Pride and Prejudice

Context:  In the light of efforts delivered by the Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) and Anganwadi workers during the pandemic, the Government must give them the benefits due to workers.

Role of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) and Anganwadi workers:

• Enabled localized approaches to fight the pandemic and acted as connecting link between the community and the state machinery.
• The stereotype persists of women’s ability and their in-built consciousness to understand other fellow beings’ feelings, makes them perfectly suitable to be recruited as community workers.

Issues faced by ASHA and Anganwadi workers.

• Devaluation of their work by the state, especially the labour of those involved in care work.
  • They are often classified as ‘volunteers’ and ‘honorary workers’
  • They are denied minimum wages (underpaid), leave and other conditions
  • Their contributions are taken for granted by the community.
• Their mobility is restricted: which gets defined by the existing social and patriarchal norms.
• Exclusion from the labour market: due to social understanding of women’s work has restricted their employment prospects and created silos of women’s employment such as paid domestic work. 
  • The declining women’s workforce participation has been a matter of concern even before COVID.

Way Forward: State shall recognize women contributions and accept them as workers: Benefits of such recognition are-

• Recognizing ASHA and Anganwadi volunteers as workers will help to shake the structural understanding of women’s labour and their status in the labour market.
  • The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour also recommended formalizing the work of community workers.
• Helps in unsettling the gendered and unequal division of housework and unpaid care burden.