If you simply tell people living in the slums to go and get their children vaccinated against polio, probably they won’t. But with an idea conceptualised by ad man Samrat Sudhakar Rane (the idea was later made into a film), these people were more than happy to go to the polio vaccination centre to get their children administered the dose.
The film recently received the prestigious National Film Award. The film depicts a team of physically disabled men who could barely walk but went from door-to-door to recount to parents their own plight, so that the same mistake wouldn’t get.
“Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that leads to paralysis and often deformity in a matter of hours. 62% of Mumbai’s population, who live in slums, do not realise the importance of polio immunization, owing to the high rate of illiteracy. So, telling them simply about the dangers of Polio was not working at all. We thought of shaking up the parents enough to take action by demonstrating the horror of the disease,” says Samrat.
Samrat did some research and went up to the Fellowship of Physically Handicapped people, at Haji Ali, to ask for their help. “Initially, I thought that I would pay these guys out of my pockets to make them work for the film. But when I told them the idea, I was so surprised that they agreed to work for free,” he says.
He remembers a line told to him by one of the
polio victims — “We have gone through a lot of pain and humiliation in this life because of our parents’
ignorance. All we can do is to tell our story to parents so that they will know it’s not good for their children to grow up like us.”
These disabled men traveled to the slums in Dharavi, Bandra, Worli, Kajipada and Dahisar for 15 days, to spread their message. The campaign was made for Rotary International India — National Polio Plus Committee and 8 lakh people turned up on day-one of the polio camp, which took place in
November 2008.
