Women in Panna cannot access their own lands due to the tiger reserve. Hence, they have a distress of food and livelihood and are forced to migrate for wage labour. But they are exploring alternative strategies for sustenance.
Optimising the limited resources in their homesteads, women have cleared their own homesteads and those abandoned by families who left the village. Women from Umravan village have harnessed their village wells with solar pumps and started kitchen gardens. For efficient irrigation, the women have harnessed the power of renewable energy by employing a solar-powered motor. Water is pumped from a community well to irrigate the gardens.
They now have an abundance of vegetables this season which they are using for their consumption and selling them at nominal rates to local villages. Dhaatri is also purchasing these vegetables for distributing them in our ration kits to all the Silicosis and TB patients as a supplementary nutrition support - thus a green and circular economy has begun and we hope that these resilience strategies can bring new changes in health and livelihoods and new perspectives to renewables’ usage and transition.
Barefoot Health Programme Addresses the Challenges of TB: Our success story in Panna
Our barefoot health volunteers and warriors have worked hard to ensure that all TB patients we identified so far, completed their DOTS course successfully. Along with the medicines, the vegetables grown by the women and the home remedies prepared with the guidance of the healers have together helped patients cope with their ill-health and hunger, to heal and regain their health. We hope to reach out to more families in the surrounding villages. The last mile linkage in community health is a key mechanism for effective public health intervention, and our health volunteers have shown the way. We thank our young volunteers and the medical officers of Panna PHC.