43-year-old Sunita Kasera is the only female member of the 150 member strong Karauli Press Union in Rajasthan. Sunita feels that Karauli is a backward district that offers little opportunity to local residents. Although Sunita completed her graduation from Jaipur University, after marriage, her in-laws insisted she stay at home. In her spare time, Sunita joined an NGO, Sathya Naval…
Adolescent girls in Rajasthan benefit from a government scheme because of our Community Correspondent (CC) Sunita's reporting.
Since Sunita has a press card, she receives a book called Sujak every month which describes the various government schemes in place. She was perusing through this and found out about the Kishori Balika Scheme, which is part of a larger government programme aimed at delaying the age of marriage, reducing the incidence of teenage pregnancies and maternal deaths, and generally improving the nutrition and health of adolescent girls. In Rajasthan, where child marriage is quite common, the scheme is especially important. Sunita decided to find out whether girls from the age of 10-19 in her neighbourhood were actually receiving what they were meant to be under this scheme: iron tablets, and information about sexual health, menstruation and pregnancy.
As she shows in her video, the majority of the people she interviewed during her survey had heard the name of the scheme before, but didn't know anything more about it and had definitely not received any of its provisions. Sometime back the assistants from their Anganwadi centre (government-run pre-school) had come around to find out how many adolescent girls and
pregnant women there were. When Sunita went to there to find out why they hadn't followed up, they refused to give her an interview and said that they had not received any tablets or instructions.
After her visit, the girls and women she had interviewed and shot on camera went to the Anganwadi centre to complain. "They came two weeks later, the women from the Anganwadi. They went to all the homes and gave out 30 iron tablets to all the teenage girls. They also called them for a training...they taught them about periods and how to be careful during pregnancy," says Sunita. "I feel very happy because I was able to help so many women. I want to continue making them aware of things they should be getting."
Watch other videos by Sunita on IndiaUnheard
No Cards
The article argues that systematically ignoring and silencing the voices of the poor and marginalized worldwide does not serve society or democracy well and must be countered. While new technologies such as AI could provide an opportunity for change, we contend that these technologies need to account more effectively for...
Impact Story
When the staff at Gannett newspapers in the US coined the term MOJO (Mobile Journalism) to describe new ways of gathering and distributing news using emerging technologies in 2005, they would not have imagined its virality and use ten years later. Ask new media journalists and our Community Correspondents Shah...