Dr Smriti Sharma earned her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Her research interests lie at the intersection of policy studies, science and technology studies, and health and welfare.

In her PhD titled, ‘Improving by Updating: The Making of a Publicly-Funded Health Insurance Scheme in India’, she conducted long-term ethnographic analysis of a publicly-funded health insurance program (Ayushman Bharat Yojana) for low-income citizens in India. Intervening in scholarly debates on digital governance and improvement, ‘Improving by Updating’ interrogated how policymakers continuously enact ‘improvements’ intended towards the health of (low-income) citizens by developing the analytical tool of ‘updating’. Adapting a term from the interdisciplinary field of computer science, she defines ‘updating’ as a necessary, iterative, and disruptive process that involves continuously adding design and technological features (updates) to make ‘improvements’ towards the journey to healthcare. These updates, however, exhibit significant variability, leading to (un)intended consequences for different actors, and providing critical insights into the linear idea of improvement. As part of the Krea Postdoctoral Fellowship, she is working on a book project inspired by her PhD research. As part of her book project, she is actively working towards broadening the analytical tool of ‘updating’  beyond the technical relevance of evaluating a specific health insurance program. In doing so, she intends to examine how political, economic, and technological visions are continuously (re)crafted and (re)inscribed within India’s healthcare regimes, and their possible effects for health(care).

Smriti has held research associations with the Department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany, and the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zürich, Switzerland. Her research has recently been published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.