Highlights Of Swasth Bharat, Sampann Bharat Telethon- Leaving No One Behind

Under the Banega Swasth India campaign, we have had a journey of seven years and we directly impact 50 million a year. In the next five years, we want to triple the impact and make it 150 million. We are in 650 thousand school. We are in madrasas and will cover all 9,000 of them. We want to clean waterways and do that in the next three years. 

Under the Birds and bees programme - we reach 3 million today and want to reach 15 million that is all of north east. We plan to reach 7 million kids through white hat junior partnership. 10 million new mother through a partnership with UN women. In UP we are targeting diarrhoea under 5 and we will achieve that goal.

We have been fighting for transgender rights for over two decades now. After various changes that has happened in India, we face a lot. In 2014, for the first time, we got a separate identity and were considered as the third gender. We are still struggling for inclusion. If you pick any news or data, you will see information how Covid has affected women. But you won't find any data on how Covid has affected transgender people. Trans people are seen begging on roads but these are the same people who helped police in implementing lockdown. 

We have right to social welfare, good health and dignity. We are not talking about small universe. If you look at data for transgender, the last mapping was done in 2011. My community is extremely impacted. Transgender community is not just about hijara. That's an umbrella term. We have various identities like transmen, transwomen, etc. 

One of the major challenges we have faced during the pandemic is that a lot of us are forced to be in our homes. To escape marriage pressure, we try to live independently but here we were forced to live with families and that led to parents harassing their children for marriage 24x7 and that led to a lot of mental health issues. I got calls of distress of which some people were contemplating suicide. For people below the poverty line, we managed to provide ration to the members of the community. We work for HIV-positive people as well. We provided them treatment at home. The Government of Gujarat also provided us help. You cannot stop treatment as it can have consequences. 

Education is empowering for young people particularly so for young women and girls. We know we have had so many studies especially in India, just how education is a game changer for young girls - it prevents early marriage and early pregnancy. It gives girls right to be free of sexual violence. But education is alone not enough. You need to have comprehensive sexuality education which is often opposed by conservative forces. You need to take out toxic masculinity out of school space. It's important to keep all girls and boys in the school upto the end of secondary school. By keeping girls in school, they are less to suffer violence, she is able to control her fertility, she can earn that keeps her and her family safe and healthy. Complete education for girls has many outcomes for girls and her family. 

For us, change is two step forward, five steps back. We had a case of child less than 10 years of age who had been raped and it took us over three years of running from police stations to courtrooms and helping the family on ground to get justice, to get a guilty sentenced and 10 year conviction. This is case of metropolitan city. The father of the victim said, the person who raped my child has sexually abused other children as well. 

People from rich societies don't show up for justice. They believe 'ghar ki baat ghar me rehne do'. First thing is to own our truth. I am glad you are talking about inequality. Have these honest conversations and hold men in our own circle accountable. We need to unlearn things and hold our elected leaders to account to do better. Hold institutions to provide us justice, to ensure we are safe, to ensure you well safe walking down the street, make sure quality education. 

Whenever we make any communication, we ensure there is an emotional connect. When the pandemic started, people were not sure what needs to be done. We decided to provide the right information to people. We realised that when there is confusion, there can be frustration. We converted the message into small videos and shared on social media. The campaign reached out to 350 million people. People created their own videos to spread the message. 

In the second wave, everyone knew what needs to be done - handwashing, distancing, etc. this time we thought that hook for us should be hope. The stories of hope. We said that there is a message here that is not being spread out. How can we take this message. We took our handwash packs, dropped the logo and added stories of everyday people on it. we took 100 of stories. First, we did it online and then we made it physically available in 5 lakh stores. Later, we also set up a website where people could nominate their own heroes. I think stories were a way to express gratitude but also to create a sense of communal hope.