Challenges and commitment: A day in the life of Geeta Gautam, an Anganwadi worker in Lucknow

Geeta Gautam, a 37-year-old living in Takrohi in Lucknow, starts her day like any other. She wakes up in the morning and prepares breakfast and tiffin for her husband and 11-year-old son. Having sent them off, she finally turns to pick the pink saree that has been her uniform for over the last seventeen years. She is an Anganwadi worker since 2007.

Geeta hurriedly drapes it, keeps her tiffin box in the bag and after a pause stuffs it in a bag of locally made gajak sweets as well. Off she hurries to get an e-rickshaw ride from Takrohi to Chandanapur village. 

The National Education Policy 2020 has turned attention to children below 8 years of age like never before however, the success of these plans hinges on how well resourced the Anganwadi workers such as Geeta and the centres are.

Of the ₹26,889 crore allocated to the Ministry of Women and Child Development in the Union Budget 2025-26, ₹21,960 crore is for Saksham Anganwadis and Poshan 2.0 showing how the network of Anganwadi centres is the backbone of national effort towards the development of women and children. There are over 14 lakh Anganwadi centres with over 13.31 lakh Anganwadi workers that are reaching out to over 10 crore children upto the age of 6 across the country. This data is as of January 31st.

The e-rickshaw stops at a small roadside restaurant – Naani ka Hotel and Geeta gathers her saree and her bags, stepping out and handing the driver a folded 20-rupee-note. Right next to the rundown establishment is a narrow cobbled path which she takes and walks the rest of the way to the ‘Anganwadi centre’. She reaches the small room, unlocks it and puts her bags to the side. By the time she reaches, it is almost 10 am. There are a few charts put up and some stationery in one corner. 

Geeta takes out her mobile phone and opens the Poshan Tracker app. The mobile application rolled out in 2018 has become a real-time data collection and monitoring portal for all Anganwadi activities. The Ministry of Women and Child Development won the National Award for e-Governance 2024 (Gold) for this very mobile app in September last year.

On the app, she uploads a location pin to convey that she has reached the centre and marks her attendance. She says, “The phone that we had gotten from the government barely worked so I saved to buy a smartphone. I have learned using it very well because so much of our work is now digital but the internet is often inconsistent and the application works very slow.”

Geeta scrolls through her WhatsApp groups to check if there are any additional activities or tasks assigned for the day by the supervisor or BDO (Block Division Officer). None yet. She picks some registers where she still maintains some records by hand, some other sheets of paper, stationery and puts them all in a bag headed out to the door. She locks the room and heads out in the other direction. It is quarter past 10. 

Going to where the children are

Geeta is leaving the centre even though her day’s work has just begun because the children do not actually come to the centre — it is too far for them. Despite her efforts, she has not been able to secure a room closer to where the children live. Geeta explains, “If I conduct the classes here in this room, barely any students will come. The children in the immediate neighbourhood are either older or belong to slightly richer families who usually have them enrolled in private preschools. There is another locality where there are several children who are ready to come but the rent there will be no less than ₹2,000. What is most important is for the children to get to learn so I decided to start going to them instead.”

The rent for Anganwadi centres is supposed to be borne by the government but Geeta says that she, like many Anganwadi workers, bears it out of her own stipend. “In my 18 years of service, it has happened perhaps only for two or three years that we received money for rent. The AWCs that are close to primary schools are integrated and get a room there itself but the others are paid for by the Anganwadi workers themselves. My overall stipend itself is ₹6,000 and including the monthly rent, most of it gets used up in things like daily commute, organising monthly activities for children and mothers, internet data packs and so on. There is barely any left to use for my family.”

It is the Anganwadi workers and helpers, local community women, who are responsible for carrying out essential services in the interest of national ambitions of achieving Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) and an end to malnutrition among others. However, these workers, not even considered government employees and hence not granted most basic social welfare provisions are not only bearing the brunt of overburdening and poor working conditions but also grossly inadequate infrastructure.

Geeta is briskly making her way through the pakka-house colony, greeting some locals as she passes by. This is the village she grew up in. As the city has expanded, what earlier looked very different is now lined up with clusters of double and triple-storeyed houses.

It was here that she got selected to become an Anganwadi worker, back in 2007 as a 20-year-old. She recalls, “I had just completed my Bachelors in Arts degree and was applying for various government jobs. I cleared the police exams but to get the position we needed to pay some bribe and that was beyond us. So when I got work as an AWW, I took it up. I started with a meagre stipend around ₹2,500 but back then I was unmarried and living with my parents so my expenses were much lesser.” 

