IIT Kharagpur Spreading Health Awareness through Live Folk Art Performance
The KGP Chronicle (March 19, 2021)
Albert Einstein had once said, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” But the challenge of scientists, health workers and the administrative machinery, involved in communicating health awareness and promoting the adoption of new health habits, to large segments of people with varying levels of education and exposure remains an arduous task. In a diverse country like India which has close to 65% of the population living in a rural or semi-urban setup, 30% population devoid of literacy in addition to significant school drop-out rates, rural health communication, particularly in the pandemic situation, demanded novel and localized approaches with scientific ideas explained in the most elementary form.
Recently IIT Kharagpur took up this challenge to improvise an effective method of health communication to a large catchment of the rural population. Under the project “Folk Artists in the Time of Coronavirus” funded IIT Kharagpur, Prof. Anjali Gera Roy, from the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, engaged with folk artists (Patua) from the Naya village in West Midnapore to hold COVID-19 awareness outreach initiative communicated through visual and musical art forms. (Read More)