These reflections are written in the spirit they were requested: honest, critical, and grounded in lived field experience. They are not intended as indictments of individuals, but as observations about how institutional norms shape who absorbs discomfort and how.
On PVTG Women and the State’s Control Over Reproduction
I want to talk about PVTG women and sterilisation. More specifically, about the fact that for a long time, PVTG women were not allowed to get tubectomies done. The reasoning was straightforward. Their numbers were small. Their population was declining. The state decided that preventing reproduction was a risk it could not afford.
The situation has changed now. The restriction has been relaxed. But while moving on, it is worth pausing to think about the logic of the law in the first place. If a population is declining, is the solution really to deny women access to contraception? Is the appropriate response to demographic anxiety the regulation of women’s bodies?
I do not think so.
When the state prevents women from accessing sterilisation, it is not promoting life. It is deciding who must reproduce, and at what cost. It treats women’s bodies as sites of policy intervention rather than as sites of autonomy. Isn’t this coercion?
What makes this particularly disturbing is how unevenly the burden falls. The state can restrict access to birth control. Husbands, meanwhile, are not expected to restrict their sexual entitlement. Sex does not stop. Pregnancy does not become optional. One of these is clearly avoidable. The other is treated as inevitable.
The result is a situation where reproduction is forced, not chosen.
You cannot claim to be saving a community while systematically denying its women control over their own bodies. You cannot treat reproduction as a collective good while ignoring the individual costs through which it is produced. And you certainly cannot do this while pretending that women’s consent is secondary to demographic targets.
Women’s bodies are not instruments of state policy. They are not resources to be managed. They are not insurance against extinction. They belong to the women themselves.
If a community is vulnerable, the response should be to improve living conditions, healthcare, nutrition, safety, and dignity. Not to force women into repeated pregnancies. Not to deny them the ability to say enough. Population decline is a social and economic problem. It cannot be solved by suspending reproductive autonomy.
After writing this, I returned to the history of the policy itself. The 1979 order did not only restrict tubectomies but also disallowed vasectomies for PVTGs. This appears gender-neutral.
Right?
In practice, it is anything but. Even when contraception is denied across the board, the burden of reproduction does not fall evenly. Pregnancy, unsafe abortion, maternal illness, and death are borne by women. Even when men’s reproductive autonomy is formally restricted, women pay the biological and social costs. The result is still forced reproduction, lived through women’s bodies.
On Survival, and the Bare Minimum
Over the course of my stay, I found myself repeatedly raising what I would politely call “infrastructural issues.” Wanting to stay in Ambikapur and asking for access to toilets in villages where we were expected to work full days are some highlights of it.
It felt basic to me. But it was often treated as if I were asking for special arrangements rather than functional ones.
Taken together, these concerns point to a larger question that kept coming up, even when it was not named.
What should be considered the bare minimum?
This is a question that employers and employees can debate forever. What is a need and what is a luxury? What counts as resilience and what gets dismissed as entitlement? These debates usually go nowhere because they begin with the wrong assumption. That the relevant benchmark is what workers can tolerate.
There is a strange pride attached to survival. To adjusting. To managing. To making it work. I understand that pride because I share it. I survived these conditions too. I adapted. I figured things out. And I am slightly embarrassed to admit that part of me feels proud of having managed.
But survival is a very low bar. It is often just a sign that someone had no other option.
Just because one can survive does not mean one should be expected to.
Once survival becomes the standard, everything else becomes negotiable. Toilets become optional. Rest starts looking indulgent. Safety turns into a matter of personal judgement. Discomfort is sold as growth, and institutional gaps are handed over to individuals to manage. If you cope well enough, the problem disappears. At least on paper.
What finally helped me make sense of this was a simple question. Would this condition still exist if those designing it had to live under it?
This question refuses to admire endurance. It asks instead about symmetry. Many arrangements that are defended as unavoidable look far less convincing when imagined as universal. If those deciding fieldwork schedules, accommodation, or basic infrastructure had to operate under the same constraints, some of these conditions would not last very long.
I am not suggesting that all constraints can be eliminated. Fieldwork is hard. Resources are limited. But hardship is not neutral. When the same people are always the ones expected to absorb inconvenience, risk, and discomfort, survival stops being incidental and becomes structural.
At the very least, work should allow people to reproduce their labour without damaging themselves in the process. This is not about comfort. It is about not having to suppress bodily needs, compromise safety, or normalise indignity just to get through the day. What counts as the bare minimum will always be contested. But treating survival as sufficient shuts that conversation down entirely.
The problem is not that people adjust. The problem is how easily institutions come to depend on that adjustment. Individual coping becomes a substitute for responsibility. Endurance becomes a virtue.
Survival can be impressive. I know this because I lived it. But it is not a policy. And it is not something institutions should take pride in demanding.
Gender, Risk, and Normalised Discomfort in Fieldwork
When I arrived in Sangwari, I did not initially think of sanitation as a gendered issue. The absence of toilets appeared to be one of many infrastructural limitations that came with fieldwork in the area. It was only through daily experience that I began to notice how this absence translated into different forms of risk.
