Youth4Children, an initiative in Madhya Pradesh, has transformed the lives of youngsters and adults, says Vinati Bhargava Mittal
Young, energetic, innovative — these children and youth — are the agents of change in rural India. They are the face of a new vibrant country. They are not scared to dream or work hard to achieve those dreams and bring the necessary changes they perceive that society needs.
Riya Soni, Ritesh Chauhan and Divisha Parwar represent the symbols of change that rural India so badly needs. They are all part of Youth4Children, an initiative for promoting child rights in Dhar and Jhabua by UNICEF and a local NGO, Vasudha Vikas Sansthan.
The initiative started as Maandal toli in 2016. Maandal is a dholak, a local tribal musical instrument popular in this belt of Madhya Pradesh. These children worked on child rights and other local issues and tried to spread awareness among community members through dholaks, nukkad nataks and other creative ways. As the children grew into youth and continued to be associated with the project, it was named Youth4Children.
Riya Soni, 16, of village Nowgong, of Meghanagar Block of Jhabua, is an extremely active member. She devised a no-cost indigenous handwashing station during the first wave of the pandemic Covid 19 in 2020. “People laughed at me when I was making it,” she says recalling that she had seen a foot-operated handwashing station used by the Army on social media. Soni, who aspires to be a doctor, understood the importance of handwashing with soap regularly to combat the Covid 19 virus. She realised that a handwashing station similar to the one she had seen on social media would be expensive for the villagers. So, she used items — wooden sticks, used bottles, wire, and stone/brick — that were easily available in any household to make an indigenous handwashing station.
In the innovative handwashing station devised by her, as soon as one keeps a foot on a wooden panel and pulls the strings, bottles of liquid soap and water hanging from the wires overturn and the liquid flows. The touch-free station proved safe to use during the pandemic. “This local handwashing station involves no cost, except for the handwash. The solution can be made by mixing soap in water,” says Dr Gayatri Parihar Mewade, Director, Vasudha.
When Soni, a class XI student of Integrated Higher Secondary School Naugawan, put up a video of her handwashing station on the Maandal toli (UNICEF) WhatsApp group, there was no looking back. Her simple innovation became very popular and was viewed by lakhs of people across the world. Children from not only her village but from those nearby replicated the model. Nearly 250 such handwashing stations were placed in local schools, community places, the Panchayat and nearby villages. People entering the villages had to first sanitise their hands.
Several national channels beamed her jugaad handwashing station. “Now, people recognise me. Those who laughed at me stopped and congratulated me,” says Soni whose father is a labourer working in a fertiliser factory. In fact, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan congratulated her on Twitter and UNICEF’s brand ambassador Sachin Tendulkar spoke to her personally. “He asked me how I came up with the idea,” she recalls.
Soni’s laurels do not rest here. An advocate of child rights ad menstrual hygiene, Soni has tried to make villagers aware of the drawbacks of child marriage in her small way. During and after the pandemic, along with her team members, she tried to remove the rumours associated with the Covid 19 vaccine, while educating villagers on its importance and the necessity of maintaining the Covid protocol. “Earlier, people did not want to get vaccinated. Men thought they would become impotent, and women were under the impression they would not be able to conceive after getting the jab,” she says.
During the lockdown, Youth4Children members used mobile phones to make villagers aware of the Covid 19 protocol and the necessity of getting a jab. Once the lockdown was lifted, the team visited homes. Today, 100 per cent of the eligible population of Nowgong has received the first dose, claims Soni adding that the response to the second dose has also been overwhelming.
Another member of the group, Ritesh Chauhan of Dhar, along with other Youth4Children volunteers visited villages during the second wave of the pandemic and found out the kind of problems the villagers faced. He even checked their oxygen levels and body temperatures. Dhar became the first district in Madhya Pradesh to reach 100 per cent Covid 19 vaccination in the 15-18 age group.
Chauhan and other Youth4Children volunteers arranged second hand smart mobile phones for poor children studying in senior classes so that they could attend online school. Each mobile costs `5,000. Following the pandemic, there had been a large number of dropouts in the nearby villages and children had even taken to child labour. Sheela Damor of Gopalpura tried to convince parents to send their wards back to school.
“During the lockdown villagers would be found sitting on the chaupal. And, the children would be playing outside. They would not be wearing masks,” says Divisha Parwar of Dhar. Not only did she distribute and make them aware of the importance of wearing masks to ward off Covid 19, but spent considerable time finding out the problems that the children faced during online education. She taught students how to use various educative sites. Applauding Soni and others, Michael Juma, then chief of UNICEF, Madhya Pradesh had said, “Progressively, adolescents in Jhabua have been proactive in advancing child rights. We may need to leverage their experiences to roll out sustained advocacy on infection prevention and control and hygiene management practices for Covid 19 response in the district and beyond whilst maintaining social distancing.”
(The author is an independent journalist.)
