Empowerment of ASHA Workers: A Study from Rural Bengal

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_12How to use a DOI?

Keywords

ASHAs; Empowerment; PCA

Abstract

Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) are the frontline workers and backbone of the primary health care system under the National Health Mission. ASHA workers serve to bridge administrative health officials with the citizens of their community through community involvement. This study inspects the status of empowerment level conceived by ASHA workers using primary information on six different domains. Further, this paper runs a comparative socioeconomic analysis to explore various factors affecting empowerment level of ASHAs. This study uses primary data (complete enumeration) collected through a detailed questionnaire survey from the best-performing block, Onda in Bankura and the worst-performing block, Khargram in Murshidabad of West Bengal, in between 2019–2020. A total of 88 variables is examined in this study. This paper uses Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for both domain-specific and overall empowerment indices and Chi-squared tests for the comparison of socioeconomic variables affecting empowerment of ASHAs. Results from PCA clearly show that despite being the best performing block, ASHAs of Onda possess an average empowerment value of 0.32, while Khargram is lacking empowerment of ASHA workers with an average value of only 0.11. Also, presence of positive skewness in Khargram implies existence of higher portion of ASHAs below mean empowerment. Onda has relatively higher level of empowerment in domains like ‘Resources’ and ‘Income and Incentive’ compared to Khargram. Results from Chi-squared tests validate the difference between empowerment level of ASHA workers in Onda and Khargram across various socioeconomic factors. Availability of better resources and satisfactory incentives has motivated ASHAs of Onda to work more efficiently. Khargram lags in almost all fields like supply of better resources, more useful, frequent, effective training, and an improved incentive system.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Sayantan Marik
AU  - Debaprasad Sarkar
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/23
TI  - Empowerment of ASHA Workers: A Study from Rural Bengal
BT  - Proceedings of the Indo-Bhutan Social Science Conference 2025 (IBSSC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 108
EP  - 133
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_12
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_12
ID  - Marik2026
ER  -