When Balmiki Prasad went to the local village market at Rana Bigha to buy some kakri – a local succulent vegetable rather like a cucumber – he was in for an unexpected and pleasant surprise. The vegetable vendor, an elderly woman, insisted he take the whole basket for free, in spite of his protests. “sadho baba”, she said, calling the bewildered Balmiki by the name of a character he played in a street play on reproductive health issues, “how can I take money from you, when you do so much of good for the village?”

Prasad is part of a nine member low cost communication team touring the villages of Nalanda district in Bihar, performing plays on issues such as the need for contraception, the hazards of adolescent marriages, and scientific ways of ensuring prenatal and postnatal health. A part of the Pathfinder initiative to address the problem of the growing population and resultant poverty in this economically backward Indian province, low cost communication teams work in tandem with community based health motivators.

“The messages are reaching the people, “ says Rajiv Ranjan, a member of the street theatre troupe. A woman from a village some 16 kilometres from Rana Bigha, sent her husband to meet with the team members in order to get information on IUD devices. “We are often stopped for condoms, and when we perform, it has become a common experience. A few men will take us aside and ask us for condoms.”

Trained at the Patna based Ravi Bharati Institute for Communication Arts , a partner of the Pathfinders run Prachar Project, the team finds ready acceptance in the agrarian villages of Nalanda. The stories they communicate are simple, set in the local rural idiom and constructed to confront traditional unhygienic practices and myths, such as the traditional practice that disbars menstruating women from bathing. One of the most popular plays that the group performs is ‘Lafdaa’ a colloquial word which means unpleasant incident. A young girl, not yet eighteen is married and she dies in childbirth. When the “sadho baba’ , a kind of mendicant comes to perform a condolence ritual, he refuses to proceed with the ceremonies, because he senses that the death was not a natural one. The message contained is that the father of the girl and the father-in-law were both responsible for the death of the girl, and so were the other members of the family because they connived to get her married before the legal age of eighteen.

“It heartens us to see how well we are recognised in the surrounding villages. As soon as we arrive for a performance, the word goes round that the “lafdaa wallahs” have arrived. “ There is a local demand that the team should continue to disseminate messages to the village folk. “It is done in words we can understand. Our parents did not know better, so they got us married, and we produced children, maybe too many. Now we have to deal with that. We don’t want the other young people in our village to suffer the same predicament. We want our women to be healthy and our children to be healthy as well. The songs and plays put things in a simple language, and even the old people are listening to them,” says Manoj Yadav, a local milk man. In the agrarian feudal society of Bihar, the words of the patriarch, or head of the family, is the law, and younger members are expected to obey without question. Marriages are decided by the elders.

The resistance of the villagers to listen or discuss issues related to sexual and reproductive health appears to be wearing off, at least in the Rana Bigha block of Nalanda District. The pace and the intensity of the messages would need to be maintained for any sustainable and long-term behaviour change to be manifest.

RAVI BHARATI –PRACHAR PARTNERSHIP

The Prachar Prioject is a reproductive health programme currently under way in the districts of Nalanda, Nawada, and Patna in Bihar.

Ravi Bharati is a 25 year old Communication Centre in Patna specializing in radio arts and group media, with its own state-of the-art recording studio and premises. It is a pioneering institution having trained several hundred social activists in low cost communication over the years.

The RAVI Bharati – Prachar partnership, with Ravi Bharati as a training partner for low-cost communication teams at the rural level started in right earnest from 16 January 2003, following a training of trainers session.

The role that Ravi Bharati plays in the Reproductive health programme is that of a facilitator to the rural communication teams. In effect, the partnership is built around: · Training of teams selected independently by the Prachar NGO implementation partners through a residential 15-day training programme.

· Assisting the teams in their respective performance areas through the provision of a mobile Field Trainer who visits each NIP, interacts with the team and provides training and advice related to performance technique and script.

· Empowering the respective NIP communication teams with tools through which the Reproductive health messages could be adapted to local situations as part of the script writing exercises conducted during the 15-day residential workshop.

· Collection and refining of the original scripts produced by the teams at the workshop in collaboration with the Prachar personnel dealing with message content.

· Collection, refining, and recording of songs in the local idiom which have been composed by the groups with the specific intention of dissemination of the reproductive health messages.

The provision of musical instruments and equipment for the communication teams, management of the communication teams, or provision for any sort of honorarium to cultural teams during or after the training period is not in the memorandum of understanding between Ravi Bharati and the Prachar [Pathfinders] project.

The general procedure as envisioned was a first round of 15-day training per team to be followed up by field visits by the Ravi Prachar Field Trainers, with a four day refresher course –cum – feedback session to share lessons learnt from the field and so on. In keeping with the philosophy and value-system affirmed to by Ravi Bharati, the training programme was constructed to ensure effective teamwork and positive group dynamics and to simulate rural conditions. The community sleeping and eating arrangements, as well as the code of conduct for participants are the same that RAVI uses for all rural low cost communication workshops be they with NGOs, children’s groups or youth groups.

The training programme, besides a two day introduction to the reproductive Health agenda and the ground situation as perceived by the Prachar project planners, focussed on two main areas: the qualities and skill-building to encompass all aspects of Street theatre: script writing, planning, execution of roles, logic of production, production values etc; and the construction of hand puppets, and creation of thematic puppet plays. Basic song-and lyric writing, vocal and technical exercises were part of the training package.