Latest news with #AccreditedSocialHealthActivists
Time of India
10-07-2025
- Health
- Time of India
Month-long drive to give 2.6cr UP kids vitamin A supplement kicks off
Lucknow: To protect children from malnutrition and preventable eye-related disorders, the state health and family welfare department launched a month-long vitamin A supplementation campaign on Thursday. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The campaign, which will run until August 9, will cover over 2.6 crore children aged nine months to five years. "The primary goal of the campaign is to reduce illnesses caused by Vitamin A deficiency, such as night blindness, weakened immunity, and malnutrition. Improving child health and reducing child mortality remain key govt priorities," said Dr Ajay Gupta, state immunization officer. Adding that the campaign is conducted twice a year, and the current round marks the first phase for the financial year 2025–26, general manager, routine immunisation, national health mission, Dr Manoj Kumar Shukla, said, "Sustained efforts over the past few years on the count have led to a drastic improvement in vitamin A coverage. Compared to 44% of children who received vitamin A during NFHS-4, over 74% of children in the same age bracket took Vitamin A when it was measured at the time of NFHS-5, which was also better than the national average of 71.2%. " He also said that in the last phase of this campaign, 93.54% of the targeted children received the vitamin A dose. The improvement may also be linked to special training provided to Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and Anganwadi workers to ensure smooth and effective implementation. An additional round of measles and rubella vaccine would also commence along with this round, said Dr Gupta, while appealing to parents of children who could have missed their vaccine to get the MR 1 or MR 2 shots.
The Hindu
09-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Workers join stir in Haryana, Delhi
DELHI/GURUGRAM Government employees, industrial and scheme workers, construction labourers, and farmers gathered under their respective banners and flags across Haryana on Wednesday, holding public meetings and protest marches in response to a 'Bharat Bandh' call by central trade unions in support of their 17-point charter of demands. A key highlight of the protests was the overwhelming participation of women scheme workers – mid-day meal workers, Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), and anganwadi workers – who reiterated their long-standing demands for regular jobs for regular work and equal pay for equal work. Industrial workers, those in the unorganised sector, government employees and farmers also took part in the State-wide protests to express their opposition to the four 'pro-corporate' labour codes introduced by the Centre. Haryana Roadways buses remained off several routes, and employees from the public health, revenue, and electricity departments, along with non-teaching university staff, observed the strike and stayed away from work. Constituents of the Sanyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) also joined the protests in solidarity with the workers' demand to withdraw the labour codes, while raising their own issues, including guaranteed Minimum Support Price (MSP), opposition to tariff deductions on dairy and farm products under U.S. pressure, and resistance to power sector privatisation. Trade union and farmer leaders said the massive turnout was a clear sign of public rejection of what they called the 'anti-people' policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at both the Centre and in the State. They accused the government of ignoring people's hardships while blindly pursuing privatisation and simultaneously trying to divide society along communal and caste lines. Speaking at separate meetings in Rohtak and Nuh, All India Kisan Sabha national vice-president Inderjit Singh and trade union leader Jai Bhagwan said the scale of the strike should serve as a wake-up call for the government to withdraw the 'draconian' labour codes without delay. They called on protesters to further strengthen their unity, involve more sections of society affected by rising prices and unemployment, and prepare for larger mobilisations in the future. The All India Central Council of Trade Unions said that workers in Delhi, who are bearing the brunt of inflation, unemployment, and displacement, took out a morning procession and made every effort to ensure the success of the strike. According to a statement issued by the union, workers participated in the marches across several industrial areas of Delhi, including Wazirpur, Narela, Jahangirpuri, Okhla, Jhilmil, and Mayapuri. 'The July 9 strike stands as a symbol of the unique unity between farmers and workers. From agricultural labourers to employees in banks and insurance sectors, everyone joined the strike,' the statement said. In Gurugram, protesters marched from Kamla Nehru Park to the post office near New Railway Road, raising slogans in support of their demands. Addressing the gathering, Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) Haryana vice-president Satbir Singh condemned what he described as the Centre's 'anti-worker' and 'anti-employee' policies. 'Minimum wages should be increased, all vacancies in government departments must be filled immediately, and anganwadi, ASHA, and mid-day meal workers should be granted employee status. The demands of construction workers and retired employees must also be addressed,' Mr. Singh said. Several automotive workers' unions extended support to the Bharat Bandh and its demands, though they did not participate in the strike, with business continuing as usual in the Gurugram-Manesar-Rewari automotive belt.
