Mumbai : “Sonia Gandhi put her hand on my shoulder. It was one of the happiest and proudest moments of my life,” said an ecstatic Anjali Ramesh Bond. Her happiness and pride stem from the fact that she was the first ASHA worker from nine lakh Indian workers to get her honorarium delivered to her directly through Micro-ATM.
Anjali has been working as an Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) worker in the Safale village of Palghar tehsil in Thane district for the past five years. As an ASHA worker under NRHM scheme, she gets an honorarium for 48 different assignments, which mainly include pregnancy, delivery and women and child health-related work.
Until now, Anjali and her husband had to go to the Gram Panchayat office to get the honorarium in cash. But now, they have been spared this trip as ICICI Bank and the Union government have joined hands to deliver the money at the ASHA workers’ doorstep.
“My job as an ASHA worker has helped my family a lot. My house was on the verge of collapse. For the last five years I have been getting an average honorarium of Rs 3,000, with which I was able to repair my house and my husband Ramesh was able to obtain a loan to buy a tempo,” Anjali said, her eyes moistening.
“A lot of homework had to be done,” said Satish Jadhav, nodal officer for Maharashtra in the Union Finance Ministry, about the money transfer. “The cash is transferred to beneficiaries of various schemes based on their Aadhar card through the Central Plan Scheme Monitoring Scheme. We transferred cash to Anjali’s account and if you type her Aadhar number, you can see the amount,” he said.
