Paper short abstract:

How can ethnographic methods track implicit & explicit forms of structural casteism in Indian public health policy & praxis? This paper theorizes insights from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in North India with public health doctors, activists & afflicted patient-groups amid COVID-19.

Paper long abstract:

In 2018, India expanded its public health frontiers through a national health protection policy (Ayushman Bharat Yojana) targeting 100 million of the country's most economically marginalized families. Albeit officially described as the "world's largest government funded healthcare (insurance) programme" that lays the foundations for achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in India, my paper argues for a more nuanced ethnographic examination of India's public health scheme and it's underlying epistemic schemas. Based primarily on fieldwork in New Delhi's low and middle-income neighbourhoods and hospitals with public health doctors, activists, afflicted patient-groups and their families amid COVID-19, I ask, how are Indian public health policy and praxis animated by theories of wellness which systematically ignore caste as a primary determinant of structural harm, risk and debility for 400 million Dalit ('lower-caste') bodies? How can ethnography uncover and unlayer the structural and symbolic field(s) of asymmetric power relations in which practitioners, beneficiaries and institutions of (neo)liberal public health policy remain embedded? How do ostensibly "pro-poor" and "pro-women" health policies enact a proscriptive ethics rooted in and through biased and casted social facts? How can ethnography assemble and attend to everyday moments in which the violence of care and the violence of casteism are (co)produced through public health policy? And importantly, how are ethnographic methods privileged (and at-risk) in their ability to track implicit and explicit forms of structural casteism in Indian public health, including the implications of health policy’s refusal to name casteism as a threat to community health outcomes and life-chances?