisation of this workforce—where their unpaid or underpaid labour is leveraged as promissory capital—illustrate how digital governance models extract care without corresponding compensation or power redistribution.

Scholars argue that such techno-centric interventions reinforce existing socio-economic hierarchies, prioritising efficiency, data extraction, and external evaluation metrics over equity, empowerment, and care. AWWs, positioned between the state and beneficiaries, are blamed by both sides—by the state for administrative gaps and by communities for lapses in service delivery—creating a cycle of techno-dependent exclusion errors with real human costs borne disproportionately by marginalised women and children.

Addressing these challenges requires a fundamental reorientation of digital governance frameworks. Tools like the Poshan Tracker App must be redesigned through participatory processes that centre the voices, expertise, and experiences of Anganwadi workers. Investments in basic digital infrastructure, equitable access to smartphones and affordable data, and adequate training must accompany any technological intervention. Moreover, policymakers must recognise that data collection is not an end in itself; it must serve the goal of improving health and nutrition outcomes, and this requires empowering frontline workers rather than burdening them.

Ultimately, strengthening the ICDS to achieve its constitutional goals of reducing malnutrition, enabling healthy childhoods, and enhancing maternal well-being necessitates recognising, valuing, and supporting the care work of AWWs as essential to social justice, gender equity, and human development. Without such shifts, digital overreach risks undermining the very welfare structures it seeks to reform, reinforcing hierarchies of exclusion while masking them under the rhetoric of innovation and efficiency.

(Dr. Abhishek Sharma is a public health researcher based in Bengaluru. His interests lie at the intersection of gender and sociology of public health. Apurva K H works as an Assistant Professor in Govt. First Grade College, Dharwad.)