Denying their due

Accredited health activists and anganwadi workers are not given their rightful place and due. The NDA government’s announcement hiking their honoraria is seen as an election sop at best.

At an anganwadi centre at Venugopal Nagar in Khammam. Midday meal workers, ASHAs and ICDS workers are not entitled to ESI or EPF cover.

 ON September 11, in what appeared to be a routine affair typical of the outreach programmes of the Central government, a video conference was organised between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and workers of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), accredited social health activists (ASHA) and auxiliary nurse midwives. Modi announced a hike in the Central contribution to the honorarium given to anganwadi workers, mini anganwadi workers and helpers, which included a doubling of the incentives to ASHA workers and helpers who were additionally promised free insurance cover under the Central government’s two main flagship insurance schemes, the Prime Minister’s Jeevan Jyoti Yojana and the Prime Minister’s Suraksha Bima Yojana. 

All these announcements made during the video conference were expected to be implemented from October. In keeping with the drive to push for digitisation, the Prime Minister promised additional incentives to ICDS workers and helpers who used common application software. According to the official release, he appreciated the efforts of these workers in the Poshan Abhiyaan (the National Nutrition Mission) targeted at reducing malnutrition. 

The timing of the announcement, ahead of the forthcoming Lok Sabha election and the Assembly elections in some States, was not a coincidence. One category that was left out of the policy largesse was the 25 lakh midday meal workers—cooks and helpers—who continued to get a measly sum of Rs.1,000 a month, and that too for only 10 months a year. Their honorarium was fixed in 2009 and has not been revised. This category of workers attended nearly 12 lakh schools. In 2013, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government promised to increase their honorarium by Rs.1,000. The government changed at the Centre in 2014, and the status of the workers has remained the same since then. “They are themselves malnourished. How can they be expected to feed themselves and their children with such a paltry amount?” asked Jai Bhagwan, general secretary of the Midday Meal Workers Federation. 

Midday meal workers, ASHAs and ICDS workers are not entitled to Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) or Employees Provident Fund (EPF) benefits although they work under various government departments. “It could have recognised them as workers, paid them minimum wages, covered them under the EPF and the ESI and then claimed that the government has generated decent employment. But it has not done this,” said Dr K. Hemalata, president of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). 

The hikes ranged from Rs.750 to Rs.1,500, falling short of the guaranteed minimum wage, which has been one of the long-standing demands of these workers. The grandiose announcement did not reveal the fact that the Centre would be paying only 60 per cent of the increased honorarium and the State governments would pay the rest under the Centre-State formula for division of funds. It was also not mentioned whether there would be additional allocations to the ICDS and if the schemes would be made permanent. It was also not stated that the scheme-based workers had been taking to the streets over the past four years demanding the implementation of the recommendations of the 45th session of the Indian Labour Conference (ILC), a tripartite confluence of the government, employers and trade unions. The amount promised fell far short of the assurances and commitments made to these women, often belonging to the economically and socially backward communities. In fact, the government did not hold the ILC’s 2018 session, after announcing a date, where these issues would have come up. The cancellation of the ILC was unprecedented. The fact that the government did not announce a fresh date to conduct it was equally surprising. The All India Federation of Anganwadi Workers and Helpers (AIFAWH) said wage payments for anganwadi workers had been pending for several months in some States and there were delays in the supply of supplementary nutrition, too.

Additional burden

“It is an additional burden on the States. Many State governments are already paying more. In Haryana, Delhi, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, they get not less than Rs.10,000. That has happened because of our struggles and in some States like Kerala, the government has been proactive. Our apprehension is that the announcement will remain an announcement only,” A.R. Sindhu, general secretary of the AIFAWH, told Frontline . She added that the Prime Minister never met any delegation of the scheme workers. “We collected three crore signatures of ICDS beneficiaries this year who demanded that the workers and helpers should be given decent wages rather than honoraria,” she said. 

The All India Coordination Committee of ASHA workers said that the insurance schemes that were announced were existing government schemes. 

The National Nutrition Mission set up in December 2017 by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was renamed as Poshan Abhiyaan, the Prime Minister’s overarching scheme for holistic nutrition, in May 2018. An allocation of Rs.9,046.17 crore was made for a three-year period. Poshan Abhiyaan, as the name suggests, limited itself to a campaign for holistic nutrition without any assurance of where the nutrients would come from. Its objectives include monitoring, supervision, fixing targets and guiding nutrition-related interventions across Ministries. 

The press release in December 2017 on the Cabinet decision on Poshan Abhiyaan explained that the programme would “strive to reduce the level of stunting, under-nutrition, anaemia and low birth weight babies. It will create synergy, ensure better monitoring, issue alerts for timely action and encourage States/UTs to perform, guide and supervise the Ministries and States/UTs to achieve the targeted goals.” 

The programme also stated that it would benefit around 10 crore individuals and all States would be covered in a phased manner. It was unclear how a programme premised and hinged only on coordination and monitoring could place a tangible benefit in terms of listing out the number of beneficiaries. It was also unclear as to how monitoring alone would address problems of stunting or under-nutrition. Quoting a Comptroller and Auditor General of India report, Sindhu told Frontline  that some ICDS centres did not even have toilets, drinking water facilities and proper buildings. 

“They are talking about digital training. Who is going to pay for the data?” she asked. There was the problem of giving additional work to scheme workers as well. In some States like Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, ICDS workers were told to throw stones at women defecating in the open. Nutrition has to be on the agenda, but that would not come about through video-conferencing, she said. “Did the government or the Prime Minister ever ask what problems scheme-based workers faced? No. Nearly 30-40 per cent of the women are widows,” she said. 

The linking of ICDS beneficiaries to Aadhaar resulted in several beneficiaries not benefiting from the scheme. In Bihar, the AIFAWH found that nearly one lakh beneficiaries had been cut off owing to the insistence on linking the benefit with Aadhaar identification. “In Jharkhand, too, children were denied food as they did not have an Aadhaar number. The government issued a notification giving a deadline for such linkage and then extended it when protests took place. But children are already being denied rations under the ICDS,” she said.

The technology-driven approach to tackling malnutrition is fraught with dangers. Denying the service providers their due is a compounded injustice. Interestingly, the only delegation of ICDS and ASHA workers the Prime Minister agreed to meet was the one led by the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the trade union affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. No such appointment was given to the AIFAWH, which is one of the oldest federations to have organised ICDS workers and helpers. The federations of scheme-based workers were first formed by the CITU. Now almost every Central union organises the scheme-based workers, who form a major component of the unorganised sector among women, the majority of whom are from rural India. Apart from issues pertaining to remuneration, there have been legitimate concerns of privatisation as well, especially in the form of constant pressure from quarters within the government to switch over to the supply of ready-made packaged dry ration instead of hot cooked meals at the ICDS centres. Fundamentally, there has not been much difference between the UPA and the NDA vis a vis  scheme-based workers. Neither government has wanted to give these workers their rightful due and place. But the scheme-based workers are no longer willing to play along.