Tending the Flowers

On April 21 this year, Government of India recognized a significant movement in Chhattisgarh by honouring ex-collector of Suguja district, R. Prasanna, with Prime Minister’s award for Excellence in Public Administration. The award was given for the initiation of Surguja Fulwari Initiative, seeking to set up day-care centres called fulwaris (a small garden) for children below three years. (They also serve as nutrition, weight monitoring and information centres for pregnant and lactating mothers). It is an idea that the state government has since expanded to 89 tribal blocks across the state.

The programme was launched in the face of dire statistics. In 2011, one out of every ten children in Surguja could expect to die before (s)he turned 5, mainly from malnutrition and related complications. Half the children in the district were classified as malnourished. The composition and quantity of food available to the babies clearly needed attention, as did a variety of feeding, social-emotional stimulation and other critical child-care practices. Prasanna imagined a programme of voluntary community action, supported through Panchayats, to supplement government’s existing nutrition programmes.

In this, he found a ready resource in State Health Resource Centre of Chhattisgarh (SHRC). SHRC had created a high quality training, development and support structure for the 70,000-strong Mitanin cadre of community health workers in Chhattisgarh. This was tailor-made for direct access to communities in attempting a change of practice and creating more empowered communities.

The programme thinks big. Coming from a civil servant, it is noteworthy for the belief it places in the ability of communities to take charge of their affairs and run them collaboratively. It not only imagines the community running the day-care centres with only financial help from the government, it also seeks to integrate this with improvement in cultivation practices and natural resource management. The belief, of course, is that all of these different strands are necessary for dealing with the malnutrition crisis at its root.

Towards this end, the cadre of Mitanins and their facilitators have undertaken extensive community contact, seeking to communicate the objectives of the programme. Since a fulwari can be set up only if the community agrees to operate it, a formidable amount of consensus-building at the hamlet level is necessary. While this means that this initiative does not roll out at the speed of a typical government programme, the community empowerment and collaboration processes it fosters at the local level are highly meaningful. In 2013, an initial 300 fulwaris were set up. By now, these have expanded to nearly 3,000 across the state.

Community-driven programmes must deal with their own challenges and the fulwari programme has seen plenty of them. Perhaps the most formidable is common to most government programmes, especially where community has a significant role: the flow of funds from the government tends to be erratic. This forces the local communities to pool in scarce resources to run them as long as they can before closing down temporarily and, in rare cases, permanently.

Other challenges also exist. Consensus-building is hard; maintaining it is much harder. Those involved must commit themselves to on-going dialogue. Caste and class divisions in the hamlet are put to test starkly in the fulwaris as children and adults mingle in one space. Sometimes, they overwhelm; more often, communities have found enough goodwill to carry on. As anywhere else, there are contributors and there are free-loaders; they must maintain enough civil interaction for the whole to function smoothly.

In the face of all of this, it is quite extraordinary that more than two-thirds of the fulwaris opened remain functional. In those that do, the immense possibilities of government action coupled to community responsibility are visible every day. And even where they have closed down, the community learnings from the experience ensure that the next wave of initiatives will find a much more fertile soil.

Disclosure: Centre for Learning Resource (CLR), where I serve as Director, has been associated with the fulwari programme for over two years. With UNICEF support, we began in 2013 with a baseline survey of the child-care situation in Surguja. Subsequently, we have been involved with designing the structure of a typical day in the fulwari and a process for developing the capacities of the mothers running the fulwaris.

Our involvement seeks to ensure that each day, the children receive a comprehensive experience of joyful growing-up; wholesome food eaten with attention to hygiene, lots of play and play materials, lots of talking and story-telling and lots of affection. It also seeks to create conditions for pregnant mothers to receive advice on wholesome child-care (as well as their own care) even before the child is born.

For all of us at CLR who have been involved, it is a joy to have had the opportunity.