Ford India's 'Endeavour' enables safe childbirths in Tamil Nadu village
Published: 08th March 2013 10:54 AM | Last Updated: 08th March 2013 10:55 AM | A+A A-
Automobile makers in India may tout the rough terrain capabilities of
their sports utility vehicles (SUV), Ford India's Endeavour model has
been silently showcasing its performance in a hill village in Tamil Nadu
where it has helped 41 pregnant women to deliver their babies safely.
"Some
of the villages in the Kalvarayan Hills in Tamil Nadu are in very
remote areas without any roads. So reaching an ambulance van is
impossible. It was then the option of having an SUV was thought of,"
K.S.Sudhakar, project director at NGO Health at Hand In Hand told
reporters here Thursday.
He said Ford India wanted to do a rural
health project under its Sustainable Urban Mobility and Uncompromised
Rural Reach (SUMURR) programme and on Tamil Nadu public health
department's suggestion, it was decided to have the Ford Endeavour
target the villages in the Kalvarayan Hills region, around 255 km from
here.
"The other challenge is the age of the pregnant women that
ranges from 19 to 40. The people were reluctant to use the public health
services due to the distance and continued with the age old practice of
having deliveries at home," Sudhakar said.
He said once the project got started, the data of pregnant women in the region was recorded and they were tracked constantly.
According
to Priya Sundaram, general manager, Ford Technology Services, pregnant
women opened up to the idea of regular check ups, receipt of automated
voice messages giving healthcare tips and reminder messages on their
mobile phones.
This technology was provided by the IIT Madras's
Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI), a non-profit
organisation focused on technologies for rural India.
"We are looking at the possibility of having a handheld scanning device," Sudhakar said.
The
pilot project that began in June 2012 started with an idea of reaching
out to 29 villages ultimately ended up touching 54 villages.
In
addition to facilitating safe childbirth for the women with high-risk
pregnancies, the program led to 27 temporary paediatric and gynecology
camps being set up in remote villages.
Such visits enabled about
1,600 women and children to receive much needed healthcare, including
screenings for basic illnesses and immunisation coverage.
According
to Sundaram of Ford Technology Services, there is a plan to equip the
vehicle with the open-source platform OpenXC to create a local cloud
housed in the Ford Endeavour.
This would enable nurses in the villages to feed in the data and transmission would happen once the web connectivity is there.
Another
new app could help in the timely communication of vital health
parameters of the mother and enable hospital readiness while she is en
route.
Queried about the future of the project with the
completion of the pilot phase, Joginder Singh, president and managing
director at Ford India, said: "We are looking at the results and the
learnings. We want to scale up the project and looking at Tamil Nadu and
Gujarat where we have our plants."