Pink army brings health care to villages
ASHAS ARE BACKBONE OF HEALTH CARE IN INDIA’S 600,000 VILLAGES, PROVIDING A CONNECT BETWEEN PEOPLE AND PUBLIC HEALTH SYSTEM
I n a country where quality health care remains a privilege of the rich and influential, a silent army of women, clad in pink sarees, work tirelessly and selflessly to make basic health care facilities accessible to those who live on the margins of the growing Indian economy, particularly in the country’s vast rural hinterland.
Barely getting time to sleep as calls for help keep coming around the clock, this pink army — as they are popularly known — is the backbone of the primary health care in India’s 600,000 villages, providing a connect between the community and the inadequate public health system. These are the trained female community health activists — called Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) — under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) of the Indian government.
Instrumental in bringing down the infant mortality rate from over 50 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2005 (when ASHA was launched) to 34 deaths in 2016, these women provide information to people in rural areas about health, sanitation and nutrition; conduct ante-natal and post-natal check-ups; assist women during their deliveries, deliver polio vaccines and conduct health surveys.
With many of them mothers themselves, they often take along their children to the clinics at unearthly hours because they can’t leave them behind at home.
Clad in the trademark pink saree, her work uniform, state health worker Godavari Anil Rathore, 23, a resident of Kalaburgi, Karnataka, about 623km north of state capital Bengaluru, is one of the youngest employed as an ASHA.
Rathore has helped over 100 women in her district in delivering healthy babies over the last three years that she has been working as an ASHA.
“It makes me extremely happy looking at women living in the remotest parts of the country with not much money to focus on their health giving birth to healthy children.
Tough conditions
“Even though it means that we work an average of 12 hours each day, taking health surveys, carrying out polio drives, assisting pregnant women from the district I live in — right from medical check-ups during pregnancy, to the delivery, then getting the baby all the vaccinations, and in the end receiving only about Rs1,500 (Dh85.39) for a month.”
Rathore said that every woman she works with “becomes family to me, even if they need me at 3am, I’m there.”
For many Indian villages where hospitals aren’t accessible easily, 860,000 ASHAs across the country (according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 2014) are the only ray of hope in providing medical assistance to thousands of people, and have been working extensively on eliminating polio and malnutrition among infants.
Making sacrifices every day to build a healthier society, these women find it hard to even make ends meet, earning a paltry sum for their services. Over 15,000 ASHAs from Karnataka staged a protest last month at Freedom Park in the heart of the city for a better remuneration from the state so that they could live with dignity.
As Karnataka State ASHA Workers’ Association Secretary D. Nagalakshmi puts it, “These women are the lifelines for our country in letting those who cannot access medical help get every kind of support. They must be credited with raising a majority of India’s next generation.”
With every right to quit their difficult job, the women say they continue on because the power to be a part of the birth of a healthy life is unparalleled.