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‘We’d get paid more if we swept and swabbed’
Updated On: 27 February, 2022 08:00 AM IST | Mumbai | Heena Khandelwal
A just-aborted protest in Mumbai that’s one of several across the country by Anganwadi workers who are indispensable to the country’s child and women welfare goals, points to a government with shifty intentions to strengthen public health
Kids at an Anganwadi centre in Agartala, Tripura. Pic/Getty Images
Trupti Raju Pathare made her way last Wednesday from her Nehru Nagar home in Kurla to Azad Maidan in South Mumbai, leaving her husband who almost suffered a stroke late last year, alone. She thinks it was a day well spent. Pathare, together with other Anganwadi workers (AWs), had gathered for a three-day protest to demand higher wages from the state government. Maharashtra pays an Anganwadi worker Rs 8,500 a month, while a helper receives Rs 4,500. The 2.12 lakh AWs in the state want their pay raised to Rs 15,000. The women say, it’s not a wage, but an honorarium since they are considered volunteers, not government workers.
This, the AWs find hard to digest because they are community-based frontline workers of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) department. Agents of social change, Anganwadi workers play a crucial role in promoting child growth and development. Their responsibilities span a wide gamut from weighing children and maintaining referral cards to organising informal pre-school teaching activities at the anganwadi or community centre, to counselling expecting mothers on nutrition, helping the Primary Health Centre (PHC) staff with immunisation, pre- and post-natal checkups, identifying early disability among children during home visits and referring the case to the nearest PHC, and helping with implementing the Kishori Shakti Yojana (KSY) to motivate adolescent girls and their parents by organising social awareness drives.
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