Man braves odds to help women in central UP

Technically, he cannot be called a “sakhi” as the term is used for a female friend of a woman. Yet, for hundreds of women in Barabanki district in central Uttar Pradesh, a majority of whom are poor and hail from backward castes and minority community, he is more than just a friend. These simple and in many cases illiterate and semi-literate women share almost everything with this “sakhi”.

This “unflinching faith” of women in him gave a great sense of satisfaction for 50-year-old Shishupal Yadav. “It feels great to help a poor and deprived woman, who shares her health problems with me,” says Yadav, who runs maternal and adolescent healthcare programmes in several villages.

“Winning the trust is not an easy task. It requires true sense of service and patience,” says Yadav as he supervises the arrangements at a health camp at Amdaha village in Barabanki district attended by around 100 married and unmarried women.
Yadav, who quit his job in a private company to take the plunge into social service on a full-time basis some 10 years ago, set-up his own organisation, Prasar, to provide better services to rural women. Prasar has been provided with two mobile health vans by The Hans Foundation, an NGO. The vans are equipped with modern facilities for providing healthcare to the women residing in remote and inaccessible areas. 

“Maternal morbidity is a serious health issue. Every woman, including adolescent girls, reporting at our health camps for want of treatment, is diagnosed as anaemic. This denotes the deprivation of the basic aspect of well-being: the lack of freedom to lead a minimally healthy life,” he remarks. 

The biggest problem that Yadav initially encountered was to get women to reveal their health problems. “They would simply not open up and hide their problems that related to menstrual cycles and urinary tract infections,” he said.

Then, it was decided to launch special­ised programmes with the help of The Hans Foundation. It envisaged roping in “swasthya sakhis” (women health workers). “We organised panchayat-level committees in 10 gram panchayats of Banki block, with a community health worker –swasthya sakhi – as the secretary of the organisation and coordinator of the programme at panchayat-level,” he said.

The swasthya sakhis choose volunteers to participate in the day-long meetings conducted in batches of 20 to 25. The trained volunteers along with sakhis gradually become the panchayat-based outreach of the nutrition care system, providing a wide-ranging services, including counselling to villagers.

The swasthya sakhis are the mainstay of the programme. They motivate women from their villages. They counsel and bring them to medical experts, he said. The results were pleasantly surprising.

“Now, women freely discuss their problems and seek guidance. Greater awareness has helped them have better health and also enabled them to take care of their new born babies as well,” he remar­ked. “It is largely due to the effectiveness of our sakhis that we are now placed almost on a par with the government health system,” he says with a visible sense of pride.

And the level of awareness could be seen at the camps. “My haemoglobin level was seven. Now it is above 11”, said Sumitra Devi, a resident of Amdaha village. The remarks in percentage terms evoked a laughter among the other women.

“We also train them in making sanitary napkins and give lessons to them in cleanliness so that they may avoid infections like urinary tract infection,” Yadav said. “One of the most distinguishing achievements of the project has been the management of high risk pregnancies through a combination of medical and personal initiatives,” he says.

Yadav said that he had to face a lot of difficulties initially in his efforts to get these women to the health camps. “Some elements, who used to exploit them financially in the name of giving them treatment, spread rumours that we sold their blood to commercial blood banks,” he said while referring to taking of blood samples for conducting different tests at pathological laboratories. “We had to make a lot of effort to convince women that such tiny quantity of blood was of no financial value,” he said.

And today for the hundreds of women in Banki and Masauli blocks in the district he was a true “sakhi”. Yadav's family, too, has extended all cooperation to his work. “I used to be out in the field for long periods. But my wife never complained,” he said.

Yadav laments lack of healthcare facilities in the rural areas. “I want that provisions of essential services like healthcare are extended to the poor and marginalised people,” he says. “I am doing whatever little I can. More people, especially the rich, need to come forward and contribute in this direction to make this possible,” he said.