The projects are addressed to more than 100 villages in the rural area 30 Km south of Calcutta in 24 PARGANAS (South) District, West Bengal Province, INDIA. The network project has enabled the expansion of the project to all of West Bengal and the direct and indirect beneficiaries of the project are at present more than 300.000 people.

The inhabitants of these areas have little access to health services. This condition, together with the lack of hygienic services and drinkable water, facilitates the spread of diseases. The public hospitals, present only in Calcutta, are not open to people with low income. The national health system is almost non-existent in the suburbs: there are no vaccination campaigns promoted by the government which aim at covering all the area. In the same way there are no preventive treatments and appropriate health education about the problems of malnutrition and infections.

To improve the healthy conditions of the population medical treatment is not sufficient:

the big health problems of the community result from the lack of education and, in this case, of primary schooling. In fact, in the area there are no public schools with the exception of the base school carried out by the Institute for Indian Mother and Child (IIMC).
The literacy and enrollment rates are very low; the families prefer to send their sons to work when they are very young and to marry their daughters when they are still little girls.
There are no government schools, especially in isolated rural areas and it is too expensive to send the sons to a school in Calcutta, to pay the fees and buy the necessary material.
In the area there is a very high rate of juvenile work and a big number of girls married when they were very young with almost unknown men who many years older than them.

The childhood conditions are very difficult,

especially for the orphans, for the abandoned children and for those who live in complicated family situations. Children and male orphans are abandoned to themselves, in the more lucky situations, they live with relatives who don’t want them and are not interested in them. These children suffer malnutrition, don’t go to school and often are employed as day workers. Often also children who have parents live situations of real abandon: the parents are so poor that they must leave the sons at home for long periods to go to work without caring for them and for their instruction.

The inhabitants of the rural areas,

having very low incomes and unable to offer collateral, cannot obtain loans from the local banks.

The female population of the area,

already traditionally discriminated, is frequently the object of exploitation, violence and abuses, both in the family and in the social environment. Moreover, the condition of poverty and illiteracy, in which the women find themselves, doesn’t allow them to have access neither to loans nor to legal services.

The irrigation systems aren´t efficient:

and that has a great impact on the local agriculture, since this is principally founded on rice cultivation which cannot be carried out without plenty of water. The local population rarely undertakes small entrepreneurial activities which outside of agriculture. With the exception of the activities carried out by IIMC, there aren’t any services for advice, training and the support for the start of handicraft activities, animal breeding and small commerce.

Projects

Project for People is working with the local partner IIMC – Institute for Indian Mother and Child since 1993. In the course of the years it has started many projects in the field of health, scholastic education and microcredit. The current project is part of a context of continuity between new projects and others already started.

The objective of this project is to apply a model of sustainable development planned by IIMC, which can provide basic health services, guarantee the right to a healthy and safe diet, promote the sensitization and the education of the rural populations of the area, as well as introduce microcredit programs for the starting of small production activities.
The model is based on the assumption, deduced by a ten year experience on the field, that the social redemption of women and children is at the base of the development of rural communities; therefore the interventions are principally addressed to them.

Such integrated methodology guarantees a high probability of success in the achievement of the objective, which is to catalyze a process of real and sustainable development for the improvement of the living conditions in the rural communities of West Bengal