As part of their professional training, 14 IAS Officer Trainees of the 2009 batch undertook a visit of city based NGO, Deepak Foundation on 3rd January. This visit was a part of their winter study tour. The Foundation received the distinction of being the only NGO in the state of Gujarat which the batch of officers visited. The objective of this 8 week long tour which will continue till the second week of February is to expose these young officers to the diversity of people, languages, and customs as also to the administrative structures in different parts of the country. The tour consists of various short attachments to governmental and non-governmental agencies.

The officers, after their arrival at Deepak Foundation first travelled to the Foundation’s Sudeep Training Center at Bodeli where they were escorted by women Out Reach Workers (ORWs) of the Foundation on motor-bikes. A series of presentations was then held at the training center. The case for global and Indian scenario of maternal mortality was put forward by Dr. Dileep Mavlankar from Center for Management of Health Services (CMHS), IIM- Ahmedabad. He said, “Maternal mortality is a result of gross under investment in life saving technologies and in the health sector. The lessons that can be drawn from trends in maternal mortality world over are the need for skilled manpower at the time of birth, support of emergency obstetric care and referral services, partnership with government, performance monitoring and political will along with administrative efficiency.”

 
A presentation was also made by Ms. Anju Sharma, IAS, Director, State Rural Health Mission who interacted with the officers and shared her experiences about Public Private Partnership (PPP) in the health sector. In her presentation, she discussed novel PPP initiatives and opined that the PPP model can work wonders for pooling in resources in the social sector. Similar experiences of PPP in reducing infant and maternal mortality in the tribal blocks of Vadodara district were shared by Ms. Archana Joshi, Director, Deepak Foundation. The presentation provided an orientation to the officers about the Foundation’s Safe Motherhood and Child Survival (SMCS) project.

After this, the officers undertook a visit of the Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (CEmONC) Unit run by the Foundation at Jabugam in partnership with the government Community Health Center (CHC). The doctors and the staff of the hospital interacted with them to provide them with information about the services being offered by the hospital. The officers then visited a Sub-Center at Koliyari village and interacted with beneficiaries of the project.

The visit commenced at the Foundation’s head office at Vadodara with a cultural program where the officers interacted with the Chairman of the Foundation, Shri C.K.Mehta.