UDAAN SCHEME AWARENESS DRIVE

The necessity of social awareness of different govt. policies has become very important nowadays. The awareness of these policies is mostly lacking among the people living below the poverty line who live in slum areas. They are deprived of various free facilities and services by the govt. due to lack of knowledge about those. One of the identifying characteristics of slums is the lack of or inadequate public infrastructure. From safe drinking water to electricity, from basic health care to police services, from affordable public transport to fire/ambulance services, from sanitation sewer to paved roads, slums usually lack all of these. 

 

We were given a task on social awareness on any particular topic as a part of our behavioural science assessment. Our group decided to spread awareness of govt. policies in slum areas. As soon as our topic got approved, we (Kritika, Charchit, Bhawana, Srastha) went to our first awareness drive in Dana pani basti(located in Vidhyadhar nagar, Jaipur). There we spread awareness about the "Udaan Scheme" of Rajasthan Chief Minister, Mr. Ashok Gehlot. 

Out of the women-related diseases happening in the state, 60% are due to non-adherence to menstrual hygiene. Keeping all these things in mind, the Udaan scheme is an innovative initiative of the government of Rajasthan. In the first phase of this scheme, Rs 200 crore has been given to the department. In the first phase, 28-30 lakh women will be benefited by this scheme and in the next phase which will start from March, a total of 1.20 crore women will be benefitted through Udaan scheme. On such a large scale, this is a unique initiative of Rajasthan in the country itself. 

We highlighted the following points in the drive:-

•Project Udaan seeks to reduce adolescent pregnancies in Rajasthan by leveraging existing government platforms and programmes across the Health and Education Departments, for scale up and sustainability. It adopts a multi-sectoral approach to prevent adolescent pregnancy, layering interventions beyond sexual health, to fundamentally change the way adolescent programming is carried on.

•Udaan attempts to keep girls in school through their enrolment (school-going and dropout girls) at secondary school level while ensuring that the eligible girls receive their scholarship through collective efforts. School and community-level interventions have been designed to increase girls’ enrolment at secondary level school by generating wide public awareness on the scholarship schemes and mobilising communities to support girls’ education and facilitate their going back to school. Udaan works towards strengthening scholarship delivery systems (IT enabled) and builds capacities of government functionaries for effective state-wide scale up to ensure sustainability and stability.

•Udaan is an integrated intervention which seeks to prevent adolescent pregnancies in Rajasthan by leveraging existing government programmes and platforms for realizing girl’s potential and reducing the number of babies born low birth weight from teenager mothers. IPE Global supports the efforts of Rajasthan government in rolling out injectable contraceptive ‘Antara’, that prevents pregnancy for three months for all women in 14 Mission Parivar Districts (MPV) of Rajasthan.

•AntaraRaj, a web application for tracking Antara uptake and reminder services for users has been developed by IPE Global in 2017-18. The initial focus was on the rolling-out of the AntaraRaj web-based application in the 14 Mission Parivar Vikas districts, however, it is now implemented across all the 33 districts of Rajasthan. IPE Global also support the state governments effort towards addressing unmet need for contraceptives by increasing access to quality family planning services.

By, 

KRITIKA GOGOI