Kis Ka Kaam aur Care Ki Keemat?

A feminist political economy of care and exhaustion

Well-being is often spoken about as a skill to be learned. Something individual. Something manageable. But conversations with grassroots women workers and human rights defenders tell a different story. Here, well-being is not absent because people do not know how to care for themselves. It is absent because care is systematically extracted while its costs are quietly absorbed.

A feminist political economy of care helps make sense of this. Burnout does not appear as an accident or a personal breakdown. It emerges where gendered labour, organisational urgency, and social inequality intersect.

Care Work Without Conditions for Care

Grassroots work depends on emotional availability, trust-building, and constant presence. These are forms of care labour that feminist scholars have long shown to be essential yet undervalued. Participants described working in physically hostile conditions, including extreme heat, long travel, and lack of basic amenities.

“Sometimes there isn’t even a toilet—especially during menstruation.”

These are not minor inconveniences. They signal whose bodies are expected to endure discomfort in the name of service. When care labour is feminised, endurance is normalised rather than addressed.

Moral surveillance compounds this physical strain.

“Kya karti hai?”

Returning late from fieldwork is read not as work, but as moral deviation. This scrutiny intensifies when the work involves women’s literacy or mobilisation.

“They say we are leading women astray.”

Thappad se darr nahi lagta sahab, patriarchal surveillance se lagta hai

Care that challenges patriarchal control attracts punishment. Well-being here is not undermined by workload alone, but by the social costs of doing gender-transformative work.

Burnout follows predictably.

“There are no breaks... even at home, my mind is in the field.”

The Fiction of Work-Life Separation

Mainstream well-being frameworks assume a separation between paid work and personal life. For many participants, that separation does not exist.

“After work, there is still work.”

Paid care labour in the field is layered onto unpaid domestic labour at home. Mobility is regulated. Phone use is monitored. Bodies are scrutinised.

“We are judged for how we look, how we talk, where we go.”

From a care lens, this reveals how women’s labour becomes infinitely elastic, available to organisations, communities, and families with little entitlement to rest.

Poverty further collapses any possibility of recovery.

“We live with hunger... it’s hard to focus on anything else.”

Care flows outward, but rarely returns.

“We carry the weight of the community, but no one asks about us.”

Organisations as Sites of Care and Extraction

Institutions are not neutral backdrops in these narratives. They actively shape how care is valued and exhausted. While teams sometimes offer solidarity, organisational responses to burnout remain limited and individualised.

“Discussing with my team gave me strength... even though solutions are rare.”

We may not have comforting answers but for that we always have chai...

“Stress management is seen as our responsibility.”

Well-being is addressed through workshops and conversations rather than changes to workload, timelines, or expectations. Mental health resources exist, but often lack trust or relevance.

“Most of our stress comes from organizational mechanisms.”

Donor-driven targets further intensify extraction.

“We’re always rushing to tick boxes for donors... there’s no time to breathe.”

Breathing but make it strategic.

From a feminist political economy perspective, care labour is mobilised to meet external accountability regimes, while its emotional and physical costs are borne by workers.

Unequal Access to Rest, Language, and Legitimacy

Burnout does not register equally across hierarchies of class, caste, and employment status.

“For me, I can say I’m burned out, but for them, the vocabulary doesn’t exist.”

The ability to name distress is itself a resource. For workers living with hunger, job insecurity, or social control, well-being language often feels distant.

“We don’t even have words to describe the stress of hunger.”

Gender-sensitive policies expose further stratification.

“Menstrual leave is only for organizational employees, not community resource persons.”

Neurodivergent workers and people with disabilities are excluded through rigid assumptions about what fieldwork should look like.

“We don’t have mechanisms in place to include them... the field team is expected to do everything.”

Inclusion remains rhetorical rather than structural.

Community Care Is Necessary, but Not Enough

Participants described informal strategies for survival. Organising spaces. Drawing flowers. Listening to music. Crying. Sleeping.

Collective moments mattered.

“We talk, eat together, shop, dance.”

But access to community care is uneven and constrained by power relations.

“If a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are in the same SHG, it’s difficult to discuss care.”

Stigma around mental health persists.

“Women were scared to access telehealth services... they feared their husbands would find out.”

Without institutional support, community care risks becoming another site where women absorb emotional labour without protection.

Reframing Well-Being as Collective Accountability

What emerges from these narratives is not a demand for better self-care, but for structural responsibility. Burnout functions as a diagnostic. It reveals where labour is extractive, where urgency replaces sustainability, and where endurance is mistaken for commitment.

As one participant put it:

“We also need care. Otherwise, how long can we keep going?”

Thoda care, chahiye

A feminist political economy of care demands a shift away from training individuals to cope and toward redesigning institutions, funding models, and labour expectations to make care possible. Until then, well-being will remain a promise spoken in workshops, while exhaustion continues to quietly hold systems together.

Written by Meher Suri

This essay draws on anonymised qualitative data generated through a multi-year feminist evaluation focused on well-being, care, and burnout among grassroots women workers and human rights defenders. The analysis is informed by participatory workshops, focus group discussions, surveys, and in-depth interviews conducted across multiple field contexts.

All quotes are reproduced verbatim, including Hindi and Hinglish expressions. Identifying details, locations, and organisational affiliations have been removed or altered to protect participants’ privacy and safety. The insights presented reflect collective patterns rather than individual testimony.