By Sanjeev Shekhar
Ranchi-
While the Indians celebrate the winner of Oscar of the noted documentary film ‘Smile Pinky’, I’m immediately reminded of the yeoman service of the corporate house, Tata Steel that has been successfully carrying out the ‘cleft lip’ operations for nearly a decade now.
The film nominated along with four others stood victorious in the short documentary category. Smile Pinky revolves around a six year old girl with a lip deformity living in Dabai village of Uttar Pradesh directed by the American director Megan Mylan. It won Oscar in Los Angeles.
Scores of social organizations as well as the corporate houses are carrying out the cleft lip operation for years together but the attention of the international media never came to an extent that could be recorded either in India or abroad. Even I, as a journalist, have personally covered the event organized by Tata Steel. The company stationed ‘hospital on wheels’ with the support of the Railways wherein the mobile train went from one place to another and successfully treated cleft lip operation of several boys and girls. The mobile hospital also conducted surgery of various diseases and the team of doctors from the Tata Main Hospital personally monitored such cases; thereby bringing about smiles in innumerable faces. Such developments should form the part of integral journalism practice.
The recent was the company’s endeavour with the Operation Smile Mission, a worldwide children’s medical charity conducted a camp at Tata Main Hospital in the last week of February. This was an effort by Tata Steel to bring smiles to faces of children born with facial deformities through cleft lip and palate operations. Tata Steel is the first corporate house to collaborate with this mission for a project of this nature.
The purpose of penning this on record is to make people aware about the noble task & give due recognition to such activity that is done for social upliftment and for the benefit of the society.
This was Operation Smile’s first international medical mission in Jamshedpur. Cleft lip operations were conducted in Jamshedpur from February 22 – February 27, 2009. The screening of patients had begun on February 19, 2009. After screening 240 cases in Jamshedpur, a total of 182 cleft lip operations were carried out at the camp from February 22 to February 27, 2009. On an average 25-30 cases were handled everyday in TMH and the patients were mainly children in the age group of 6 months to 15 years and a few adults.
The entire funding for this project has been done by Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. All the medication to patients during their stay in hospital has been taken care by the group. In addition to this, medicine packets with instruction in their local language have been given to patients when they were discharged from the hospital. Speech therapy also organised for the patents as a part of the mission. A follow up check up for these patients has been arranged in TMH on March 7, 2009.
This is the first time that Tata Steel has collaborated with Operation Smile Mission which started in India in 2002. Tata Steel had entered into a MoU with another international organisation called Smile Train in 2002 and along with Smile Train more than 3000 children have been operated till date. The MoU with Smile Train is valid till December 2009. In the year 2000 and 2001, Tata Steel was able to bring smiles to 63 cleft lip cases with the voluntary effort of Dr R Bharat (the then plastic surgeon of TMH who has recently retired from TMH) and the Indian Red Cross Society of Jamshedpur. Kudos to all such bodies for their inavluable service...
Sanjeev Shekhar
Media Consultant/Journalist/PR
No comments:
Post a Comment