An honorarium is not a wage: the republic owes ASHA workers a salary slip

An honorarium is a polite word for an unpaid bill. In Karnataka this week, ASHA workers named the amount plainly: Rs 15,000 a month. They protested in Karwar, Shivamogga and Hassan, and they carried a second demand that tells the first one's story. The state wants their health data on the SAMASTA app, entered on their personal phones, after stopping the Rs 280 monthly rent it paid for that use. In other words, the worker supplies the office, the device and the data connection. The government supplies the instruction.

This is how care work is kept cheap. The ASHA worker is called a volunteer, an activist, a link, anything except what she is in practice: the first health worker a village sees. She tracks the pregnant mother, reminds the family about the vaccine, notices the child who is not gaining weight, and walks the same lanes in heat and rain. When the system needs a record, it reaches for her phone. When she asks for a wage, it reaches for a softer word.

Periyar's test for any public claim was self-respect. A wage is not charity, and it is not a gift from a minister. It is the difference between being thanked and being recognised. Anna and Kalaignar built a politics on the idea that welfare must reach the last person with dignity intact. That dignity cannot stop at the beneficiary's door and vanish at the worker's. A health system that praises women at public meetings and pays them in honorariums is keeping two ledgers, one for speeches and one for salaries.

The phone makes the old pattern visible in a new form. Digital governance sounds clean in a presentation: one app, live data, every village on a dashboard. On the ground, digitisation has a body. It is a woman recharging her own phone, guarding a patient's details on a device her children also use, and being asked to absorb the risk as duty. If the state wants the data, the state must provide the tool, the connection, the training and the pay. Anything less is extraction dressed as innovation.

Rs 15,000 will not settle every question about workload, leave, insurance or retirement. But it is the right place to start, because it names the worker correctly. Pay her as a worker, equip her as a worker, and then ask for the record. A republic that runs on women's care owes them more than gratitude. It owes them a salary slip.