I came across this intriguing article when I was searching for something else on the net (oh the joys of google serendipity!) – to be honest, it was the title that caught my attention initially…. The power of saas-bahu. Eh, what is prime time star plus (the television channel that made saas-bahu the buzzword in Indian er, entertainment) doing on a site on Indian ngo news?
An army of largely illiterate and rustic women from Azamgarh can teach a thing or two on polio eradication to the high profile WHO and UNICEF teams. The district, which gave jitters to the state health machinery for having topped the polio tally in 2001-2002 with 81 recorded cases, has thrown up only one case this year. The credit for the transformation in all fairness goes to the concerted saas-bahu power.. Realising that conservative (and themselves very bored) mothers-in-law would not take too kindly to their daughters-in-law going out of their homes for anything – including getting their children immunised against polio, NGOs in this town hit upon the idea of organising saas-bahu sammelans. – assembly-of-mil-dil…(? in public) – the women got together and fought the polio battle. Women together and not against each other…
“My greatest moment,” says Singh, “was when I administered polio drops to 18 children of a family in Faria at one such sammelan. The same family had shut the doors on the WHO team earlier the same day.”. Read on…
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While on polio, I googled on and found other interesting articles.
From Frontline, A reluctant battle against polio, which says Uttar Pradesh accounts for 64 per cent of the polio cases reported worldwide, but its Chief Minister, Mayawati, is honoured with the Rotary International award for her “outstanding personal contribution” towards eradicating the disease from the State. – emphasis mine.
Launching the third phase of the national pulse polio campaign on April 7, WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland said: “Eighty-three per cent of all new polio cases are now found in India. Uttar Pradesh, in particular, should be the number one priority in order to stop the transmission of the polio virus around the world.”
I wonder what Mayawati’s contribution could have been…
And here is The Eradication of Polio and the Conspiracy-Theory Mentality
By mid-2004 the conspiracy theory had jumped to India, where a health worker noted that in one slum, “many poor and ignorant women regard the anti-polio drops as a deceptive strategy to control the birth rate.”
Groan, not the conspiracy theory again. Exactly how much damage has been caused by our enthusiastic and energetic, if misguided efforts at population control?
Hi Charu
Considering that the polio vaccine has been around for more than 50 years, it seem an awful tragedy that people in India are still falling victim to it.
for all our cribbing about saas bahu serials they seem to have greatly affected women in rural areas and smaller towns… and it’s not all negative
the problem india has with the polio epidemic is not endemic to india only. Countries like nigeria have similar problems, i was reading somewhere no many people in Nigeria thinking the same thing that the vaccine is [an american conspiracy] to make their men impotent.
Michael, yes, it is tragic – the government has been taking some efforts recently to push people to get their children immunised against polio – but that is clearly not enough…
shoefiend, I dont think these serials have ‘affected’ women in any positive sense – the reason for such sammelans is that saas and bahus were fighting in the first place – and that was damaging the health of the children in the family – the sasses were refusing to let their bahus step out of home!
Akshay, the conspiracy theory wrt polio drops has come to us from Africa… this is what the article I have linked to here says –
The theory’s source seems to be a physician and the president of Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Shari’a Law, Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, 68. Dr. Ahmed, an Islamist, accuses Americans of lacing the vaccine with an anti-fertility agent that sterilizes children (or, in an alternate theory, it infects them with AIDS) and considers them, according to John Murphy of the Baltimore Sun, “the worst criminals on Earth … Even Hitler was not as evil as that.”
I also heard that Dr. Ahmed is responsible for some the Muslim – Christian communal disharmony nigeria is facing in certain provences.
Akshay – didn’t know this – or any other details about Dr. Ahmed – but reading what the article says – “Dr. Ahmed, an ‘Islamist'” – alarm bells ringing in my head – need to find out more…
nice post – that was an interesting angle 🙂
m. which one of the angles exactly? 🙂
i meant using one of those awful soaps to some good purpose! :)) and yesh, weve bungled quite a bit on the family planning front havent we! im sure itll take some generations (how ironic) to undo the mess.