The State Health Department’s ambitious plan to extend Mission Indradhanush, the flagship programme of the Union government to ensure immunisation of all children and pregnant women, in 17 districts from October 7 may suffer a setback.
This is because Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), who play a vital role in the implementation of any health scheme, have threatened to launch a Statewide strike from October 5 to protest against the delay in grant of performance-based incentives from the government.
Mission Indradhanush is aimed at covering all those children who have either missed vaccination or are partially vaccinated against seven vaccine preventable diseases that include diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, tuberculosis, measles and hepatitis B. Expecting mothers will also be immunised for tetanus.
In the first phase, the programme was launched in five Hyderabad-Karnataka districts, Bengaluru (Urban) and areas that fall under BBMP.
D. Nagalakshmi, general secretary of the Karnataka State Samyukta ASHA Workers’ Association, said the workers would boycott all work including participation in the vaccination programme from October 5. “Although the department has been promising to pay us increased performance-based incentives, the payments are not made regularly,” she said.
Totally, 30,000 ASHAs in the State have to get payments over Rs. 30 crore that have accumulated over the last one-and-a-half years. “Repeated pleas and several meetings with the officials and Health Minister have yielded only assurances. We can no longer take it,” she said.
Minister for Health and Family Welfare, U.T. Khader said most of the issues raised by the ASHAs had been resolved. Requesting the workers not to go on strike, the Minister said: “We have been releasing the pending payments by instalments and all backlog will be cleared shortly.”
Health activists, who implement the scheme, are going on strike from October 5
