Haath mein Sehat, one of the projects in Somaiya Social Cell, gets media coverage in CoastWatch column of DNA newspaper dated March 2008. The news article is given below:
Volunteers from Berkeley university to visit Bandra
They will be in the city for the Health in Hand project
About forty percent of the nation’s wealth is generated from Bandra, which is a city of 14 million, where the world’s rich and famous people rub shoulders with some of the poorest people on earth. With real estate at a premium, nearly fifty percent of the city’s residents live in quasi legal slums like Behrampada, a crowded community that spills from across the street and into the train station itself. It is here that Yu and a small group of volunteers from University of California (UC), Berkeley called Haath Mein Sehat, or Health in Hand, have been spending school breaks since 2004 working to improve access to safe drinking water. They are also putting efforts to ending an epidemic of diarrhea for the estimated 1,75,000 residents of this slum.“There is a bunch of students from the university who come down to India every year to work in the slum of Behrampada in Bandra (E). They make efforts to make improvements in to point of access to water,” says Arvind Sadasiv, volunteer from Mumbai of Haath Mein Sehat. He also adds, “They also make an effort to educate the people about hygiene and make them aware of the effects of using contaminated water.” Emily Kumpel, student of UC Berkeley, says, “We are an entirely volunteerrun organisation (I myself am a volunteer while I am full-time student) that works in several small slums in Mumbai. We have tie ups with the microbiology department of some colleges in Mumbai. The students of these colleges also participate in our drives. We usually conduct workshops to part hygiene education and also try to create some awareness, among the people living in these slums about the point of use of water. All the workshops that we conduct are more of interactive sessions which is attended by people of in all the age group,” adds Kumpel.
