AIDS volunteers paid below minimum wage

TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
PANJIM: Volunteers who work in HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention through Non-Governmental Organisations that liaise with the Goa State AIDS Control Society are being paid much below the minimum wage for unskilled labour and have not had an increment for nearly a decade.
Speaking to Herald, Raj Vaidya of the NGO Voluntary Health Association of Goa said it was unfortunate that those who were doing the actual work were not paid, but those government staff who received all the perks, were barely lifting a finger to help the cause.
 “The NGOs are audited critically by GSACS and NACO and they expect staff with low scales, who have been slogging it out for 10 years on the same scale, to perform like super humans,” Vaidya quipped. 
Some of the volunteers told Herald, preferring to remain anonymous, said that the only thing that keeps them going in the job is the motivation of working with the less fortunate.
 “I have been working with High Risk groups for the past five years as a project manager. High risk groups include the slum inhabitants, truck drivers, female sex workers and drug users. As a manager I earn Rs 8,000 a month and outreach workers under me earn only Rs 5,500 per month. This is lower than the minimum wage. It has not changed for the last ten years,” a volunteer working with the NGO Positive People told Herald.
The NGOs are paid by the Government through the Goa AIDS Control Society (GSACS) to all NGOs that they have roped in for their AIDS control programmes.
NGOs like Lifeline Foundation and Positive People are working under projects sanctioned by the GSACS.
Dr Rajnanda Desai, Director of the GSACS said that they are paid according to the remuneration that has been decided by the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), but admitted that the remuneration has not been revised for years together.
 “We are paying them according to what NACO has stipulated,” Desai told Herald. She however admitted that they had received representations from the NGOs to increase the remuneration, given that it was woefully inadequate.
It may be recalled that the government recently revised the minimum wage for an unskilled labour to Rs 215 a day which works out to Rs 6500 a month.
The field staff of the NGOs besides earning lower than the minimum wage, get Rs 200 a month as traveling allowance, but do not get gratuity, provident fund, or ESI as a security or insurance.
 “We are working in a high risk sector. Recently one of our volunteers contracted Filiria on account of frequent visits to the slums. She had to pay Rs 60,000 for treatment,” a volunteer from another NGO also working under GSACS said.
The NGOs have made various petitions to the GSACS as well as NACO but to no avail. There doesn’t seem to be any hope in sight for them yet.