Not many residents of the villages in Palghar district know Bhakti Kini’s last name. For them, she is Bhakti tai, the woman who hikes up a hilly neighbourhood in  Kore, Saphale, every day. Her reward? Rs 6,000 a month. Kini, 50, an ASHA worker, walks and climbs 3 km daily to reach the healthcare centre, where she is assigned the duty of monitoring the health of local residents. She starts her shift at 9 am after finishing household chores. Her 30-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son help her around the house. Kini’s husband, who worked at Boisar’s Brinks Arya Company and has been out of a job for three years, is not of much use, she admits, making her the sole breadearner of a four-member family. “I could take an autorickshaw, but that would cost me R50 one way. I can’t afford it,” Kini says in an interview to mid-day on a day when she has been deployed to immunise people for Covid-19.

Called the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Responses (IPPPR), a report established by World Health Organization (WHO) in January 2021, highlighted how the deployment of “a cadre of million women social health activists” has helped India’s Covid-19 surveillance. “Community engagement by ASHA workers has been a successful strategy in enhancing India’s national response to Covid-19,” it stated, adding, “Systems for health require substantive community engagement at every step of pandemic preparedness and response, from early detection and alarm to the dissemination of reliable information throughout a community, including effective ways to prevent, care for and treat infection.”