India is not open defecation free. Surguja is certainly not open defecation free. If toilets existed in every household, we would not be doing a field project like this in the first place. So let us accept the constraint upfront: toilets are absent.
Given this, the more useful question is not “Why don’t toilets exist?” but “How should a field team function when they do not?”
Our field team was mostly women, most of them local. They appeared accustomed to defecating in the open. Men did too. But comfort is not the same as safety, and choice is not the same as compulsion.
Risk in this context is anatomical and social. Men are safer for two reasons. Their exposure time is shorter, and their bodies require less removal of clothing. Women do not have this convenience. To urinate, one must fully expose oneself. Vulnerability increases not because women are seen as weaker but because they are more exposed within a patriarchal setting.
Local women knew where the relatively safe spots were. I did not. I am not from here, and I continue to believe that being forced to excrete in public is undignified. The field did not make that belief disappear. It only made it inconvenient.
The field day ran from 9 to 5. In villages without toilets, the institution had two reasonable options (although what is reasonable is also up for debate). Either provide access to toilets or shorten the workday. Anything else transfers the problem onto individual women.
When I raised this, the response was empathetic but individualising. I was told we would identify a toilet in each village and secure permission in advance. I was also told to be bold and ask households with toilets. On paper, this was a strong plan.
It is important to note that I genuinely appreciated the “be bold” advice. It addressed a real internal barrier. I had to confront how much shame I had absorbed around asking. The advice helped me. I do not want to pretend it did not.
We tried the plan. It did not consistently work. And it quickly became clear that the toilet problem was being treated as my personal discomfort rather than a structural issue. So I adapted. I began asking to use toilets even when I did not urgently need to. I wanted to unlearn the shame. For a brief period, I felt proud and empowered by that individual solution.
Then a male PhD student joined the field team. He raised the same issue. The next day, toilet arrangements appeared. When he left a few weeks later, the arrangements disappeared just as quickly.
I questioned whether I was overinterpreting the pattern. But the timing made it difficult to dismiss.
But the pattern was difficult to ignore. When a woman raised an embodied concern, it became behavioural guidance. When a man raised the same concern, it became structural and urgent.
Possibly.
Later, someone asked, “Aapko zaroorat padti hai?” The implication was that necessity alone justifies access. But necessity is not the category that matters. Choice, dignity, and bodily autonomy matter. So does the ability to work without organising my bladder around organisational or should I say patriarchal indifference.
Patriarchy often appears this way. Not as hostility, but as normalcy. As silence. As expectations that women will individually adjust to structural failures.
Sangwari is not uniquely patriarchal. But it illustrates how easily women’s discomfort becomes invisible until it disrupts work or is validated by a man.
It also made me reconsider my method of raising issues. I tend to frame concerns politely (?), privately, and as personal. Institutions respond to the opposite: visibility, repetition, and inconvenience. Something becomes structural only when it interrupts the ordinary flow of work.
If I were to do this again, I would raise it earlier, in public, and as a condition of labour rather than a personal problem. Access to toilets is not an individual adjustment. It is a basic precondition for dignified work.
Reflections on How the Survey Was Conducted
One of the first things that struck me during the survey was how quickly the community health workers adapted to the tablets. Most had never used digital tools for data collection before.
Within days, they were navigating the questionnaire, troubleshooting small glitches, and entering data with a fluency that made the initial hesitation feel overstated. I was genuinely fascinated to see a bunch of young women be so good at something so new to them.
Once the tablets became ordinary objects and the questions became familiarised, the centre of gravity shifted. The work began to be organised around covering households. Speed became a proxy for progress. No one introduced this change. It emerged through long field days, tacit expectations around productivity, and the desire to finish areas on time. I was not outside this dynamic. At some point, I noticed that I too had begun valuing completion over a tad bit more probing which I am sure would have served everyone better.
When speed accelerates, interviews flatten. Probing becomes rare. Inconsistencies are left alone. None of this came from negligence. It came from tired bodies, limited time, and informal targets. A clearer and more realistic idea of what one pair could cover in a day might have allowed for attention without treating caution as indulgent.
Data quality was discussed during training, but accuracy needs reinforcement in practice. Reminders matter because speed is the easiest metric to observe and reward.
Training itself made me think about pedagogy. The sessions were long and continuous. After some time, my attention drifted and the material began to merge. Attention leaks are not personal failures. They are shaped by structure. Shorter modules or more frequent breaks might have made the content easier to hold. It also might help to vary who speaks. Seeing someone from the community lead parts of the training could build confidence faster than a single authoritative voice. People often learn best when they can see themselves in the person who is explaining.
Finally, I want to mark my own role in the data that was generated. I participated in collection and was shaped by the same pressures of fatigue, time, and completion. These conditions inevitably influenced how carefully I asked questions and recorded responses. If errors entered through me, I apologise for them. But an individual apology should not obscure the broader point. Data is not simply captured. It is produced under specific conditions, and those conditions deserve scrutiny.
– Ankita Cheeran