ASHA workers act as a stopgap in the country’s porous health care system, delivering assistance from maternal health to immunization in its vast rural hinterland
They helped eradicate polio in India and reduced the number of women dying during child birth. But the country’s catastrophic coronavirus outbreak, now the third-largest in the world, has pushed its all-female army of contact-tracing health workers to breaking point.
After months of harassment, underpayment and lack of protection from infection, about 600,000 of the country’s one million Accredited Social Health Activists — or ASHAs, which also means hope in Hindi — are going on strike for two days starting Aug. 7 to draw attention to their plight. Union leaders expect more may join as the word spreads.
They want better and timely pay, and a legal status that ensures minimum wages, to sustain their work of helping Indian officials track down high-risk contacts of Covid-19 patients across slums and hard-to-reach rural parts of the country. Losing the ASHAs would not only threaten India’s virus-containment effort, but also impact the other essential health services they provide to rural households that range from child vaccinations to tuberculosis control.
“For working from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. we get only 2,000 rupees ($27) a month and no masks or sanitizer,” said Sulochana Rajendra Sabde, a 45-year-old ASHA in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra, a state along India’s west cost with Mumbai as its capital…“For working from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. we get only 2,000 rupees ($27) a month and no masks or sanitizer,” said Sulochana Rajendra Sabde, a 45-year-old ASHA in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra, a state along India’s west cost with Mumbai as its capital.
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