India’s virus-hunting women strike for pay and protection

Health workers take blood samples in New Delhi, India, on August 6 2020. Picture: BLOOMBERG/T NARAYAN— They helped eradicate polio in India and reduced the number of women dying during child birth. But the country’s catastrophic coronavirus outbreak, now the third-largest in the world, has pushed its all-female army of contact-tracing health workers to breaking point.

“For working from 7am to 5pm we get only 2,000 rupees a month and no masks or sanitiser,” said Sulochana Rajendra Sabde, an Asha in the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra, a state along India’s west cost with Mumbai as its capital. He has been unable to claim the insurance promised by the Narendra Modi-led government for front-line Covid-19 workers despite multiple visits to the relevant local agencies.

The neglect of Ashas’ welfare is symptomatic of the disregard shown to disadvantaged segments of Indian society, said T Sundararaman, the New Delhi-based global co-ordinator of the People’s Health Movement. “They are going to lower-caste households. They are reaching out to women. They are not going to the middle-class or the Bollywood elite,” he said. “The challenge is to bring attention to what is lost when these people go off the field.

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