Kerala's voluntary healthcare workers' basic demand is for a monthly wage of Rs21,000
3 MIN READ
Kerala has local body elections this year - and the all-important state polls before May 2026. The 'Asha Workers' strike can prove to be a highly emotive issue with the electorate.
Kerala has local body elections this year - and the all-important state polls before May 2026. The 'Asha Workers' strike can prove to be a highly emotive issue with the electorate.
Politics and elections in India are always about raw emotion. One doesn’t go to the polling booth thinking about that political party or individual has the best manifesto.
In India, issuing a manifesto is just one minor detail in an often complex election process. And rare are the Indian voters who actually go through the trouble of reading what’s in a manifesto. Or even believing what’s in them.
Now, the last two state elections in Kerala have had two highly emotive issues dictating who won and lost. If in 2016, ‘Solar Saritha’ brought about the downfall of the late Oomen Chandy’s UDF government, then ‘Corono Kits’ had an equally potent sway in a majority of Kerala’s electorate deciding that Pinaray Vijayan’s LDF deserved a second successive stint at running the government. (This in turn rewrote recent Kerala electoral history, by delivering a consecutive win for the government in power.) Just to retrace recent history, the Solar Saritha issue revolved around alleged corruption at the highest levels of the UDF government, while the Corona Kits had to do with how the LDF responded to the crisis set off by the Covid pandemic.
Now, Kerala is heading for another intensely fought assembly elections in 2026, but there is also the matter of the local body elections - to the municipalities, corporations, etc. - later this year.
Asha Workers
Would these elections and results hinge on another possible emotive issue - that of ‘Asha Workers’?
These ‘voluntary’ healthcare workers - all of them women - have been on a grueling state-wide strike for over a month now, principally demanding a raise to their monthly honorarium of Rs7,000 (Dh300) to a monthly wage of Rs21,000 (Dh900). (ASHA stands for ‘Accredited Social Health Activist’. An 'honorarium' is a voluntary payment.) In recent days, they have amped up their protests by going on hunger strikes and have threatened to collectively shave off their hair in front of the Secretariat building - the administrative hub of the Kerala Government - if the authorities refuse to listen to what they want.
Now, there could be many reasons why the government is deciding against consenting to the demands, but fact is that the strikes have hit a raw nerve within Kerala society. Because the Asha workers are the primary healthcare contact between the residents in the areas they operate in and the state’s health system. They are on the ground, through the sweltering heat and dust, through the rains and flooded roadways, grinding it out for their monthly payments. And none of them get to enjoy anywhere near the perks and allowances that government employees take as their entitlement.
With emotive issues, especially with elections on the horizon, there’s always a point when the electorates in India make up their minds. They may not go all vocal about it, unlike the influencers on social media channels. But they do let their feelings on any such issue germinate in their minds and then watch it take shape - until the time they reach the voting booth for the next election. (In Kerala especially, it’s the ‘undecideds’ who tilt elections one way or the other, whatever opinion polls might say up to that point.) Can the Asha Workers’ issue assume such a significance? If done right and the crisis is resolved, it can actually end up helping the LDF government, of being seen as proactively helping a group of workers with genuine grievances about their pay.
What the Asha Workers will not need from anyone are expressions of sympathy. That doesn’t help much. All they need is the Rs21,000 a month…
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