Volunteers in India built and ran digital platforms for Covid-19 aid—finding oxygen, booking vaccines, correcting misinformation—but the work itself was shaped by caste, gender, and class inequalities. The research examines this hidden digital labour as a historical ethnography, tracing how volunteer-run platforms, social media communities, and crowdfunding efforts became critical pandemic infrastructure after 2000. It asks who did the work, who had access, and how the promise of "real-time" data created new power dynamics around urgency and information. This matters because most pandemic response studies focus on official systems or biomedical tools, not the unpaid, often precarious digital work that kept people alive. If successful, the project will reveal how volunteer-built platforms can reinforce or challenge existing social hierarchies—insights that could reshape how governments and NGOs design emergency digital infrastructure in future crises. The research is primarily historical and analytical, not a blueprint for a new tool, but understanding these power relations could help make future volunteer-driven health responses more equitable and less reliant on elite access.
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The research analyses the politics of digital health labour within Covid-19 volunteer work in contemporary India. This is a historical ethnography that situates such labour within the post-2000 neoliberal landscape of health infrastructures. Covid volunteers – across a spectrum of governmental, corporate, and civil society channels – created or worked with platforms, applications, social media to provide pandemic responses. While foregrounding life-saving aspirations of Covid-19 volunteerism, the research evaluates unequal, gendered, caste-based burdens, solidarities, differential access underlying digital platforms and applications for pandemic aid. Drawing on oral history, discourse analysis, Digital Humanities tools, this research analyses how volunteers influenced digital audiences' experiences of time during the pandemic. Volunteers from elite and marginalized social backgrounds used digital platforms to mould temporal perceptions of disease transmission, vaccine procurement, urgent information. This involved crowdfunding and creating social media communities around real-time data, ephemeral, time- sensitive medical data and resources. The research studies the power relations underlying the labour of providing timely pandemic data. This project studies the relevance of India within global Covid infrastructures, and their corresponding digital labour. Set within three sites, the labour of Covid contact-tracing, creating vaccine access, battling misinformation, this project involves fieldwork across six Indian states and two countries.
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