Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, Jan 17: Workers of various schemes including ASHAs, Anganwari workers and Mid Day Meal workers drawn from various parts of Jammu region today held a sit-in protest in support of their demands, here near Press Club.
The protest was held on the call of Central Trade Unions for country-wide strike. The protesters were demanding workers’ status to all scheme workers, implementation of recommendations of 45th Indian Labour Conference (ILC) to recognize them as workers, minimum wages of Rs 18000 per month, no privatization of schemes like ICDS, NHM, MDMS, SSA, etc, adequate budget allocation for the Central and State schemes, pension and social security benefits and regularization of CPW workers under SRO 308.
Addressing the protesting workers, MY Tarigami, CITU president and MLA Kulgam, said that nearly one crore workers, mostly women are working under different central schemes and these schemes’ workers provide the basic service of food and nutrition, health and education to the majority of people of the country.
He said even after 70 years of independence, majority of our population does not have access to food and nutrition, healthcare and education. “We achieve these schemes through years of struggle that successive Governments forced to bring to address basic services although in a limited way but Modi led NDA Government in the Centre have taken all measures to close down all these schemes by curtailing the allocation of budget”, he alleged.
Tarigami urged upon the Government to recognize and regularize scheme workers and pay them minimum wages of Rs 18000 per month.
Sham Parsad Kesar, senior leader of State CITU, said that ASHAs have to work for more than 8 hours in addition to their assigned works like collecting information of births and deaths, work with health and sanitation committee, etc but the Government considers ASHAs as voluntary health activists and does not pay them any wages.
He said that incentives are so low that an ASHA gets only between Rs 500 to Rs 1000 per month. He demanded that ASHAs and other schemes’ workers be paid minimum wages of Rs 6750 per month notified by the State Government till their demand of Rs 18000 per month is fulfilled.
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