Appalled by a high percentage of young children who die at an early age in rural India as they miss out on vaccinations, two students of Nirma University have launched a service to create awareness among young mothers about vaccination schedules of their infants. Through the service, they have already started reaching out to people in rural parts of the country.
Recently, a study by an organisation had found that 70% of the children in rural India die at an early age because they are not given vaccines on time. After reading findings of the national study, the students realised that a majority of parents in rural areas are not aware of the vaccination dates.
So Megha Agarwal and Yashika Agarwal thought of reaching out to these people with reminders about the vaccination schedules. They have used mobile phone and internet for their project and the service to is free of cost.
The duo recently launched the service called 'Vaccination Alerts'. So far, they have got 90 registrations from across India for giving them the benefit of the service. The new parents just need to register themselves by sending a text message from their mobile phones to 08128066929.
"They need to type request for the registration, date of birth, month and year of the child, followed by preferred language. Once registered, they will get alerts for specific vaccination three days prior to the date. We will also provide them with baby-care tips," she said. They have launched the service in five languages -Gujarati, Hindi, English, Kannada and Assamese.
