Jharkhand
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A leafy, rolling landscape gives Jharkhand its unique tribal name. Known as ‘the land of forests’, the state is rich in natural resources and native history. About three quarters of the state’s 27 million people live in rural areas, many in traditional tribal groups, planting crops and foraging from nature like their ancestors, who were likely among the earliest inhabitants of India.
Lying beneath the forests of one of the poorest states in India, with one of the country’s highest child mortality and malnourishment rates, is some of the greatest mineral wealth in the country. Sophisticated steel and power plants also flourish here.
UNICEF is working closely with the Government of Jharkhand through a variety of programmes designed to tackle the challenges facing the state’s people. One of these is the successful Dular (‘care and love’) initiative that creates a cycle of assistance in each community, starting with childbirth, breastfeeding and babyhood and progressing to nutrition and health services for children and their families.
Currently, to assist about half the state’s people who do not have safe drinking water, UNICEF is establishing clean water supplies, encouraging proper sanitation and promoting toilet building.
To address high illiteracy rates, particularly in rural regions, education campaigns are successfully encouraging more children to enrol and stay in school.
Challenges and Opportunities
In Jharkhand, half the people live below the poverty line, and about half the children younger than three are considered malnourished. The state also has one of India’s highest mortality rates for children under five. Hilly terrain hampers outreach efforts in some areas of the state.
Until recently, many families followed ancient breastfeeding traditions that unwittingly threatened children’s lives. Old traditions and beliefs required new mothers to discard their colostrum, the first, nutrient-rich breast milk instead of giving it to their newborns. Believing the colostrum to be dirty and useless they would give their newborns warm goat’s milk dripped into their mouths from a cloth. Colostrum is rich in antibodies and protects the baby against many infections and diseases.
Other Challenges and Opportunities:
• Three quarters of young children and adolescent girls are anaemic, and many are deficient in vitamin A.
• About half of Jharkhand’s children do not have full immunization against childhood diseases.
• The state’s literacy rate is only 67 per cent. Dropout rate among poor, female and tribal children at the elementary education level is high.
• Child marriage is still prevalent in tribal communities.
• About half of Jharkhand’s households don’t have toilet facilities. The common village practice of open defecation in neighbouring fields is responsible for much ill health and contaminated water supplies
• Safe drinking water is not available to nearly one quarter of the state’s population. Arsenic and other pollutants are present in many wells in some of the districts.
• About half the families in the state do not use iodized salt, which is important in preventing iodine deficiency that can result in physical and mental retardation.
UNICEF in Action
UNICEF is prioritizing reducing the high malnutrition and child mortality rates, and reaching out to millions of families in Jharkhand to address these concerns.
The Dular strategy, which trains village women to counsel new mothers about breastfeeding and proper nutrition, is a successful approach that is already expected to prevent about one quarter of newborn deaths and save the lives of thousands of older babies and children. The Dular initiative is of particular importance to tribal children who are most vulnerable to disease, malnutrition and education disparities, as prejudice, isolation and misunderstanding make it difficult for these families to access services.
Water and education initiatives are also the focus of UNICEF’s efforts in the state to help disadvantaged children attend school and ensure that all communities have access to safe drinking water.
UNICEF initiatives include:
Child Survival
• The Dular programme was successfully initiated a decade ago to train thousands of volunteer village women, called LRP (local resource people), to teach new mothers about the benefits of proper breastfeeding. These volunteers also help local anganwadi or female childcare workers provide information on health and nutrition for older children and mothers.
Now, women in Dular villages are three times more likely than other women to exclusively breastfeed newborns and avoid traditional practices about colostrum. The percentage of underweight children is much lower, too. The programme has been so successful that plans are afoot to expand the Dular network across Jharkhand. UNICEF and the Government of India also started a three-year project in 2009 to further extend it to 22 million children across India.
• Parents and health care workers are learning lifesaving childhood diarrhoea treatment methods with oral rehydration salts and zinc tablets.
• UNICEF supports efforts to distribute iron folic acid supplements to adolescent girls at all schools in the state in an attempt to control anaemia.
• The Adolescent Anaemia Control Programme reaches 1.4 million girls through schools and anganwadi centres.
• Vitamin A supplementation for children aged one to five is helping to prevent blindness and disease.
• Families and children are learning about proper hygiene and toilet building through schools, community and government initiatives supported by UNICEF.
• UNICEF supports campaigns to promote handwashing and provides kits to test water for arsenic and microbiological contamination.
Child Protection and Education
• UNICEF is supporting a plan developed by the Government of Jharkhand to eradicate child marriage and human trafficking.
• UNICEF works to promote and strengthen education opportunities in the state, particularly for poor, tribal and female students.
Address for UNICEF State Office for Jharkhand
UNICEF State Office for Jharkhand
Viswa Hotel Complex, Ground Floor, Near IIC Complex, Jodapul, Kanke Road,
Ranchi 834 006, Jharkhand, India
Tel: 91 0651 245-0266, 245-0267
Fax: 0651 245-0268
