Tragic cocktail of bad health care, superstition for MP's tribals

This could not be happening again. It was the middle of November, and in 22-year-old Ganeshiya Baiga's arms, her three-month-old Ragini daughter was shivering -breath drawn sharply, eyes fluttering, body fading.

- Shruti Tomar

Ganeshiya's mind flashed back to another baby who was once motionless in her arms; her six-month-old son had died after he fell into the village well. This could not be happening again.

She looked for help, but there was none. It was early afternoon, and her husband, like every other male member of the tribal Patasi village in Madhya Pradesh's Shahdol, had left home early to earn his daily wage. She glanced around her thatched home for something that could alleviate her daughter's pain. The floor was bare, the kitchen sparse; and no possibility of any medicines.

She thought briefly of the sub-health centre (SHC) at Kotma, 9km away, but experience told her that was rarely useful. There was the medical college in Shahdol the district headquarters --15km away, but there was no money for transport Travelling to the city without her husband was out of the question anyway; the village would not allow it.

Ragini had pneumonia, not uncommon among young children. And as her condition deteriorated, Baiga decided on an option often exercised in trib Madhya Pradesh because of a potent cocktail of superstition and inaccessible primary health care an option that may not always cause death itself, but can delay proper medical attention until it is far too late.

Ganeshiya took her daughter to be branded.

The young child clutched tightly, she ran, arriving at the home of her 67-year-old grandmother, Tirji, in Kotma. Tirji is a "vaidya", the local word for an unregistered medical practitioner. Tirji did what she had done many times before. She brought out an old sickle, and set it next to a flame. Then, 50 times over, as the child cried out, she branded Ragini, the tell-tale scar from burnt skin spreading its tentacles across her stomach.