BHOPAL: Around 20,000 contractual health workers, including National Health Mission (NHM) workers, went on indefinite strike in Madhya Pradesh in pandemic times over discrepancies in their salaries. These workers are called 'master key', meaning they can be deployed anywhere for work related to health and hospitals.
With this strike, medical services in various government hospitals were severely affected. The main work which they do is maintaining the reports of ASHA workers and their monitoring, transportation of vaccines and medicines, data collection, ward duties, sample collection, testing and others. So, all this kind of work was totally hampered in the hospitals of the state.
Earlier, these workers held a meeting with health minister Dr Prabhuram Chaudhary but it did not yield any results, so they went on strike.
According to the striking workers, they work as permanent employees, but are getting very poor salaries, so, there exist big discrepancies of salaries and they are not even given perks or incentives while they work round the clock in pandemic times.
Stir to continue till demands met
"Heath minister Dr Prabhuram Chaudhary had called a meeting, but it yielded no positive results, so, we are on an indefinite strike. Thereís no option but to go on strike in the state at this crucial juncture in pandemic times. Despite all our hard work, weíre getting just 40 per cent salaries, so, this is a big issue. The NHM workers have also joined our strike. Weíll continue till redress of the salary issue and fulfilment of other demands. Weíve given the details to the health minister."- Sanjiv Kumar, one of the striking staff
