Interns' diary: Anahit Simonyan II
July 3-13 Work in the field is over but the impressions are so vivid that will carry on for long. In fact, the experience was unprecedented for me and as such it made me understand that this is the kind of work I can pleasurably and, perhaps, successfully do in future. Our topic was birth registration and the study site mainly tribal Dhar district situated in the south-west of Madhya Pradesh, around 6 hours drive from the state capital Bhopal. On the whole our project went smoothly and successfully in spite of initial difficulties. One of the most impressing interactions we had was with health workers and Anganwadi center workers. The dedication to their work by these mainly women workers is really praiseworthy - be it registering births, providing immunization, nutritional supplements or primary schooling. They know all houses with small children, have exact information when and where they were born, and were helpful to us in finding them. From the smallest child to the eldest person are in close contacts with them. The village administration engaged with birth registration was also helpful as they arranged meetings with people we needed to talk to. However this help and caring went so far as to do initial preparations for our visits in terms of information that they must give us, registers which must show us. In certain places it was accompanied by one day before distribution of birth certificates. This fact made us to change our whole strategy and go to villages unannounced though at the price of probability of not finding people at the same and at the same time. But this led to real findings in spite of difficulties of organization. Apart from work it was so pleasant just to spend some hours in interaction with people so close to nature. We visited villages, which had amazingly beautiful sites, some of them totally cut off from the main street, hidden behind the hills where in rainy weather even cars don't go, so people have to walk long distances in deep mud, which was exactly what happened to us. Occasionally the road to villages led us near a field of lotuses in full blossom, which was a marvelous scene at least for me as I was seeing it for the first time. Then countryside ... calm, tranquil, drizzling rain, as it was during our visits, corn fields moving softly from the breeze like waves sweeping over them. Villagers busy with their everyday routine - men wearing traditional dhotis working in nearby farms whose brightly coloured pagadis stand out from otherwise gloomy surrounding. Young women - in tribal jewelry, heavy bracelets and anklets, carry buckets of water on their head, which makes their walking particularly gentle. However, for outsider it's idyllic, for insider it's daily hard work and sweat. Children - so vibrant as everywhere but also so different from sometimes “spoiled” children of the city. They followed us from place to place, peeped form the windows of Panchayat to listen to the conversation of the adults, but were often shy to answer our questions.
Village dwellings impressed me much. Imagine lines of small houses made up of mud and cow dung, sometimes with brick, all attached to each other. The scene that opens upon entering the house is - a woman sitting on the ground feeding a baby, another baby sleeping in a cradle (which is just a cloth tied from both ends of the ceiling) unbothered by dozens of flies around him. In some houses minimum furniture is missing. Inside is stuffy as there is not any ventilation. When looking on one side of the house you can see the section where cows live separated from the main room by a low wall, so the door from which people and cows enter is the same. The scene of the sleeping baby on his mother’s lap in dim light on the background of cows was so similar to the one in the Icon of Nativity. For me, the most fascinating talks were the ones with the villagers. I myself grew up in a village and had certain understandings about the way of life there, about how our questions should be structured to win trust and get true responses. The reality, however, went beyond expectations, as we faced difficulties. It mostly consisted in getting answers from young mothers. These mainly young girls, hardly 20 years of age were shy to speak: firstly, because of the presence of their mothers-in-law, secondly, maybe because we were outsiders. Some of them didn’t open their face even after persuasion from elders, “Take the veil away, we are all women here”. But they would only giggle. So our team decided to change methods and don’t fill in questionnaires while talking to families in order to surpass this barrier and to certain extent we succeeded. What concerns our study and what we discovered, in broad lines, was that the first part of registration system, i.e. recording births in Panchayat and Municipality registers is done more or less consistently though not completely. Nonetheless, in certain villages there is inconsistency and lack of uniformity between Panchayat and Anganwadi or health workers’ registers. However, the practice of collecting certificates by households, as the second inseparable part of birth registration, is very low or in some places non-existent among population. This has its various reasons, which will try to elaborate on in our case study. Much work has been done to reach this level of registration in Dhar district. Though in reality there is little link between even high registration numbers and the ability of people to function as citizens and to exercise their rights. So, a lot needs to be done more to rise the awareness among population, which, to my mind, cannot be confined only to birth registration but includes overall human development in this area in terms of increase of education and literacy, provision of basic sanitation, reduction of extreme poverty etc., which are undoubtedly long-term objectives to achieve.
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