Indian health infrastructure is grossly understaffed, especially in key areas like nursing. India had 1.7 nurses per 1000 population in September 2021 but the WHO norm is 3 nurses per 1000 population. India needs 4.3 million more nurses to meet the WHO norm. We can well imagine the workload if 2 nurses were to perform the work of 5. WHO recommends 1 doctor for every 1000 people but India has one doctor for every 1457 people. In this article, we will focus mainly on nurses and ASHA workers who are the backbone of the army of health workers who fought Covid-19.
https://countercurrents.org/2022/08/women-frontline-warriors-and-covid-19-part-one/
The only significant support that the government could come up with for frontline workers was the announcement on 27 March 2020 that under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Insurance Scheme the frontline health workers would be offered an insurance cover of up to Rs.50 lakh if the worker died contracting Corona infection while working.
Regarding the frontline workers in the private sector, only those requisitioned by the government for work in government health centres would be covered under this scheme and the vast majority of the rest had no mandatory risk cover from the employers, and hence those among them who died did not get any compensation.
As per a study by Anusha, R and Tanvi Singh published in The Leaflet even among those working in government hospitals hardly 0.013% benefited from this scheme. There are several reasons for this low figure which is much lower than the general Covid-19 mortality rate of around 1% for all cases.
For instance, the government, in its wisdom, excluded all those above 55 years of age from this insurance cover but they were not excluded from Covid-19 duty. They were also deployed to attend to Covid-19 patients despite belonging to the high-risk age-group.
Secondly, a vast majority of the private sector health workers were excluded.
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by B Sivaraman
03/08/2022