ASHAs ready to call off strike if honorarium increased by at least ₹3000

The agitating ASHA workers on Monday said that they would end their protest but only if the government agreed to increase the honorarium by at least ₹3000. This climb down was held before the LDF government as a bargaining chip. The original demand was a hike of ₹14,000. 

The protesters said they were also willing to set aside their disapproval of a committee that the health minister Veena George had mooted to study issues related to ASHAs. Today is the 57th day of the agitation and the 19th day of the hunger strike. 

The representatives of the agitating ASHAs placed these two bargaining points before Labour Minister V Sivankutty on Monday. After meeting the minister, Samara Samithi president V K Sadanandan told reporters that the minister, after poring through the minutes of the April 3 meeting they had with the health minister, asked them to call off the strike since the government had agreed in principle to increase the honorarium. “We said we can end the agitation only if there is a monetary benefit,” Sadanandan said. 

The representatives of ASHA workers said that the government should first offer the “minimum honorarium increase” and then constitute the committee to study the problems faced by ASHAs. On April 3, when the health minister introduced the idea of the committee, the ASHAs had rejected it saying that there was no need for a study to understand that ASHAs were poorly paid, and required retirement benefits. 

“Even earlier when the honorarium was increased (through annual budgets), it was not on the basis of any study conducted by any committee,” said the Samara Samithi general secretary M A Bindu who had also met the labour minister on Monday. “We opposed it because the impression we gathered was that the committee was proposed only to study the need for an increase in honorarium and retirement benefits. However, we are fine with a study that will comprehensively study the working conditions of ASHA workers,” Bindu said.

But the ASHA representatives told the minister that the committee should be appointed only after declaring an increase in honorarium. The minister, offering ASHAs yet another reason to terminate the strike, told them that he would talk to the finance and health ministers and shorten the tenure of the proposed committee from three months to a month. 

The ASHA representatives stuck to their stand that the honorarium has to be increased by at least Rs 3000 for them to call off the strike.