Paper short abstract:

This paper is about digitality as a condition that becomes folded in procedural bureaucracy and healthworkers who navigate the frequent slips between the paper and the digital as they assemble people, objects and programs together.

Paper long abstract:

In July 2022 I am sitting in Villupuram’s ‘Block War Room’ where the health staff are showcasing a powerpoint presentation on a digital health project called the Tamil Nadu Population Health Registry. It is a dashboard, a mobile app, a web portal, depending on who is looking at it, but most importantly it is a ‘single source of truth’ that records and profiles health data of residents in Tamil Nadu, India. ‘Digital India’ as an emerging political form is an instantiation of lively capacities into the ‘idle’ archives of data by linking, networking, interoperating for ‘comprehensive governance’ (Cohen 2016) This has not come about, yet, but the idea of surfacing all existing data onto a plane of legibility and forging an interactive collective that emits the right kinds of prompts and predictions changes things. It shifts an understanding of population data from a repository of identities and categories to the expansive circuits of databases that can materialize new relations between people, technologies and government programs. This paper is about digitality as a condition that becomes folded in procedural bureaucracy and healthworkers who navigate the frequent slips between paper and digital as they assemble people, objects and programs together. I argue that as old and new regimes of state work get entangled, digitisation, digital truths, databases refashion local and national hopes for health security with technology, for modern health centers, and this changes how care is distributed and sought in these spaces.