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Contribution short abstract

This contribution examines the pivotal role of enumerators and survey workers in producing statistical knowledge for development research and practice based on fieldwork in India. It analyses their skills, precarity, social backgrounds and future aspirations.

Contribution long abstract

Statistics have for long been the bedrock on which international development has been analysed and executed. Analysing the statistical infrastructures that underly development and public policy has been an important focus in ethnographic and critical development studies scholarship (Holland 2013; Jerven 2013; Merry 2016; Rottenburg and Merry 2015). While much of this scholarship has analysed the role of technocrats, officials and statisticians in producing quantitative data, a growing scholarship has emerged that focuses on the role of enumerators and frontline workers in the production of socio-economic statistics (Biruk 2018; Kingori 2013; McLellan and Eyre 2025). Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in India, this contribution analyses the crucial labour performed by enumerators and survey workers, the intricate tacit skills they utilise in survey work, their aspirations and social backgrounds. This is analysed in the context of a growing private industry for customised socio-economic data where economists and assorted international development professionals engage private survey firms for producing tailored data that is used in randomised trials and impact evaluations. These firms hire enumerators on short-term contracts for the crucial labour of data collection on the ground. By focusing on these enumerators and their managers in the field, this contribution seeks to highlight an important set of development workers who perform labour that is necessary for development practice. In doing so, it aims to centre their experiences, challenges and ambitions, which can better inform the ways in which development interventions are made socially possible.