ABSTRACT
Tuberculosis control focuses extensively on measurement of epidemiological data to both understand the problem of tuberculosis and track attempts at intervention. This chapter focuses on the production of these abstracted figures in India and asks how measures are made and how they work on and transform the lives of TB patients. The chapter asks the questions: Where and to whom does measurement matter? What might good measurement look like? Should we be aspiring to non-universal measurement? To do this it focuses on the Indian tuberculosis programme. It examines the ‘performance’ of some numbers and values expressed in government health policy and popular media reports and how complex political, social and health problems are transformed into depoliticised ‘objective facts’. This use of numbers is compared with the numbers of the Jan Swasthya Sahyog (‘People’s Health Movement’), an NGO located in central India, and how they ‘tinker’ with official numbers to achieve their own person-centred medical aims. This ‘tinkering with numbers’ shapes the contemporary struggles over TB care work in India and how care is negotiated in different ways with different bio-political interests.
