Programmes
General Health Awareness
Health awareness has been the trust's first line of work since 1993, when it began with a reproductive and child health programme in Amreli district. The method has not changed much: go to the village, raise the subject nobody is raising, and come back often enough for the misconception to loosen. COVID-19 turned that work into logistics for two years.
Thematic area
Well-being & Community Development
સુખાકારી અને સમુદાય વિકાસ
The strategic goal it works towards
To promote physical, mental and social well-being, strengthen community participation and create inclusive spaces that enable individuals and communities to live with dignity, harmony and resilience.
Read the whole frameworkThis programme covers
- Reproductive and child health awareness
- Capacity building of Gram Sanjivani Samiti members
- Awareness campaigns on cancer, HIV/AIDS and other serious illness
- Pesticide safety and protective equipment for farmers and farm labour
- Hygiene and household prevention
- COVID-19 relief — masks, sanitiser, ration kits and transport
The problem
Two different problems sit under one programme. The first is information. Serious illness is met late here, and often through a screen of belief about what causes it and what will cure it, so the questions that would lead someone to a doctor never get asked out loud. The second is occupational. Cotton and groundnut farming in this district runs on agrochemicals, and the person mixing and spraying them is usually doing it bare-handed, in the heat, without a mask — a farmer on his own land or a labourer on somebody else's. Neither problem is fixed by opening a clinic. Both respond to the same thing: somebody from the village, saying it again, in the village, next season too.
What we do
Take the subject into the village
Awareness campaigns on cancer, HIV/AIDS and other serious illness, run where people live rather than where the health system sits. The first session on a subject is usually the first time it has been discussed openly in that village at all.
Work through the village health committee
Gram Sanjivani Samiti members are the people already tasked with village health, and misconceptions are dislodged faster by a neighbour than by a visitor. Capacity-building training for these committees has been a standing part of the work.
Protect the person holding the nozzle
Regular dialogue with farmers and farm labourers about protective equipment — a PPE kit, a mask, the discipline of not spraying into the wind. Cheap, unglamorous, and the only part of pesticide exposure a household actually controls.
Health awareness activities have been the organisation’s first priority from the start. The trust was founded in 1993 to improve health and education services in Amreli district, and the reproductive and child health programme was one of its first two activities. What follows are the strands that programme has since broken into.
The pandemic, 2020 to 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic was among the worst combined health and economic crises in recent history, and its effect in India began with the lockdown of March 2020. Ordinary work stopped and the team turned to reaching people who had been cut off:
- Spreading accurate information about the disease, at a point when very little of what circulated was accurate
- Distributing masks, sanitiser and ration kits
- Encouraging and supporting hygiene habits in the household as prevention
- Arranging transport during the lockdown for people stranded away from home
- Providing e-education tools to children who would otherwise have lost the school year entirely
The last of those became the seed of the trust’s learning assistance work, which is now a programme in its own right.
Awareness in the villages
Beyond the pandemic, the standing health work is a small number of subjects returned to repeatedly:
- Reproductive and child health — the trust’s oldest programme, and still the one where a conversation in the village changes what a household does next.
- Capacity building of Gram Sanjivani Samiti — training village health committees so that the person correcting a misconception lives there. This work has extended beyond Amreli to Bardoli block in Surat district.
- Serious illness — awareness campaigns on cancer, HIV/AIDS and comparable conditions, where late presentation is the difference between treatable and not.
Pesticide safety
For protection against the pesticides used on farms, the team holds regular dialogues with farmers and farm labourers on using a PPE kit and other protective equipment, and demonstrates how to handle a spray safely. The same field staff run the trust’s agriculture work, which is what makes the conversation possible: a household will discuss its spraying practice with somebody it already talks to about its crop. Reducing the number of sprays in the first place belongs to the natural resource management programme; keeping the person who does spray from breathing it in belongs here.
What came before
The trust’s founding objectives, written in the 1990s, put it this way: take steps to control disease in rural areas by organising health programmes, and provide better services to the people. Alongside that sat an aim that reads oddly now but explains a good deal of the awareness work — to drive superstition out of the villages. Both are still a fair description of what the programme does.
Where we work
Villages across Amreli district, worked through the same village network as the trust's agriculture and education programmes. Gram Sanjivani Samiti capacity-building work has also run in Bardoli block, Surat district.
- 2
- Districts
- 40+
- Intervention villages
By the numbers
- 9,000+
- Farmers and farm labourers reached on health, safety and protective equipmentFigure as published on Hariraj's earlier website; year not stated, and it counts people trained or contacted in person, not verified use of protective equipment
What we do not yet measure
This page reports activity, not effect. We hold no screening or coverage data of our own: no count of how many people took up protective equipment and kept using it, changed a habit, or reached a diagnosis earlier because of a campaign we ran. The COVID-19 relief work was never tallied properly at all — masks, kits and transport went out as fast as they came in, and the records from those months are incomplete. Where the older website asserted a number, we have said plainly whose number it is and that its year is unknown, rather than restating it as though it were measured.
