Voice of Talbehat: Reaching out to people

Bundelkhand region is known for it’s draughts, poverty and demand for a separate statehood. Governance and political structures are weak and not delivering at the grass-root level. Elected and selected representatives seem to make a little effort to connect with people. Government’s Bundelkhand revival package and plethora of national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are not able to make any visible dent. Human mind craves for hope and an initiative called “Voice of Talbehat” in a local town council in one of the district in Bundelkhand, gives that hope. The hope that at least someone is trying.

Talbehat is a block and a “Nagar Panchayat” (Town council) in Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh, one of the poorest district of Bundelkhand region. Mukta Soni got elected as the chairman of Talbehat Nagar Panchayat in 2006. Talbehat town has a population of around 25 thousand people. She and her team’s longing to connect with all these people in her town gave birth to the idea of “Voice of Talbehat”. It’s is a unique and simple concept, where a control room is set up in the heart of the Talbehat town and more than 225 speakers were mounted on the electricity poles in every nook and corner of the town. “Any message can be heard by whole of the town with minimum effort within no time.” Says Mukta Soni. She further adds that the cycle rickshaws canvassing different messages in the lanes of Lalitpur inspired her for the idea of “Voice of Talbehat”.

Council member, Dileep Pathak, and husband Vijay Soni, helped Mrs Soni to give shape to her brilliant idea and all the other councilors supported this new concept and unanimously approved Rs 10 Lacs from the town council’s budget for this initiative. In January 2009, VoT started with modest one or two messages a day and today after three years, it’s an integral part of Talbehat’s public communication system.

“Messages broadcasted form “Voice of Talbehat’s” control room involves information on “Tahsil Divas”, urgent requirement of blood for patients, free advices from doctors on seasonal diseases, information about weather, train schedules, religious greetings, information about lost and found items in the town, messages form police to maintain peace in the town, information about government schemes etc.”, says Narendra Goswami, the main announcer who lends his voice to this initiative form the control room.

A four-member team from ministry of information and broadcasting, government of India, came to study the VoT system, it’s inception, process of setting up and reception among people. After being thoroughly impressed with the idea, the team is planning to recommend the similar system to other town councils in India. In the electronic age, where technology companies are adding new dimensions to the world of communication and giving us multiple platforms to engage and connect with people every minute, this simplistic but extremely effective innovation in a small town of India seems like a great step by some motivated bunch of town councilors to connect with it’s people.

Will Vimla Devi survive the burden of Millennium Development Goals?

Meet Vimla devi, a committed anganwadi worker (AWW) in a remote village in Uttar Pradesh, the most populated state of India. Anganwadi is a village level institution under Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), one of the most talked about flagship program of Indian Government.

The children make up forty two percent of the total population of the country. But when it comes to the union budget for the year of 2010-11, they have got the share of only 4.63 percent.

As per Section 8.1 (BUDGETARY ALLOCATION) in GoI, ICDS website, alongside gradual expansion of the scheme, there has also been a significant increase in the budgetary allocation for ICDS scheme from Rs.10391.75 crore in 10th five year plan to Rs.44,400 crore in XI plan period. The details of budget allocation and expenditure for the year 2007-08 to 2009-10 in respect of ICDS (General) and supplementary nutrition are given as under:

S.No.	Year	Budget Allocation (Rs. In Lakh)	Funds released under ICDS(G)	Funds released under Supplementary Nutrition
1	2007-08	529300	310803.27	206231.05
2	2008-09	630000	401319.16	228131.33
3	2009-10	670500	177894.15	182001.76

Under 2010 – 11 budget, ICDS received Rs. 7, 932.71 crore against Rs. 6705 crore in 2009-10, nearly 18 percent increase. But even then it far below to universalize the ICDS scheme in all villages of India. The assessment made by CBGA says that the magnitude of funds required from the union budget 2010-11 to universalize ICDS would be in the range of Rs. 45,355 crore to Rs.75,055 crore depending on the number of anganwadi centers taken into consideration and the proportion of them that need construction of pucca building.

Government of India is spending about $1.7 billion/year on ICDS with around 75-80% utilization. But is this budget sufficient? Is it being spent on the appropriate heads to target the millennium development goals of reducing Infact Mortality Rate (IMR) and Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR).