Time of India
08-07-2025
- Health
- Time of India
Govt to start AI-driven maternal, child health monitoring systems in Rayagada
1 2 Koraput: In a first-of-its-kind initiative for tribal Odisha, the state govt is set to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven maternal and child health monitoring systems in Rayagada district. The pilot project is aimed at reducing the maternal mortality rate (MMR) and infant mortality rate (IMR) in one of the state's most vulnerable regions. According to officials in the health and family welfare department, the pilot will deploy AI-based diagnostic kits to monitor the health of pregnant women throughout the gestation period. These kits, already cleared after successful trials, will be used by frontline healthcare workers to detect early signs of complications ensuring timely intervention and improved health outcomes. Rayagada has historically faced challenges in maternal and child healthcare due to its difficult terrain and poor connectivity. "By bringing AI into the fold, we aim to bridge the gap between rural patients and quality healthcare," said a senior health department official involved in the project. The AI-enabled system is designed to track the physical and cognitive development of the foetus from the earliest stages. The kits will also enable real-time screening and generate instant health reports, which can be shared remotely with doctors for expert consultation. Prafulla Padhi, a senior gynaecologist at Rayagada district headquarters hospital, said, "We have come to know about the government's plan to launch AI tools in the district, although formal instructions are yet to be received. It's a welcome step that can help us detect risks early and reduce complications during delivery." The initiative plans to equip Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and other field workers with smartphones and training. They will be taught to operate the AI kits, collect health data, and upload it to a centralised software system. The system will then analyse the data using machine learning algorithms and provide personalised health assessments for each pregnant woman. Officials said the AI kits are designed to be user-friendly and can be operated by health workers with minimal training. The goal is to empower the ground-level teams with smart tools that improve efficiency and coverage. "Technology can be a game-changer for inclusive healthcare. With the help of the AI kit, more patients can be treated in less time, and those in serious condition can receive immediate medical attention," said PK Mishra, additional district medical and public health officer, Rayagada. As per SRS MMR bulletin-2018-20, Odisha MMR now stands at 119. (deaths per one lakh mothers). Odisha's IMR is 36 (deaths per 1000 births). According to health department data, Rayagada's MMR is 170 and IMR 33.
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Business Standard
09-06-2025
- Health
- Business Standard
PM Surakshit Matritva Abhiyan marks 9 years, MRR declines by 50 points
India's Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) has declined by 50 points in the nine years of Pradhan Mantri Surakshit Matritva Abhiyan (PMSMA). During that time, 6.19 crore women have been examined under the scheme. According to a press note, the government's combined efforts to provide antenatal care and ensure proper nutrition for pregnant women have led to a significant improvement in India's Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR), which declined from 130 per lakh live births in 2014-16 to 80 per lakh live births in 2021-23, a reduction of 50 points. According to the note, 6813 volunteers have registered to assist pregnant women under the PMSMA. Maharashtra has topped the list of the most volunteers registered under the scheme till May 2025 with 1131 volunteers, followed by 1076 in Uttar Pradesh and 1015 in Rajasthan. Uttar Pradesh has the most pregnant women in the second or third trimester receiving antenatal care under the scheme, with 189534 women who have received the facilities. Launched in June 2016, the PMSMA is a flagship initiative of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. It was designed to provide assured, comprehensive, and quality antenatal care (ANC) services free of cost to all pregnant women on the 9th of every month, particularly during the second and third trimesters. The core aim is to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality by facilitating early detection and prompt management of high-risk pregnancies. The press note says that the programme follows a systematic approach to engagement with the private sector, which includes motivating private practitioners to volunteer for the campaign, helping develop strategies for spreading awareness, and participating in the Abhiyan at government health facilities. The PMSMA aligns with the broader goals of the Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child, and Adolescent Health plus Nutrition (RMNCAH+N) strategy under the National Health Mission (NHM). The main objectives of the scheme include ensuring that every pregnant woman receives at least one check-up by a physician/specialist during the second or third trimester, improve the quality of care during antenatal visits, identifying and managing high-risk pregnancies (HRP) at an early stage, appropriate birth planning and complication readiness for each pregnant woman, ensuring appropriate management of women with malnutrition and a special focus on adolescent and early pregnancies. The E-PMSMA strategy was rolled out in January 2022 to ensure the tracing and tracking of High-Risk Pregnant (HRP) women until a safe delivery is achieved by provisioning financial incentivisation for the identified HRP women and accompanying Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) for an extra three visits over and above the PMSMA visit, the press note said. Services offered under the scheme include routine antenatal care checkups, diagnostic services, identification and management of high-risk pregnant women, and counselling regarding nutrition, family planning, birth preparedness, and newborn and postnatal care. PMSMA complements other government programs, including the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which was launched to incentivise institutional deliveries through conditional cash transfers. This scheme has benefited over 11.07 crore women as of March 2025, the Janani Shishu Suraksha Karyakram (JSSK), launched to promote free institutional delivery and neonatal care. More than 16.60 crore beneficiaries have been served since 2014-15, LaQshya Initiative for improving quality of care in labour rooms, the Surakshit Matritva Aashwasan (SUMAN), launched to strengthen respectful and quality care for pregnant women. 90,015 SUMAN health facilities have been notified across the country by March 2025, the POSHAN Abhiyaan, started to target the most vulnerable--children, adolescent girls, pregnant women, and lactating mothers--by revamping the nutrition services and the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY), launched to promote institutional delivery and ensuring maternal health, the scheme provides direct cash benefits of Rs5,000 to pregnant and lactating women.
