: A Million Female Frontline COVID Workers In India Earn Just a Month. Now They’re Planning to Strike #WorldNEWS Dressed in pink, the women have gone door to door for months, persuading people

A Million Female Frontline COVID Workers In India Earn Just a Month. Now They’re Planning to Strike #WorldNEWS
Dressed in pink, the women have gone door to door for months, persuading people to get Covid-19 vaccines in some of India’s remotest corners, hinterlands and crowded urban slums, often risking their own personal safety.
For their trouble, they make about a month, a wage barely enough to make ends meet. More than a million of these frontline healthcare workers across the country — pivotal to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal of inoculating the nation’s entire population and reviving the . 6 trillion economy — are soon about to snap.
Called Accredited Social Health Activists, or “Asha” the Hindi word for hope, these women are teaming up with trade unions with muscle to step up their fight against what they call chronic official apathy toward their complaints about poor pay and dismal working conditions.
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Nine Asha workers Bloomberg News interviewed across India said authorities who earlier assured them better wages, personal protective equipment and safe working conditions haven’t kept those promises despite a two-day stoppage last year. Even worse, some say they haven’t been paid for months.
Read More: How Did Indias COVID Crisis Become a Catastrophe?
The All India Trade Union Congress is planning protests in New Delhi when the nation’s parliament is in session through Dec. 23, said General Secretary Amarjeet Kaur. “We are talking to other trade unions and are planning a national strike in December for all scheme workers,” said A. R. Sindhu, national secretary for the Communist-linked Centre of Indian Trade Unions.
The threat of another walkout by the workers comes at a critical time when India is still struggling with its vaccination targets. Only 32% of India’s 1. 4 billion people had received two shots, according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker Wednesday, while Modi has an ambitious goal of getting all adults fully inoculated by the end of the year. A strike could also deal a blow as the omicron variant of the coronavirus poses a new risk to recovery efforts around the globe.
Indias COVID workers are a bridge to communities
Asha workers are crucial to Modi’s door-to-door Covid-19 vaccination campaign launched in November. They have detailed knowledge of their neighborhoods, and they are far more likely to persuade residents to get the shots. They act as a bridge between health authorities and local communities.
Created in 2005 as a stopgap arrangement to help provide more than 55 health-care services to people, especially women and children, in far-flung areas, the Asha program has been instrumental in eradicating polio from the developing country.

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