Their van of hope

EAR TO THE GROUND

A unique experiment in the villages of Haryana's Mewat district ensures women in labour get the right medical advice at the right place.

Sabila, a 23-year-old woman at Phirojpur Jhidga in Haryana's Mewat district, was in labour on Friday afternoon this week. She was expecting her second child. The household immediately rang up a number around 4:30 pm. And in minutes an ambulance was waiting outside and she was on her way to the block-level Government Alafiya Hospital in nearby Mandikheda.

For Sabila and her family members, it was a new experience. Not only to get a government hospital to take Sabila to hospital but to give birth in the hospital at all. Sabila had her first child at home.

But this time, within an hour of reaching the hospital she had given birth to a boy, watched over by the doctor and other staff.

Van driver Jamshed Ali is a rather busy man nowadays. He gets two to four calls daily from the surrounding villages in the Phirojpur Jhidga block.

Earlier, in the morning, it was Hansira, a 22-year-old girl from Agon village in the block. She was having her first child. The van went and picked her up at 10 in the morning and a baby girl was born in the hospital in hours.

Ali's job includes dropping the mothers back home after keeping them in observation for 24 hours.

While mothers in Mewat have persuaded themselves to have babies in hospitals, they are yet to make up their minds about staying on in hospital till it pleases the doctor to discharge them. "The moment the babies arrive, the mothers and their relatives want to rush back home," says Ali. Rarely do they stay back for 24 hours, hence Ali seldom gets to fulfil the second part of his job.

Both Sabila and Hansira went back home on their own within two hours of the delivery. Ali didn't drop them back. "We can't drop them off if they go against medical advice," explains Ali.

This unique experiment of providing vans to bring the women in labour to the government hospital is on in the whole of Mewat district in Haryana since October 2.

And from day one, there has been a good response, say hospital authorities.

There are nine blocks in the district, having one hospital each. All the nine have been provided the van service.

The hospitals never say no to anyone even if the van is not available, say health workers of an NGO Sehgal Foundation which has adopted 12 villages in the district. The van in one of the nine blocks is then diverted and the need is promptly fulfilled, says Kamla, a health worker of the foundation who herself called the van twice for women in the village of Patkhori.

Mamta, another health worker of the foundation working in Patkhori, also called the van twice.

The village neither has any auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM) in residence nor have the Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) been appointed anywhere in Mewat. But the Haryana government has stepped in to help the women in the most backward part of the state, populated by the Muslim Meo community.

Only eight girls from the Patkhori village, for instance, attend school. Most women are illiterate and spend the day in onion fields or collecting wood.

But the women are already willing to take advantage of an institutional delivery, thanks to the vans.

For a country where one in every five women dies in child birth, it is indeed an achievement that at least one state has thought of looking at every child birth as a matter of life and death for both mother and child. Can this proactive step of Haryana inspire the rest of the bleeding belt where mothers have to die to have a baby?