PRACTICE
OF ABUNDANCE AND LOVE ESSENTIAL TO ENJOY FREEDOM AND INITIATE SOCIAL CHANGE URGES
Dr. SAILAKSHMI
12th
Aug, 2011, Chennai: “The most important
parts of social change and action can emerge from voluntary action and such
voluntary action has to be driven by love and a sense of abundance”, urged Dr.
Sailakshmi, founder – trustee of Ekam Foundation while delivering the 8th
Samanvaya Freedom Lecture.
Dr.
Sailakshmi through Ekam has been providing support services to the poorest new
born children in the state whose parents cannot afford better medical facility
or drugs. Ekam provides the new-borns with the best available medical attention
to ensure that the neo-natal deaths are minimized in the state. Ekam has
contributed significantly in educating and supporting the system and believes
in working with the government machinery. Recently Ekam has also recruited and
trained nurses for the neo-natal care units in the state as part of the NRHM,
along with the State health department, Dr. Sai mentioned.
Dr. Sai has travelled to over 21 government
hospitals across the state in training the nurses apart from setting up local
civil-society support groups for better treatment to the new born. She said
that the neo-natal mortality rate has come down by almost 50% per cent in most
of the hospitals since. The local
civil-society groups too have been set-up to provide monitoring and support
services to the GM neo-natal units. In Tiruvallur, engineering college students
have come forth to regularly monitor and volunteer in GH, in Vellore it is
local NGOs and in Ramnad, teachers. Such voluntary participation from different
cross sections of society is what drives her efforts, Sai said.
She
spoke of her own journey in discovering the health problems the poor in the
country faced and how care and love can make a major difference. Mentioning
that when good efforts for a social cause are taken by individuals, support in
abundance arrives voluntarily, she pointed out her own example and that of Ekam
and how abundant support had arrived for what she called otherwise an
‘unsustainable’ model of rendering service.
The
lecture was Presided over by Smt. Shreya , ED, Malladi Drugs &
Pharmaceauticals. The Chief Consultant of Samanvaya, Mr. Ramasubramanian
welcomed the gathering and updated the audience about the development
activities across the state that Samanvaya has undertaken in the last year. He
said that the freedom lecture was an effort to bring a grassroot worker each
year to talk about their idea of freedom to the audience in Chennai. The Vote
of thanks was proposed by Sri. Rangarajan, national coordinator of Rejuvenate
India Movement, co-organizer of the programme.
The transcript of her lecture and the video will be shortly made available.
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