Vimal Devi has to provide six services to the children and women in her Anganwadi, which intern are designed to reduce Infant Mortality rate (IMR), Maternal Mortality rate (MMR), to reduce hunger deaths among children and to prepare the children for elementary education. These targets are linked directly to at least four millennium development goals (MDGs 1,2,4 &5)

Each of these six services are quite demanding and designed assuming, various kind of skills in the anganwadi workers i.e community mobilization skills, technical skills, dealing with children, documentation and many others. Let’s spend a minute on each of these six services

· Supplementary Nutrition – There are four types of supplementary nutrition powders (called Panjeeri) targeted for four different kinds of beneficiaries - children (one group of 0.5-3 years and other of 3-6 years), pregnant and lactating women and for the adolescent girls to check different kinds of mal/under-nutrition among women and children. Different quantities of each of these powders should be measured and given to respective beneficiary and anganwadi worker has to maintain at least 7-8 registers to manage the procurement and distribution of these nutritional supplements. Apart from this they have to prepare hot cooked meal for the children of 3-6 years of age, with the help of the helper appointed in the anganwadi. Procurement of these “nutritional supplements”, ration for the meals and tracking the money for the meals is also their responsibility. This directly targets millennium development goals (MDG) 1, 4 &5, which commands a huge international attention but Vimal Devi is quite oblivious about the same!

· Immunization – Vimal Devi has to help the health workers (ASHA and ANM) in routine immunization of children and women and the village. She needs to mobilize the beneficiaries for the immunization and convince and educate the one’s who are refusing for the service. The developed world is quite concerned on the low % of immunization in India (Uttar Pradesh being at < 35%), in the fear of any chance of trans-border travel of these fatal diseases to their countries and they have left it on the shoulders of Vimal Devi. Here Vimla Devi is working unknowingly on millennium development goals (MDG) 4&5.

· Health check-up – Vimla Devi needs to assist the health workers (ASHA and ANM) to check and monitor the health of children and pregnant/lactating in the village and maintain all the data in separate registers.

· Referral services – All the children who are severe mal nourished, need to be referred to Nutritional Rehabilitation Center (NRC) to save their lives and here Vimla Devi directly work on to reduce IMR under millennium development goals (MDG) 4

· Nutrition & health education – Vimla Devi needs to spread the awareness of health, hygiene and other practices for the good health of women and child to the adolescent girls and other women’s group in the village

· Pre-school non-formal education – While doing all the above, Vimla Devi needs to engage 40-50 children in her anganwadi for 2-3 hours daily for pre-schooling education, to prepare the children for class 1 in the primary school. Needless to say that she needs to maintain some more registers for the same and the above five services hardly leaves any time and focus in her for this very important component.

So in total she maintains 20-25 different registers, procure food, cook the same and distribute it among the children, engage children in pre-schooling sessions, ensure immunization, mobilize the beneficiaries to avail these services, take care of all the pregnant and lactating women in the village and thus help Indian Government and International agencies to achieve their millennium development goals. And for all these she gets a salary of Rs 1500 per month ($35/month). Our kindhearted government made it Rs 3000 per month ($70/month) in the last budget, but even that is not realized in states like Uttar Pradesh and many others.

After running the ICDS for 35+ years, even today India’s IMR and MMR measures are abysmally poor and comparable only to Sub Saharan Africa and same is the case for % of malnourished children in the country. Infact ‘Eeshani Kandpal’ writes in her paper that budget allocation between states and villages also varies as per the voting pattern in that area. Ministry of ‘women and child welfare’ needs to have a hard look at the budget allocation to ICDS and/or reprioritizing the allocation of existing budget towards strengthening ICDS program at the ground level. Anganwadi workers should be empowered for the success of the ICDS scheme and for realizing the set targets of IMR and MMR.

But as of today, hope seems to be distant and the plight of Vimla Devi is endless. While performing these six mammoth responsibilities, she needs to regularly bribe her supervisors for not giving a negative report on her during their monitoring visits, the nutritional supplement is being sold in the open market before it reaches Vimla Devi and on any small irregularity on these 25+ registers and six services, she faces cuts in her salary or suspension from the job.

As of December 2010, Vimla Devi has more than 12.5 lacs fellow anganwadi workers in India, somehow surviving the burden of these four millennium development goals (MDGs) in Rs 1500/month.

Shall we form our own Children’s Union ?

Sam and Simmi go to a government school in grade 4th in a city in India. They have been going to this school since last 4 yrs and they say they are quite regular. Once they were picked by a ‘kind hearted’ NGO to participate in an essay writing competition for a CSR activity of a big ‘kind hearted’ corporate. The topic was, ‘my school’ !

Sam took the permission to write in the vernacular language and started….My school’s name is Government Primary School (GPS), in Good-Good-Nagar. It had 300 children 2 years back, 130 children last year and now we are a small elite group of 43 children in the whole school across 5 grades. Head master of my school is a very nice person but I think he has some family problems as he comes to school only once a week. My favorite teacher is Sarita, a class 5th girl. My class teacher madam appoints her most of the times to take care of our class as she is busy most of the time in staff-room in talking to other teachers and motivating them. Cooking of mid day meals for us also keeps her busy. I always get curious that why she takes such a special interest in mid day meals ? She might be interested in cooking for us. My home is not very far from the school. I go there around 5-6 times a day during the school hours to visit the toilet and drink water as my teachers alone cannot manage the water arrangement and toilet cleaning at school.

