Dr Smriti Sharma, Postdoctoral Fellow, Sociology and Social Anthropology, SIAS, published an article titled Packing Pareshani or Healthcare? The Affective Dimensions of Digitalisation in India’s Health Sector in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
In this article, author examine how digitalisation in the health sector seeks to standardise care in the name of effective service delivery. Author analyses the affective dimensions of operating a digital portal within the publicly funded health insurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat Yojana, by conceptualising the emic term, pareshani. In Hindi, pareshani encompasses a wide range of meanings, including worry, trouble, tension, helplessness, frustration, distress and exhaustion. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in a private hospital and the public insurer’s headquarters in Haryana, the author show how the intermedial specificity of pareshani undergirds payments and patient treatment. She argues that understanding the affective force of digital portals requires examining how pareshani becomes embedded in intermediaries’ everyday navigation and negotiation of bureaucratic standards and procedures that shape clinical work. More broadly, author reflect on what these affective dynamics reveal about the digital bureaucratic state and its modes of governing healthcare.