The asphalt road gives way to a stony one. On one side is an open field where most of the locality seems to be dumping their garbage and on the other is a walled field of mustard. Beyond that, there are several houses under construction. Just behind them, is the settlement – a patchwork of makeshift homes pieced together with mud, black plastic sheets and thin wooden poles.

Apart from the rumble of construction machines and subdued cackles of children, the place is quiet, almost deserted. Most of the adults have left for work— men mostly to construction sites and the women, accompanied by older children, to residential colonies for domestic work. Clothes hang stiffly from sagging lines and only a few elderly people are lying on charpoys in the sun. 

Right in the middle is a black babool tree and under it are sitting around 15 children from the nearby huts that the Anganwadi helper, Sarla Rawat has managed to gather. They sit cross-legged on a yellow tarpaulin sheet, some fidgeting, some whispering to each other, with their bare feet dusty.

Out of the total 14 lakh nationwide, only 6.77 lakh Anganwadi centres have their own building, only over 10 lakh have functional toilets and 12.4 lakh have an accessible drinking water source.

As soon as the children see Geeta, they perk up and take turns wishing her good morning. Geeta asks Sarla where the others are to which she responds with an exclaim, “There!”

Three toddlers had snuck out and were playing on the cycle rickshaw parked closeby. Geeta takes attendance and proceeds with the lesson plan for the day. They begin with some poems that Geeta and the slightly older 5-year-olds take turns singing with actions. “Today we will talk about big and small objects,” says Geeta. 

Meanwhile Sarla keeps getting up to bring back the kids who get up and go wandering. Around 11:30 a.m., Geeta gets an intimation on WhatsApp from her supervisor about organising ‘Anna Prashan Diwas’ for women with six-month-olds. “If I had known this last night I would have prepared kheer and brought it as a sweet to offer the women and could have arranged for some sweets for the children here also. Now we’ll do it tomorrow,” she says to Sarla. 

As it gets closer to noon, the kids become increasingly restless. “Madam, I am hungry,” says one of them finally. Some of the women are beginning to return home and seeing his mother, one of the three-year-olds, sneakily hurries behind her when both the teachers are not looking. “What should we do? By noon time kids are hungry and we cannot forcibly keep them here when we have no food to offer!” says Geeta with a tinge of frustration, getting up and fishing out of her bag a 20-rupee-note. She calls an older kid who was hanging around and says to him, “Go to the shop in the corner and just get two packets of biscuits, will you?”

The children sitting on the mat suddenly break into a smile. But he had only taken a few steps when Geeta, suddenly remembering something, called him back. “Here,” she said, taking out the bag of gajak from her bag, “distribute this among everyone. This is healthier than biscuits.”

The main aims of the Integrated Child Development Scheme have been health, nutrition and education. The provision of hot cooked meals for all children every day at Anganwadi centres has been one of the main incentives for parents to send their children to AWCs. However, for the last two years, Geeta says, no meals have been provided for the children. “The story is different for AWCs integrated with primary schools which already have their mid-day meal scheme but for the rest like ours, no cooked meals have been provided in years. None of the non-attached Anganwadis I know have been getting meals for the children. It is very disheartening for us to keep urging for children to come and sit for four hours when we neither have food nor a proper room.” she says. 

During the pandemic, the AWCs were closed but in November 2023 the UP government announced that they will resume providing hot cooked meals. However, Anganwadis like Geeta’s have not been getting any such provisions. 

Talking about the monthly rations that are distributed monthly, one of the mothers, Suneeta who is just returning from work, says, “Nobody uses the 1 kg dalia that we get because even we can see that the quality is so bad. It is like powder… I just fed it to my goats last time.” Her two-year-old crawls up to her and she picks him and leaves. 

Many duties of the Anganwadi workers

Geeta calls out to another woman passing by, “Did you apply for the Aadhar card yet? When will it be done?” Geeta is in the process of enrolling Rimi, a new mother, in the Pradha Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana. Under this scheme, Rimi will get a total of ₹5,000 once her child’s vaccination dose is completed by the age of 14 weeks. Usually, after finishing her day with the children at 2 pm, Geeta goes to make home visits for various parameters, sometimes checking the status of pregnant mothers, sometimes making lactating mothers aware of health concerns and so on. 

Today however, she will head to the closest primary school where she will meet another Aganwadi worker with whom she will discuss some issues she has been facing in the google form she needs to be filling for the Matru Vandana scheme. Having done that, she goes back home hoping to be back in time to catch some time with her son before she has to begin preparing dinner. 

“Educating my son is very important to me. My husband and I work very hard to ensure enough funds for it. Had the stipend been a little more, it would have been helpful.” She added, “Just like me, the parents of the village also want to ensure good education for their kids. I understand their emotions and relate to it. This is what drives me to show up every day and do whatever I can for these kids.”