Twelve years at the stove, still on daily wages: Amma Unavagam workers in Virudhunagar demand regularisation
Amma Unavagam workers in Virudhunagar, many with 12-13 years of service, say they still get Rs 250-340 a day against a collector-fixed Rs 578. Affiliated to the CITU, they protested on Monday demanding regularisation and the revised wage.
They cook the cheapest full meal in Tamil Nadu. They are paid as if their own work has no price. Workers of Amma Unavagam, the state-subsidised canteens started in March 2013, staged a protest in Virudhunagar on Monday demanding regularisation of their jobs and payment of the wage the district itself has fixed.
Inaugurating the demonstration, CITU district general secretary Balasubramanian said workers who have spent 12 to 13 years in the same canteens still receive only Rs 250 to Rs 340 a day, and that the amount varies from one outlet to another. The Virudhunagar District Collector fixed the daily wage at Rs 578 with effect from April 2026, he said, yet six months later the revised salary has not reached the workers. A government order exists. The money does not.
The gap is not a rounding error. At Rs 300 a day, a worker who cooks, serves, cleans and closes a canteen that feeds hundreds takes home less in a month than the Collector's own rate promises in a fortnight. These are overwhelmingly women workers, holding up a welfare scheme that every government claims as its own compassion while keeping the hands that run it on daily wages, without the security that a decade of service should have earned many times over.
Amma Unavagam survives politically because it is visible: a board, a queue, a plate for a few rupees. Its workers are invisible in the budget lines. Regularisation would mean a timescale, provident fund, paid leave and a retirement that is not destitution. Daily wages mean none of that, and a wage revision that stays on paper means the state can announce fairness without paying for it.
The protest in Virudhunagar was small, as first protests usually are. Its question is large. If a government cannot pay its own fixed wage to the workers of its flagship feeding scheme, the failure is not administrative delay. It is a choice about whose labour counts. The workers have asked for talks and for the Rs 578 to be paid. Until it is, every subsidised plate in Virudhunagar carries a second, unpaid subsidy: theirs.
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