Rs 15,000 and a phone that is not theirs: ASHA workers protest the data burden in Karnataka

ASHA workers in Karnataka have taken to the streets again, demanding a fixed monthly remuneration of Rs 15,000 and relief from a digital reporting burden they say has been shifted onto their own phones and their own pockets. The Accredited Social Health Activists, affiliated to the All India United Trade Union Centre, staged a protest in front of the Zilla Panchayat Chief Executive Officer's office in Karwar on Tuesday as part of a state-wide protest. A day earlier, workers in Shivamogga and Hassan held similar demonstrations.

Their immediate grievance is the SAMASTA application, introduced by the state government to digitise public health data. The task of entering that data has been entrusted to ASHA workers. The workers allege they were not given good-quality mobile phones or tablets for the work, and that the government has also stopped the monthly Rs 280 rent it paid to those using their personal phones. They want a support price for entering data on the application.

The complaint goes beyond equipment. The workers say using the app on personal phones compromises their privacy. A phone that holds family photographs, messages and bank alerts is now also an office device, carrying health data from door-to-door visits. The cost of data, the wear on the device, and the risk all sit with the worker, while the data itself belongs to the state.

That is why the demand is framed as remuneration, not a bonus. ASHA workers are the first link between villages and the public health system, tracking pregnancies, immunisation, nutrition and disease in their own neighbourhoods. Tuesday's protests restated a familiar argument in a new setting: a system that asks women to carry its records on private phones must first recognise them as workers with a wage, not volunteers with an honorarium.

The state government has not, in the reports available at the time of writing, announced a settlement. The protests in Karwar, Shivamogga and Hassan suggest the question will keep returning until the pay, the device and the data burden are answered together.