Patna: Six year old Gangiya from Kangyav village in Shivsagar block [Rohtas District] was sick for a long time and too weak to walk. The local doctor prescribed medicines but nothing seemed to work. Her labourer parents were unable to meet the expenses. The illness gradually increased and the girl became bed-ridden.

One of village women returned to the village from a training programme at Patna . She visited Gangiya, and on looking closely at the symptoms diagnosed the ailment as bone TB. She tried to administer some herbal medicines for relief. The remedies did not work. In the meanwhile, the Mahila Samooh, the village women’s group, got together to help Gangiya get treatment at the Benaras Hindu University medical college. Today, six months later, Gangiya has recovered. She runs and jumps about just like any other girl of her age.

In Uchitpur village, Sangita , from the village Samooh received information about Tuberculosis at the same training programme. She suspected that she had TB. She went to a doctor and her suspicions were confirmed. She had glandular tuberculosis. She is now healthy after receiving treatment.

In Muzaffarpur District, the 20 women of the Mushari Purab Tola women’s group tackled a health hazard. Heaps of cow dung surrounded the village hand pump making the surroundings unhygienic. The women got together and carried the cow dung to the fields and cleaned up the area around the drinking water source. In the meanwhile, at Mominpur, Mahila Samooh women got together and cleaned the waterlogged area surrounding their hand-pump. The Samooh constructed a drain to keep the area free of stagnant water. Over the past two years a quiet revolution is taking place in at least three districts of Bihar and two in Jharkhand as a result of a Mahila Samakhya-WHO health initiative that trained some 720 rural women from 360 village groups as barefoot health workers in a year long initiative. The districts were those which had the women’s empowerment component of the [undivided] Bihar Education Project: Rohtas, Muzaffarpur, Sitamarhi, Chatra and Ranchi.

The specially designed course covered some 24 different issues among which were studies of the impact of gender, nutrition, work and violence on women’s health; mental well-being; access to health care; Panchayat and women’s health; folk health traditions; malaria; tuberculosis , water and sanitation,; male and female reproductive health; pregnancy; adolescent health; healthcare during pregnancy; delivery and postnatal care; abortion; barrenness; contraception; reproductive tract infections ; HIV/AIDS; cervical cancer, breast cancer, tobacco.

“The effectiveness of a programme must be seen by the behaviour change it influences,” says Sister Sabina, director of the MS Bihar. The Mahila Samakhya village level workers or Sahyoginis have reported that the practice of defecation by the roadside has stopped in as many as eleven villages in Muzaffarpur District. Several villages in the five districts have dug soak pits to combat the accumulation of waste water to stem the incidence of Malaria.

These ‘barefoot health workers’ carried the information back to their own villages, and this has initiated visible change in pre-natal and neo natal care. Some of the women trained were local midwives who immediately put into practice the more hygienic birthing practices. Demand for health services from the government health centres has increased along with immunisation figures in almost all the 360 villages..

Sessions on sexual health has increased awareness among the women. Said MS District level trainer Punita from Sitamarhi, “Our rural women have never heard sexually transmitted diseases being discussed so openly, neither had they ever discussed the subject with anyone. They had always thought that the diseases were the result of their own negligence.”