Technological infrastructures have become an important stakeholder in contemporary reproductive politics, with anthropological scholarship incisively demonstrating how these “choice-enhancing developments” are “accompanied by and enable increasingly effective methods of social surveillance and regulation of reproductive practices” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991, 315). Through a case study of the FP-LMIS application, this paper will critically analyse the role of data-led family planning infrastructures in India’s population governance.
The FP-LMIS user guide, published by MohFW in 2017, states the aim to “improve and streamline the logistics and supply chain of the Family Planning commodities under the National Family Planning Programme” (6). Indeed, the application is framed by policy-makers as rooted in technological efficiency. In September 2022, I attended the training sessions provided by a local district government in Rajasthan to community health workers on how to successfully implement the FP-LMIS system at primary and community healthcare centres. Interestingly, these training sessions were being given at a time when this district had been newly included under the Mission Parivar Vikas mandate, the national flagship family planning programme. The content of the training sessions were delivered with an enthusiastic focus on ensuring that the district reports desirable family planning outcomes at the state and federal levels; while comparing different districts’ ‘performances’, the session-leader would exclaim in encouragement: “We must be at the top!”
In this paper, based on the participant observation undertaken at six FP-LMIS training sessions, I will argue how data-led family planning infrastructures not only recourse to historically contested categories of contraceptive targets, quotas and surveillance, but also reconfigure these categories as technologically efficient ways of delivering family planning services. More broadly, this paper asks: what kinds of challenges and relationships are at stake as family planning, and population governance by extension, is re-emerging as a numbers-game in this increasingly data-led world.
