Awareness and Training

Health awareness campaigns are conducted throughout the villages.
Awareness classes on Health, Sanitation and Menstrual hygiene are conducted, and Saukhyam cloth pads distributed. The people of the village, the children in particular, are taught the importance of properly washing their hands.

Awareness on family planning encourages women to plan their families, as a survey showed that 65.7% of the women do not use any planning methods. The self-help group meetings are used as a major key to open the doors of development.

There is a wide range of different government schemes that have the potential to make a significant positive impact on these women’s lives. Various projects of the MAM, including AmritaSREE, Amrita SeRVe, and AMMACHI Labs, provide awareness on this topic and offer support in availing the schemes. One example of a scheme applying to tribal communities is the Forest Rights Act of 2006, empowering the people to special rights concerning their property and traditional lifestyles relating to nature.
One of the first challenges for the AmritaSREE SHGs was to get the children of some of the most backward villages in India to go to school. In a land where education is seen as a luxury, far from being seen as a basic tool, children who went to school regularly were but far and few. Of the handful that had attended school for a few years, many would drop out by the age of ten. With the continuous and supportive intervention of group members, the women are now seeing that their own and their neighbours’ children attend their classes regularly, as well as the Education centres run by Amrita CREATE, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham.

Amma’s will has traversed many landscapes already bringing about phenomenal changes to the situation of women in rural India. Much has been achieved, but there is much more on Her agenda. Amma feels that it is simply imperative that the women of rural India ought to be made aware of the unlimited potential that rests within them, for they run the family. Family is of immense consequence in the Indian way of life. There is a lot that these women can achieve together; for themselves, their families, the nation and ultimately for this world.