Home to many primitive tribal groups like Bhils, Bhilalas, Patelias, the Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh was facing lack of medical facilities until recently. With 84 % of tribal population, the district has borders with Gujarat & Rajasthan. The people here lack in education as well as awareness about government programs, and migration is a common-phenomena. Given the poor health facilities, many people including the pregnant women turn to neibhouring states even for routine checkups. As a result, the pregnant and lactating women ignore their healthcare and ante natal checkup (ANC).
The situation was slipping out of hands till the DC of Jhabua ,Mr. Rohit Singh took this matter seriously. He, along with his team members, came up with a unique mission called ‘Chiranjeevi’ to take care of mother and child along. The initiative has been a great success and had helped the district to increase its graph on medical map in the country. Recently, the initiative also got a Gold in the SKOCH awards.
This appreciation has boosted the moral of district administration and when Indian Masterminds reached to Mr. Singh, he shared details of his journey in initiating the mission and also his future plans.
Challenging the social barriers
`Chiranjeevi’ is a health and nutrition related mission which focuses on well-being of mother and child, from the latter’s conception till six years. To achieve this, a great deal of ground work was needed and first thing was to identify the social barriers.
As Mr Singh said, “We had to find the root cause of problem. With little research, we got to know that early marriage is still in practice here. This leads to less marriage registrations and delayed information about pregnancies. Migration was another problem. In some cases, authorities are totally unaware of pregnancy till second time around while in many cases the concerned women are reluctant to talk about their health conditions.”.
To tackle the situation, Mr Singh made marriage registration complusory. This solved many problems. People started visiting doctors at the earliest stage of pregnancy.
Making Tribals Aware
Mr. Singh said, “ The tribal people are very innocent and they are not aware about most of the government facilities. The literacy rate among them is also low and they still follow many orthodox practices. This was affecting their health. The rate of anaemia too was very high in women and around 50% children were malnourished. The infant mortality rate was also high. So, we wanted to create a mechanism where we could put together all the things available in taking care of the mother and the child”.
With this thought, all the areahospitals, doctors, anganwadis and other interested group were roped in. A master monitoring sheet was prepared to track the health of pregnant, lactating woman and children up to age six. The health workers were guided to work around the sheet.
Improving the infrastructure
The condition of the district hospitals and other health centres were below satisfaction. This was one of the main reason why people would turn to nearby towns for health check-ups. To solve this issue, the hospitals here were renovated under the ‘Kayakalp’ initiative with the government funds available. The same was done for the anganwadis and other district institutions as well.
Since the tribes mostly depend on farming for economic needs, so in case of poor crops they had to borrow money from the lenders. This often worsened their situation. Here too, Mr. Singh focused on the issuing `Ayushman’ and other cards with massive drives, so the locals could at least avail the facilities given by the government.
Maximum benefits for all
“ Our focus is to provide the best health facility and at every stage. We will soon start focusing on tracking the health of adolescent girls and boys as well. With this, we can ensure durable results. Apart from these we are also organising blood donation camps on regular basis and increasing the capacity of Nutrition Resource Centre for the malnourished child,” said Mr Singh.
Under his leadership, the administration of Jhabua is expanding its reach for the well-being of every individual, including the differently-abled. Mr. Singh believes that only if a person is healthy can he make his life productive.
