Twelve years of service, Rs 250 a day: Amma Unavagam workers march for regularisation in Virudhunagar

For thirteen years they have fed the poorest of their towns at prices that have barely moved while everything else doubled. On Monday, the workers of Amma Unavagam in Virudhunagar asked for something simpler: to be treated as employees at all. Workers of Amma Unavagam, affiliated to the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, staged a demonstration in Virudhunagar demanding regularisation of their jobs. The protest was inaugurated by Balasubramanian, the CITU district general secretary of the Rural Development Local Administration Department Employees. Amma Unavagam, 'mother's canteen', was launched in March 2013 as Tamil Nadu's subsidised food programme, a lifeline for daily-wage earners, the elderly and the destitute. The workers who keep it running, the protestors said, have spent more than a decade frozen in a twilight of employment: doing the work, without the status. After 12 to 13 years in the same job, they are paid daily wages of Rs 250 to Rs 340, the amount differing from one canteen to another. The Virudhunagar District Collector's order, effective April 2026, fixed the daily wage at Rs 578. Six months on, the workers say they have not been paid the revised wage, not the increase, and not the arrears. 'The wages differ from one Amma Unavagam to another,' Balasubramanian said at the protest, pointing to a system in which the same work carries a different price depending on which municipal boundary it sits inside. The collector's order was meant to end that. Its non-implementation has ended nothing. The demands are twofold: regularisation of jobs, and payment of wages exactly as fixed by the collector. The workers argue that a programme built to feed the poor cannot be sustained on poverty wages for its own workforce, and that the state's flagship welfare scheme runs on a shadow workforce with none of the protections the scheme extends to its beneficiaries. The Virudhunagar protest is the latest in a widening churn of labour disputes across the state, as workers in government schemes push for the same minimum-wage orders that private employers are already bound by. The CITU leadership said the agitation would be intensified if the demands were not met.