I have been told many genres of inspirational stories - stories of valour during the Independence Movement, fairytales with perfect endings, civilians rescuing drowning children, etc. If you are lucky, you sometimes find yourself in a place where you see these stories turning to reality in front of you. This is what my mother and I witnessed in Shillim on May 31, 2019.
Driving up the hill on a cool summer morning in Shillim, we stopped our car to ask an elderly woman carrying a heavy potla, if we could drop her on our way. From the corner of her eye, my mother spotted a small pre-primary Pratham school near the homes in the village right next to us. We could see from a distance, a few dozen women dressed in bright pink sarees all gathered together on a Friday morning. We were intrigued.
We found out that they were Anganwadi workers. Anganwadis translates to mean “courtyard shelter “. This scheme was started by the Indian government in 1975 and now The Ministry of Women and Child Development has laid down guidelines for the responsibilities of Anganwadi workers, “These guidelines include showing community support, conducting regular quick surveys of all families, organizing pre-school activities, providing health and nutrition education to families, motivating families to adopt family planning, educating teenage girls and parents by organizing social awareness programs, and identifying disabilities in children”.
The Central Government has now recently launched the online mobile phone app to streamline and easily document the various findings by the Anganwadi workers across the country.
In Shillim, Maharashtra, it was the first time these 25 women from 25 different surrounding villages were meeting to participate in the monthly online training session to learn how to use this app for their everyday work as Anganwadi workers. They explained that the dashboard on the app allows the workers to go paperless and share progress reports, best practices, simple system for growth monitoring and request for immediate help where needed. Prior to this, the women had to do 800 surveys on average every year and write, document and preserve these papers which made it time consuming and extremely difficult to maintain.
When we walked into the school, we saw women who were in their late 60s, holding a smart phone for the first time in their life, young newly-wed wives driving in on motorbikes, and mothers who have never in their life experienced the joy of having an income to their own name. This is the new India, and these women are our secret weapon.
