Accredited Social Health Activist(ASHA) workers staged a protest demanding supply of masks, sanitisers and gloves, apart from risk allowance.
Holding banners and placards, the ASHA workers, under the leadership of the ASHA Workers Union(CITU), raised slogans outside the urban PHC at Allipuram on Monday, demanding recognition of their services. Wearing masks and donning black stoles over their shoulders, they decried the failure of the government to recognise their services.
Union honorary president P. Mani said that the ASHA workers were rendering yeoman service putting their lives at risk but they were often being criticised by the officials. They were attending to immunisation, pregnant women, delivery cases and conducting fever surveys and were being subjected to severe mental stress. Instead of encouraging them and appreciating their work, the officials were demoralising them, she alleged.
The other demands of the ASHA workers include payment of ₹50 lakh as compensation to the families of those who lost their lives in the line of duty, allocation of beds to ASHA workers and their family members affected by COVID-19, providing the honorarium of ₹10,000 a month in a single instalment, provision of mobile phone for doing online work, implementation of welfare schemes and excluding of pregnant ASHA workers and those with long-term health problems from the COVID duties.