The Star
08-06-2025
- Health
- The Star
Paid less than unskilled labourers, community health workers in India go on strike
BENGALURU: Thousands of community health workers in the south Indian state of Kerala have been on strike for more than 110 days. Their demands? Better pay, reduced workload, social security and dignity. This is not the first time they have protested against work conditions, nor are they the only state's health workers in India to do so. In Kerala's capital, Thiruvananthapuram, female community health workers known as Accredited Social Health Activists (Ashas) have been in a day-and-night protest opposite the state secretariat since Feb 10. Yet four meetings with state Health Ministry officials have been inconclusive. Under the national Asha programme, every village or urban ward has a resident health worker who helps ensure people's access to vaccination, safe childbirth and seasonal epidemic checks. In Kerala, these women were on the front line of the state's famously superb Covid-19 response that earned praise from the World Health Organisation. After the devastating 2018 floods in Kerala, they were also at the forefront of preventing rampant waterborne diseases. The health workers' grievances of poor pay and lack of respect stand at odds with Kerala's highly reputed public health system, which has achieved better disease control and maternal mortality and immunisation rates than most other states. Studies credit these healthcare triumphs to decentralised governance and the community engagement by more than 26,000 grassroots health workers. The Indian government defines Asha work under a national programme as voluntary, and the workers' payment an honorarium, not a wage. The workers are paid largely by the local state governments, with each state setting its own honorarium. When the Asha programme was launched in 2005, the honorarium nationwide was 500 rupees (US$5.83) a month. In Kerala, it has been gradually increased in response to protests every few years, up to 7,000 rupees a month since 2024. This still amounts to around 230 rupees a day, only a third of Kerala's legal minimum wage for unskilled labourers, which is 700 rupees. Ashas are also eligible for up to 3,000 rupees a month in performance-based incentives – this is paid by the state and national governments in a 60:40 ratio. 'I was shocked to discover how little the front-line workers of Kerala's proactive health system are paid. It's insulting,' said Dr Gopika Swarna Bai, a community health physician from Kerala who is now doing her residency in Mumbai, where Ashas are paid 13,000 rupees a month. 'Ashas know every household. For example, they spread awareness of a mass drug administration for filariasis for weeks, bring the 100 people, find chairs and shelter for them on a fixed date for doctors like me to just go and administer injections,' Dr Gopika added, noting that government nurses and doctors could be transferred, but Ashas have 'backyard knowledge' as they stay put in a region for decades. All states have raised the honorariums over the years in response to demands and protests. Neighbouring Karnataka increased the fixed honorarium from 5,000 to 10,000 rupees in January after an eight-year campaign by health workers. The north-eastern state of Sikkim has paid Ashas 10,000 rupees a month since 2022; Puducherry in the south pays them 18,000 rupees. In West Bengal, health workers retiring at 65 years old get a one-time payout of 500,000 rupees – the same amount Kerala's Ashas want. Striking health workers in Kerala are demanding minimum wages, which would amount to 21,000 rupees a month. Bindu B., a community health worker in the Kannammoola ward of Thiruvananthapuram city, points to 'the hypocrisy of the communist-led state government that enjoys the plaudits of being people- and worker-centric leaders, but treats women workers almost like slaves'. The 51-year-old, who has been an Asha for 18 years, spoke to The Straits Times on May 30 as she was headed to the protest site, even though there was an orange alert for rainstorms that week. At least 12,000 Ashas like her have endured extreme rain and heat for over 110 days, and held dramatic protests, including a 41-day hunger strike and cutting their hair off. Some of them are now on a statewide march, spending the night under bus shelters or on school verandas as they reach out to Ashas who may not have been able to travel to the Thiruvananthapuram protest site. 'The government's response is that they don't have funds, that the central government has not transferred the budget,' said S. Mini, state vice-president of the Kerala Asha Health Workers Association, which is helming the ongoing strike. Kerala is among several states, such as Tamil Nadu and Telangana, led by opposition parties demanding a greater share of taxes from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party government at the centre. India spends a mere 1.14 per cent of its budget on public health. 'Understanding Kerala's financial situation, we asked the (Kerala) Health Minister to increase the pay for now by 100 rupees a day, so that we can get 10,000 rupees a month at least,' said Rosy Mardra, 51, an Asha who was part of the delegation that met officials, of the last meeting. 