Simmi, daughter of a small time basti leader had a different take….She pretended that her hand is paining and asked the NGO volunteer to write as she narrates her essay …She started like this ….My school’s name is Government Primary School (GPS), No-One-Cares Nagar. Strength of the school is decreasing every year as most of the children have started going to the road side ‘Ravi Convent School’ paying Rs 300 per month. My Head master Mr. Ravi owns that school and that’s why he rarely comes to our school. Our teachers keep on gossiping in the staff room and send 5th class children to control us. Some teachers manage the whole mid day meal and my father told me that they get money for 100 children as per the register, bud hardly 50 children come daily to school. There is no water facility in the schools and being a girl I feel so ashamed to go to toilet in open. And the truth is that after being in school for 4 years many of us including me can’t even read and write properly even in our mother tongue. My father gets paid and goes for many rallies, dharnas and bandhs BUT he never does a rally for me, for us, that we are not learning, that our teachers are not taking care of us, that we don’t get proper food in the school, that we don’t have water and toilets in the school. Can you all “kind hearted’ people, please pay my dad, so that he and his friends can do some dharna to save us.

Or may be all 43 of us can make a children’s union and do the dharna ourselves!

Reflections on India

After reading Sean Paul Kelley's "reflections on India" @ http://www.seanpaulkelley.com/?p=620 I had to sit down and collect my thoughts...Thanks Sean to make me go back to the blog board after a log gap.....

Sean started with "the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation"....When France and many others are backing India for UN SC seat.....UK's new government wants to please India for its looming economy and every American company dreams to open a office in India, to be called truly global...Sean must have faced some real tough days in India to pen this article and deny the facts....

Though I don't deny most of the observations made by Sean, but this writing is coming across more of his personal frustration of digesting the fact that ………How come a country without following the conventional western path of development of cleanliness, paranoidal hygiene, sophisticated infrastructure, discipline and the rest of it……..Is able to post 9% growth year on year, able to make billion dollar international acquisitions, able to make President Bush run around the whole globe as India’s brand ambassador for the nuclear deal, able to be the software and the back office hub for the whole of the word, including many companies in Texas, Sean’s home state….

For long, the western idea of efficiency, of order, of precision has been mouthed out loud. I agree we have garbage lying around in our cities. But that's not all that describes a society. We are helpful, tolerant, childish, innocent, religious, historical, festive, traditional, hierarchical... long list.So much more than a 40%-of-their-population-earns-less-than-a-dollar society.

Sean says…..”It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies…….. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number…….” I really want to know the names of the hotels where Sean faced that…..If Sean found it difficult to get a SIM card in India……then He should never try the same in Switzerland….As getting a pre-paid SIM card in Switzerland (among the top 10 most developed countries as per HDI) takes more documents then a visa application….let alone dreaming for a post-paid connection….To book a train ticket, Sean should have used the internet…..I will help you in all these mundane things next time Sean ! After living in a country where a few motor companies have fooled and destroyed the whole public transport system…I can imagine that, It must be difficult for Sean…..

But having said all of that….I accept all the other observations with the great ‘Indian’ humility…..Just give us a few more years….We are only 63 years old as a independent nation…..Americans took very many years to establish the basic civil rights for its citizens, even being a free nation from more than 200+ years….Europe has seen the worst plagues in the world in the past owing to unhygienic conditions……Even today America is the worst polluter and highest in per capita emissions……Income disparity is worse in America than India (Based on GINI coefficient)…

Comments and reflections like these are surely useful for us to tighten the grip further…..I will just request author’s like Sean to do a more intelligent comparison while writing their observation…..India, which is 14 times more populated than Ethiopia, with India’s wide cultural and linguist differences may not learn much with other references…..Those comparisons will only have editorial value for the sake of a eye catching headline....

Religion and Development : Hungry for Researchers....

In spite of the fact that more than 90% of the people in the world follow some or the other religious belief system, the academicians and researchers in the development field are still acting innocent towards the strong co-relation between religion, faith and international development. Human beings wear a plural personality. They wear the identity of their countries, castes, languages, gender, age etc. Development researchers and policy makers, try hard to find the common factors among communities and countries to unite them but often fail to do so because of this vast plurality. Belief in one or the other religion or faith is the only common factor running across the global population, which researchers fail to acknowledge.

