| Sustainable Livelihood | Health | HIV/AIDS/Trafficking | Safe Drinking Water | Panchayati Raj Institutions |

Health

Health services for a fairly large section of population, particularly the one hailing from disadvantaged section, are always a dream. In most cases they are unable to access health services, given their precarious financial situation. The problem is compounded by their lack of awareness of health services available.

Prantinidh's interventions in health sector are confined to tackling water-borne diseases, which are very common in villages and slums of India, leading to high morbidity and mortality rates.  Villagers and slum-dwellers usually are not aware of the small measures that they may take to protect themselves from water borne diseases, including diarrhoea. As a result, precious scarce resources are spent in treatment of these diseases. Also there is considerable loss of productivity of the people.

The interventions include creating awareness among the people about safe drinking water in slums and villages. But awareness per se does not ensure clean drinking water to the people. They need devices to clean the water that they drink. In view of this, Pratinidhi is providing devices like low cost water filters and chlorine water to the users. Though money required by the users to purchase of these devices is small, it is often a large sum, particularly in case of low cost water filters. The organisation has come out with a microfinance scheme to meet cost of the filters.

Of late zinc therapy with ORS has emerged as a powerful tool for managing diarrhoea, especially among children in 0-2 years. Doctors and chemists have been enlisted for the purpose and awareness material distributed among them. Posters have been pasted at strategic points. Community is also being made aware of the zinc therapy and ORS.

Earlier, Pratinidhi has participated in issues like immunisation and pulse polio programme of the Government. It has run health information centres to provide immunisation and ORS related information to the people. It also ran RCH services benefitting a large section of population.