In an Anganwadi centre in G Madugula mandal of Andhra Pradesh’s Alluri Sitharama Raju (ASR) district, Savitri*, a 45-year-old Anganwadi worker, often has to travel up to 3 km just to find internet connectivity. While she is away, Madhavi*, the 33-year-old Anganwadi helper, is left to look after the children, prepare meals, and clean the centre.
For Savitri, these trips mean additional costs. She uses her two-wheeler to reach places where the network is available, but receives no reimbursement from the government. What is meant to be a digital system for improving service delivery has, in practice, increased both her workload and her expenses.
Savitri’s experience is not exceptional. Across tribal Anganwadis in the district, digital systems designed to modernise welfare delivery are instead shifting the costs, labour, and risks of poor infrastructure onto the workers meant to deliver care.
We interviewed three Anganwadi workers, three Anganwadi helpers, and one mini Angawadi worker, who spoke of poor or absent connectivity, limited access to mobile phones, low levels of digital literacy, and problems within the applications themselves.
These issues are part of a larger shift in the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme — the primary government framework for early childhood nutrition and care. In 2018, the Union government introduced digital tools through the National Nutrition Mission, also known as Poshan Abhiyaan. The Poshan Tracker application was meant to improve data collection, increase transparency, and allow real-time monitoring of services provided through Anganwadi centres.
But in the tribal areas of Andhra Pradesh, where access to technology is limited, this push towards digitalisation has created new difficulties.
The digital system also requires OTPs sent to rights holders’ phones. This makes the distribution of food stocks dependent not only on the Anganwadi worker, but also on whether rights holders have phones, whether the phone is working, whether the network is available, and whether the application functions properly. In these areas, many people do not have either a phone or Aadhaar. This makes the distribution of Take Home Ration (THR) — meant for pregnant women, lactating mothers, and children between six months and three years — difficult and uncertain.
Women who are eligible for these entitlements sometimes stop coming to the centre because the procedures are complex and often unsuccessful.
According to official minutes from a review meeting held on December 10, 2025, released by the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development on the RTI request by NGO LibTech India, the Andhra Pradesh government “raised concerns about Aadhaar number issues in ASR district.”
The connectivity problem is only one layer. A second runs deeper: the system’s dependence on Aadhaar infrastructure that many tribal residents simply do not have, as our field work covering four Anganwadi centres in four villages of G Madugula mandal showed.
According to a December 2023 study by LibTech India, roughly 3.6% of Adivasis in the ASR district do not have an Aadhaar card.
The state is also working towards reaching a 95% distribution target through the Facial Recognition System (FRS). But Anganwadi workers in the area say the FRS system is creating problems because of frequent technical failures and malfunctioning apps.
For example, at one of the centers, an Anganwadi worker was able to successfully upload the rights holder’s photo only on the fourth attempt. After each upload attempt, she said the application required her to wait several seconds before displaying the error message: “Something went wrong. Please try again.”
The workers said they had not received adequate training to use these apps. As a result, some of them depend on others to manage the applications. Anasuya*, 50, and Ramulamma*, 50, said they pay an external person from another village to help them with app-related work. This costs them around Rs 1,000 per month.
One of the problems reported by Anasuya concerns the use of photographs in the Poshan Tracker. Uploading a photograph is necessary to authorise the distribution of THR. But the uploaded image must match the photograph linked to Aadhaar. In many cases, the Aadhaar photograph is old. This becomes a particular problem for mothers, whose appearance may have changed after childbirth, making facial recognition difficult.
Rights holders often become frustrated by these repeated hurdles. Many are also reluctant to travel to Aadhaar centres, which are often far from their homes, just to update a photograph, according to Anganwadi workers we interviewed.
There are also problems in updating rights holders’ details on the apps. Savitri spoke of a case where a seven-month-old child died. The child’s mother had been registered as a lactating mother, but Savitri was unable to remove her name from the list of eligible rights holders because the platform did not allow it. A year later, the same woman became pregnant again. But Savitri was still unable to change her category from “lactating mother” to “pregnant woman”.
This created tension within the community. The mother accused Savitri of failing to update her details. She also blamed her for the child’s death, alleging that spoiled food had been distributed.
After this incident, Savitri’s relationship with the rights holders was affected. She said she began to fear accusations from families and became anxious about using the digital system itself. Asking women to come to the centre for photographs, facial recognition, and data entry became a source of stress for her.
The pressure also comes from above. Anganwadi workers said they face constant monitoring from supervisors. Through WhatsApp groups, supervisors track the percentage of data uploaded by each worker and send reminders if photographs showing children’s presence are not uploaded on time.
Workers said this is not always in their control. Many children arrive late at the centre, making it difficult to upload data within the required timeframe.
The burden of these digital tasks also affects the children. Anganwadi workers are responsible not only for food distribution but also for monitoring children’s growth and health, recording data on children, pregnant women and lactating mothers, noting weight, health visits and vaccinations, and conducting awareness campaigns on issues such as child marriage, hygiene, preschool education, and immunisation.
With much of their time now spent on digital platforms, workers said they are able to give less attention to preschool education. In many cases, the helper ends up taking care of the children, though she is less trained for this role.
Nagamani*, a 32-year-old Anganwadi worker, said having a person specifically assigned to manage digital applications would reduce the burden on workers.
Among the four Anganwadi workers spoken to, three said they would prefer to remove all digital platforms. Nagamani had a different view — and her suggestions point toward what a more workable system might look like. The apps could function offline, she said, so that workers in low-connectivity areas are not paralysed by absent networks. All applications should be merged into a single platform, eliminating the repeated data entry that currently consumes hours of a worker’s week. And a dedicated person should be assigned to manage digital tasks at each centre, so that the worker’s primary role — caring for children and mothers — is not displaced by administrative labour.
The experiences of Anganwadi workers and helpers in G Madugula show how digital systems often assume that all regions have the same level of connectivity, access to phones, Aadhaar coverage, and digital readiness. In tribal areas, these assumptions do not hold.
Digital reforms were introduced with the promise of modernising welfare delivery. But a system designed without accounting for connectivity gaps, Aadhaar exclusions, and the realities of frontline work does not modernise — it just relocates the burden onto the people least equipped to absorb it. If the government is serious about Poshan Abhiyaan’s goals, it must ask whether its digital infrastructure is serving Anganwadi workers or simply surveilling them.
Names of the interviewees have been changed to protect their identities.
The authors thank Karthik Reddy Panditi from LibTech India for his inputs.
Rebecca Della Lena is a Master’s student in Relations and Institutions of Asia and Africa at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy.
Andrea Maria Crispino is a Master’s student in Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy.
Views expressed are the authors’ own.