Development studies has given birth to many wonderful development approaches in the last 60 years of its inception. Human beings are the center of all the development approaches. For any development approach to succeed in policy and practice, we need honest and selfless contribution from many human beings. Unfortunately no development approach came out with the mechanism to produce good, honest and dedicated human beings. Religion and faith have the answers to this, which development researchers are rarely daring to explore.

‘Display’ of ‘morality’ lies at the core of the current international development practice. North, after exploiting south for many years wants to act ‘moral’ in the form of a donor. Forced global governance equations keep this relationship going. Religion has the power and wisdom to convert this forced morality into the basic human nature but unfortunately development researchers are still contented with their triplet of economics, politics and anthropology. For example, there is very little, if any discussion in the mainstream development debate on the interrelation between religion and development. Though a few noble initiatives like ‘Religion and Development’ (RaD) research program in University of Birmingham are trying hard to carve a space in the mainstream development research arena, but largely this arena is still hungry for researchers...

Doctor, Please don’t kill me !!!!

Let me try to enter in a doctor’s clinic, Let me have a peep into his prescriptions and let me check the stocks of our druggists in India. Why they prescribe us a particular medicine? Why for a trivial running nose, our prescriptions run into four to five medicines? Why druggists are always eager to sell us a substitute?

Let me turn back some boring but very important pages of history. In 1970s, Hathi Committee was commissioned to study the operations of multinational drug companies vis-à-vis indigenous companies and public sector undertakings. The committee's recommendations, released in 1975, very strongly recommended issuing licenses for formulations of only 117 drugs which the committee considered sufficient for the treatment of the majority of diseases in India. Very recently WHO has added to the list based on the current scenarios of diseases in Indian environment and now that list contains around 450 essential drugs, which are sufficient for medication for all the possible diseases in Indian environment. BUT still today, In the absence of a clear, comprehensive and rational drug policy, we continue to see a distorted pattern of drug production and the proliferation of non-essential, irrational and harmful drugs. Indian markets are flooded with over 100,000 formulations; there is no system of central registration of these formulations.

Pharma sector is the only sector near to the “arms trade sector” to register profits of the order of thousands of percentages. Where do these profits go? Pfizer says it goes into the R&D. Do you believe this? I don’t. Apart from some proportion going in the R&D of new drugs, it goes into greasing the druggists and the doctors to prescribe these tons of non-essential and obsolete medicines in the huge unregulated markets like India.

A country where around 84 crore people live below Rs 20 a day, where only 35% of the population visit any form of formal medical practitioner, where even WHO has said that about 450 formulations can cover all the prevalent diseases in India, we have allowed more than hundred thousand formulations in the market. Even small and developing countries like Bangladesh, Nepal and Brunie have tough regulations for non-essential medicines to be sold in their market let alone US and EU, which have banned them decades back. But we are a super generous nation. We welcome all and we have very kindly allowed all those obsolete and non-essential formulations to be sold in our Indian market. There is a huge list of these obsolete medicines which are banned in the international markets and even in the home countries of many pharma MNCs operating in India, but are being openly prescribed and sold in the Indian market.

Many steering and standing committees have been established to study and report the anomalies in the Indian drug market. All of them have recommended to stop this flood of non-essential and obsolete medicines immediately in the Indian market. Many of the reports have stated to the extent that these non-essential and obsolete medicines are killing more people in India than the diseases. But pharma companies with their huge profits have enough money to stop and twist these reports before they even reach to the roads leading to the Indian parliament.

I don’t know when and which government will have the guts to take any action on this powerful pharma lobby. Doctors of my country! Let’s defeat this lobby by killing the demand for these non-essential and obsolete drugs. Please don’t prescribe me these drugs, next time I come to you with a sour throat. Doctor, I always see a life saver behind that white coat. Please don’t kill me.

ये पेंसिल है या, बस एक लकड़ी का टुकड़ा
मुझे क्या पता, मैं तो ठहरा कबाड़ी

तमन्ना उठी कि इस पेंसिल को भीचूं
और आज इससे कुछ लकीरें तो खीचूं

लकीरें मेरी तुमसे ये पूंछती हैं
ये क्यों नासमझ हैं, ये क्यों बेतुकी हैं

मेरी इन लकीरों की चीखों को सुन लो
कचरे से मुझको उठा के तो देखो

चुनता हूं प्लास्टिक की बोतल और पन्नी
मुझे पेंसिल और कॉपी पकड़ा कर तो देखो

नंगे पैरों बहुत चल लिया अब
स्कूल के जूते पहना कर तो देखो

कलेक्टर ना सही, तो कुछ तो बनूँगा
छोटा सही, एक मौक़ा दे के तो देखो

-- शांतनु गुप्ता