India's bid to boost healthcare in slums

Training includes lessons on good nutrition, safer birthing methods, better sanitation, proper disposal of waste products, and proper hygiene, such as washing hands before food preparation. Some slum dwellers are learning how to demand access to drinking water and affordable health clinics.

The irony, says Mr. Hota, is that both politicians and villagers assume that the issue of urban healthcare will just resolve itself. "Somehow we all expect that urban poor, with higher incomes, higher number of doctors and hospitals, should be able to take care of themselves. But that is not true."

In fact, says Mr. Agarwal, 71 percent of the slum dwellers in Indore go to private doctors, "many of whom are not licensed, and all of whom are expensive."

In Professor's Colony here in Indore - a neighborhood of modern concrete homes near the university - a band of women - middle-aged, poor, and barely literate - are educating themselves now on how to prevent health problems.

Every few weeks, they meet with tutors from EHP in an effort to prevent illnesses that can devastate a poor family. During hot afternoons, during times that used to be reserved for gossip, the women share what they learn with other women in the area.

Tara Bai, a 60-year-old who came to Indore 30 years ago, has learned more about childbirth in the last year than in all her life. Before, improper practices in washing babies after birth meant that more than half would die overnight from hypothermia. Before, mothers didn't use a sterilized string to tie the umbilical cord; many children died of infections.

Today, infant mortality in Tara Bai's slum has dropped dramatically.

"We've had 8 to 10 births so far this year, and no deaths," she says. Her hut has become a meeting place of sorts for the 100 families of this slum. "If God gives light to you, you should know how to use that light."

Best of all, Tara Bai says, this education is portable. So if city officials carry out threats to remove this slum, Tara Bai says, "I know how to go to a new slum and organize it; I can do it again."

Across town, in a slum at the city's scruffy edges, Shanta Bai (unrelated to Tara) has also been taking courses in healthcare, and improving the lives of her neighbors. (Bai is a common last name for Indian women here; it means wife in Hindi.) Shanta Bai comes from one of the poorest communities in Hindu society, the caste of ragpickers, who collect and sort trash for recycling. She's illiterate, but acts as a community pillar.

"This slum has been moved three times in 15 years," she says, adding that she was born into an Indore slum 60 years ago. "But there is a support system here. We look out for each other."

She says her training has made her better prepared. "Before the class, I was blind. I would never have realized ... that we could do all this together," she says. "It's opened my eyes."

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