Karnataka ASHA workers protest: pay us our due, don't load us with unpaid app work

Bengaluru, Oct 5 — Thousands of Karnataka's ASHA workers are back on the streets, demanding a long-promised hike in their honorarium and opposing the state's move to load them with new digital work through the SAMASTA application without additional pay. The Accredited Social Health Activists — the women who form the backbone of rural primary healthcare, tracking pregnancies, immunisations and disease surveillance door to door — say the Congress government's promises on their pay have not been kept, and that the new app-based reporting regime has only added unpaid hours to already gruelling days. SAMASTA is Karnataka's integrated community digital health platform, a mobile application meant to digitise health records and replace the paper registers maintained by frontline workers. The government says it cuts the ASHA diary from 485 data fields to 134, reducing data-entry workload by nearly 75 per cent, and a pilot in Udupi district recorded 95 per cent beneficiary registration. But on the ground, workers tell a different story. In interviews with the health news platform BehanBox earlier this year, ASHA worker Sundaravva described an app that has made her work harder, not easier: servers so slow she cannot enter details of more than five houses a day, though she visits at least twenty; work that follows her home every evening; and pay that is withheld if every detail is not entered. "They didn't give us a phone," she said — the government-issued BSNL SIM stopped working, so she bought her own. None of the app work, she added, comes with extra pay. The current unrest has deep roots. In January 2025, more than 42,000 ASHAs launched an indefinite strike from Bengaluru's Freedom Park, demanding a fixed monthly pay of Rs 15,000. The Siddaramaiah government conceded a fixed Rs 10,000 honorarium from April, along with timely incentives, paid sick leave and hospital leave. Workers say implementation has been patchy. An earlier election promise — raising the honorarium from Rs 5,000 to Rs 8,000 — remains, in the workers' telling, unfulfilled. The pattern is national. In Kerala, ASHA workers under the KAHWA banner recently completed a 53-day protest outside the Secretariat, including a 15-day indefinite hunger strike, demanding retirement benefits and higher honorarium — a standoff in which the state health minister insisted the workers already receive Rs 7,000 plus Rs 3,000 in fixed incentives, a claim the workers rejected. India's roughly one million ASHAs were celebrated as the foot soldiers of the pandemic. Six years on, the women who carried the health system on their backs are still fighting for the most basic recognition: to be treated, and paid, as workers.