Protesting against the Union Government proposal to privatise Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) under which, Anganwadi workers serve, the Karnataka State Anganwadi Workers’ Association to hold ‘Parliament Chalo’ programme on November 21.
Informing this at a press conference here on Friday, District President, Saraswati Math condemned the proposed decision, stating that privatisation would intensely harm the interest of numerous Anganwadi workers.
Fearing that privatisation would lead to mass removal of several Anganwadi workers who were serving for the last over three decades, Ms. Math said that the exploitation of the workers would be a reality under private management.
“The government itself has not been meeting the long pending legitimate demands of the Anganwadi workers. We are burdened with numerous jobs beyond our capabilities, in such a situation, can we expect the private management to do better than the Government”, she wondered.
She said that though the primary job of the Anganwadi workers was to take care of children, mainly the one that are suffering from malnourishment, taking care of pregnant women and their health aspect.
However, the government off late, had been giving other jobs including senses of toilets, distribution of voter identity card and vaccination.
“These are additional job burdens put on us by the government. We spent almost entire day working with limited salary and benefits, the government instead of addressing our issues, is now taking harsh decision of privatising our services, this is nothing but a big blow to our future”, Ms. Math said.
She said that on November 21, thousands of Anganwadi workers of the country would gather in Delhi and plans to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi to present a memorandum seeking withdrawal of the proposal.
To a question, she said that while Karnataka alone has nearly one lakh Anganwadi workers, Bijapur district has close to five thousand workers serving of the government.