'They refused even that.' Kerala's Health Ministry has yet to respond to ST's queries. A state official, who requested anonymity, pointed ST to a recent central government study that found the state's financial health poor, ranking 15th among 28 states owing to high social welfare spending and limited revenue growth. He also argued that Kerala paid the honorariums more regularly than other states that promised more, but Ashas have refuted this claim, saying they sometimes do not get paid for over three months. Rosy, struggling to repay loans she took to send her two daughters to college, was enraged by what she called 'the government's cruel excuses'. 'Amid this financial crunch, how come the Kerala government has 100 crore (one billion) rupees to celebrate its fourth anniversary, but does not give us 100 rupees more?' she asked. The cost of living in Kerala is higher than the national average. Some estimates put average monthly expenses excluding rent at more than 27,000 rupees per month. Almost all Ashas in Kerala are from low-income families, and three-quarters are sole breadwinners while a quarter are Dalits, who are at the bottom of India's caste hierarchy, said feminist scholar J. Devika, who conducted spot surveys of striking health workers. 'Families in Kerala are kept safe by these women's cheap labour. They've clearly had enough. Without committed, financially secure Ashas, the state's health indices and disease control will collapse,' she added. Since joining the service at the age of 32, Bindu's work hours have ballooned from two hours a day, per government guidelines, to at least 12 hours a day of fieldwork and report writing. She is responsible for 950 households, and performs 100 tasks each month assigned by the national health programme. These include registering pregnancies, ensuring child immunisations, doing leprosy checks, detecting sources of waterborne diseases, and monitoring fevers or other symptoms in vulnerable populations during epidemics. Kerala has assigned her ten other responsibilities, such as conducting surveys for the local government and digitising a lot of health data. Some days, she is chlorinating wells, and other days, she is collecting diabetes data from every household. The latest task, which many Ashas told ST was a trigger for the ongoing strike, was the Kerala government's app-based statewide screening for non-communicable diseases. Launched in 2023 to detect and prevent lifestyle diseases, the Shaili app's initial phases have shown 45 per cent of the population at risk for diabetes, cancer, tuberculosis and hypertension. But Ashas alleged that having to ask 60 questions a household within tight deadlines over a glitchy app, which does not work in areas with poor data networks, made the job so onerous that it affected other tasks. 'Even as the workload grew and took on a compulsory nature, the pay remains an honorarium fit for volunteers,' social activist Shradha S. said, also a co-founder of a menstruation awareness collective in Kerala. 'The current pay is too little and too erratic, and I keep having to take loans to get by,' said Bindu, who recently took on a second job to make ends meet. After dusk, she delivers medicine for a neighbourhood pharmacy. It pays her 10,000 rupees a month. 'After my husband died a decade ago, my son had to drop out of college to work, and I married my daughter off early at 20 years to have one less mouth to feed,' she told ST. To Bindu, the strike was 'the only step left to save me from dying of exhaustion'. The strike has had a few wins, with Kerala's Health Minister, Veena George, announcing that the Ashas' monthly pay is no longer tied to the fulfilment of ten state tasks, although the fine print reveals that it is still tied to the incentives. The state has also formed a committee to investigate the need for a pay hike. But Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has stated that the government will not engage in further negotiations. As the monsoon sets in, the health workers will also have to begin awareness campaigns to prevent waterborne and mosquito-related diseases like dengue, filariasis and malaria. Cognisant of the impact of their absence on the community, and struggling without any income for three months, most Ashas have gone back to work now. But many are still making time to spend a few hours at the protest site. 'What began as a simple protest seeking fair compensation and lower workload has now turned into a cry for respect and parity,' said Rosy. Bindu has been going to the protest site and conducting her fieldwork despite requiring rest for a ligament tear. 'In my area, there is one palliative care patient with cancer; 13 senior citizens, of whom eight are on (intravenous drips); 150 children are under five years old; 14 kids are under one year (old). I know where mosquitoes breed regularly. This week, four people had a fever – I took them for testing, and two turned out positive for Covid-19.' She asked: 'Who will know people in this detail if I don't go to work? 'Why doesn't the government see us?' - The Straits Times/ANN
