Like many Indian women, Priya Goswami’s mother lived a dual life: balancing her professional obligations with unpaid domestic labour. “My mother is a senior secondary teacher, and I would see her wake up at 5 am every day to finish household chores before she left for her work,” recalls the award-winning filmmaker and feminist tech entrepreneur. It was hard, of course, but Priya, who now shuttles between Hong Kong and India, understands why her mother did it. “For Indian women, financial independence is a political act so that they retain some independence in a patriarchal society,” says the co-founder, creative head and CEO of Mumkin, an AI-based application that enables difficult conversations around gender, culture and society.
The appreciation she gained from watching her mother juggle her many responsibilities drew her to the stories of India’s Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), says Priya, who has recently designed an immersive, web-based original game, SUPER ASHA, which highlights the challenges faced by these workers. “When I met some of the ASHA workers, I saw the resilience of the women who brought me up. For me, the ASHA workers’ story is a tribute to my mother and women like my mother who manage impossible hours.”
The latest version of SUPER ASHA will be released at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona as part of her multimedia exhibition titled ‘Digital Bharat’, which will be held between November 7 and 9. This exhibition, which explores the impact of Digital Public Infrastructures (DPIs) on health and livelihood in India via photos, videos and of course, the game, “brings you face-to-face with the lived realities of some of the most marginalised populations in India, community health workers and daily-wage labourers,” says Priya, currently part of an 18-month fellowship programme offered by the Mozilla foundation, which kicked off in September 2024.
As part of the Mozilla Fellowship cohort, which “couples civil society organisations in the Global Majority with public interest technologists across various geographies,” as the foundation’s website describes it, she had the opportunity to focus on stories revolving around the world’s largest invisible workforce: women. “My biggest draw was to be able to go on the ground and highlight some of their stories,” says Priya, who carried out extensive on-ground research during the fellowship and also shot two three-minute-long documentary videos — one on ASHA workers and one on daily-wage labourers — both of which would become part of Digital Bharat. While doing so, “The ASHA workers’ story became an even bigger one for me,” she says, expanding on the series of events which led up to the game.
Priya spoke to ASHA workers from three states for the exhibition
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
In October last year, she bumped into Sunita Rani, the general secretary of the Haryana ASHA Workers Union, as well as a couple of other ASHA workers at a gathering held at the Goethe-Institut in Delhi. The meeting made her realise that “these women were not just forming the backbone of India’s healthcare system by providing community health services, but are now gathering and digitising health records of people across India,” explains Priya, pointing out that despite their essential role, they are severely underpaid, earning anywhere between ₹5,500 and ₹10,000 per month and facing constant systemic neglect.
This meeting prompted her to think about several things, she says. “The question of the largest invisible workforce in the world, women, carrying on care labour, is one angle. But another angle is also that they are now doing data labour, and do not have the option of opting out of doing it.” Additionally, this direct on-ground deployment of community health workers, which results in data being collected for a pool or tank, also raises questions about the data itself: how it is being stored, used and regulated, says Priya. “There is no governance, policy-based framework in India. Also, health is specifically a State subject.”
She travelled to Haryana, Maharashtra, and Kerala to meet ASHA workers, understanding the challenges they faced, some of which were very specific to the states in which they lived and worked. One of her most poignant memories of those travels occurred at the recently concluded ASHA worker strike in Kerala in May, where she witnessed a group of LGBTQ youth come in to support these workers. When she went up to talk to these youth, they told her that since ASHA workers were frontline workers, they knew what no one else did. “They told me that if they had to hide their gender from the government survey, the ASHA worker would shield them,” recalls Priya.
SUPER ASHA was born from a need to create an immersive experience of the lives of regular ASHA workers, essentially putting “people in the shoes of these workers and letting them experience the data and care labour,” she says of the game, which was supported by the Mozilla Foundation and Mumkin. The game, which is divided into time windows, has players become ASHA workers to help them understand how exhausting and complicated the job can be. “The whole idea is that you will be her every hour and experience what she’s supposed to do,” says Priya, who has drawn on “hard-hitting, true stories” gathered from the field to design the game.
A screenshot of the game
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
To design SUPER ASHA, Priya worked with a team of artists, including Ranjitha Rajeevan and Basim Abu NP, “without whom this game would not have been possible. They are gamers, and I am not.” The focus, she says, was to make the simplest game possible; so they designed it based on the popular game Super Mario. “Super Mario has to jump hoops to get to Princess Peach, so let ASHA also do that,” she says. However, as a player goes to higher levels, the settings become more complex, she says, drawing a parallel to ‘Papers, Please’, a puzzle simulation video game “where you play as an immigration officer, where stamping people to enter a border or not is a moral choice,” she says.
The first version of SUPER ASHA was showcased at the eighth annual ACM FAccT conference, held in Athens, Greece, from June 23 to 26, alongside other multimedia artefacts from the Digital Bharat exhibition. A more refined version of the game, SUPER ASHA v1.2, will be launched at the Mozfest Barcelona display. This version “starts at 5am ASHA time and goes on till 3pm.” The game will likely be out in the public domain by November 7, “with any versions from then on be accessible to all,” says Priya, who especially wants to target technologists and policy makers through this game.
“They should be able to play the game and understand the constraints of this job.” Even better, of course, would be this: implementing policy based on the understanding that conducting data labour, such as logging records, changes the nature of care and support ASHAs offer. “The two (care and data labour) should not be carried out by the same human apparatus, the ASHA worker, because care setting is a very different context,” says Priya