Indumati Parikh and the Women of India Network<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> By Roy Brown

 

It is impossible in a short article even to begin to describe the enormous achievements of the great Indian Humanist, and dear friend and colleague, Dr Indumati Parikh, who died in June at the age of 86. I will leave for others who have known her longer the task of describing her myriad achievements. In this article I want to look at just one: the creation, growth and management of one of the most effective programmes anywhere in the world for the emancipation of poor women to enable them to live free, full and happy lives.

 

It was only in the early 1960s that the world first became aware of the population explosion. Between 1900 and 1960 world population had doubled from 1.5 to 3 billion, and by 1960 it was rising faster than ever before. Most of the population growth was in poorer countries where few women enjoyed the means to limit their pregnancies. For one wealthy gynaecologist and her husband living in Bombay amid the burgeoning population, it was clear that something needed to be done not only for society as a whole but particularly for the women weighed down by endless child-bearing. Modern contraceptives had existed for some time but the government was doing little to make them widely available. Indumati Parikh decided to do something about it.

 

She and her husband sold their house in an affluent suburb of Bombay and moved to the slums, where she set up a women’s self-help organization called Streehitakarini. The aim was primarily to provide contraceptives to the women of the slums. But as Indumati Parikh told me years later, it became immediately obvious once she started talking to the women that it was not morally possible to try to persuade them to use contraception when their babies were dying. From that moment, Streehitakarini began to address the full range of problems faced by slum women, from child survival through better hygiene and nutrition, to vaccination, literacy programmes and skills training: listening to the women’s real and immediate needs, and finding creative ways in which to meet them.

 

At the same time, in the early 1960s, well-funded family planning programmes were being set up in many developing countries, but the rate of contraceptive use remained low. Religious and cultural taboos combined with deep suspicion of government programmes (often coercive in nature) discouraged ordinary people from taking advantage of what was on offer. Thirty years later the world had learned that it is not enough just to supply contraceptives in isolation: they are needed, yes, but as part of a range of services including primary healthcare for mothers and children, girls’ education, and improvements in the status of women.

 

When I first met Indumati Parikh at the World Humanist Congress in Mumbai in 1999, I had already been working in the population and family planning field for about 12 years. By that time the new ideas that first achieved international consensus at the 1994 Cairo conference on population and development were becoming more widely accepted. It was a huge surprise to discover that here, in the slums of Mumbai, a model of modern integrated services had already been in operation for over 30 years, and had for more than a generation been enabling thousands of women from the slums to rear healthy and successful families.

 

Following the Congress I agreed to try to help replicate the Streehitakarini example in other slums of Mumbai, starting in Bandra East, site of the M.N. Roy Human Development Campus. The surrounding area has a slum population of about 200,000, mostly Muslims. Under Dr Parikh’s leadership, we set out to follow the Streehitakarini model, with a central hospital facility located in the M.N. Roy Campus and with 20 satellite clinics located in small rented rooms in the neighbouring slums. Such a scheme, she estimated, would be able to provide local primary healthcare for about 30,000 mothers and young children. By using the voluntary services of young, newly graduated gynaecologists, making full use of government supplies of vaccines and contraceptives, and by training and paying a small salary to local women to spread the word, we should be able to reach the majority of women in need within each slum area, and at very low cost. If it proved possible to replicate the model in this way we would then, with the experience we had gained, be able to tackle other slums within Mumbai and further afield.

 

The need for such a programme, called the Women of India Network or WIN, is enormous. More than seven million people live in the slums of Mumbai – roughly equal to the entire population of Switzerland – and almost none have access to even the most basic medical facilities. All live in abject poverty, yet all, through programmes such as WIN, could be helped. When fully operational, the WIN project will provide low-cost, effective health care to mothers and children; family planning services (one of the key elements of any human development programme); basic education in hygiene and nutrition to young mothers; and basic skills training for girls.

 

As I write, Dr Parikh’s grand scheme has already opened 10 of the satellite clinics, and over 6,000 mothers and children have already been treated. The central hospital, which is nearing completion, is located in a 15,000 sq ft wing of the M.N. Roy Campus, donated rent-free by the Centre for the Study of Social Change founded by Dr Parikh.

 

Because the project is making the maximum possible use of voluntary help, and consumables and medicines are being provided either free or heavily subsidised by the government, it will cost just $5,000 per annum to run each satellite clinic and $70,000 per annum to run the central hospital.

 

The day before she died Dr Parikh learned from Dr Ramesh Potdar, the project director, that he had secured funding for the next three years for a total of 17 of the 20 planned clinics, and that only another $50,000 is still needed to complete the central hospital.

 

What a fitting tribute it would be to Indumati Parikh if Humanists worldwide were now to donate the remaining funds necessary to complete her project in her memory, and at the same time help some of the world’s most disadvantaged people.