NATIONAL CAMPAIGN ON SAFE ABORTION

Introduction to the campaign

Unsafe abortion is one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in India. The burden of abortion related mortality and morbidity is disproportionately higher among adolescents and adult women from marginalized groups.

Though abortion is legally available under the provisions of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP Act) of 1972, but poor implementation of the Act and quality of abortion services pose several barriers for women’s access to safe abortion services.

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Taking Budget to the People- CEHAT Initiative Budget Praxis

CEHAT’s work on health financing had led to the lot of literature on health budgets, financing and expenditure issues, including large field based studies to generate primary data. CEHAT has also developed a database of public health expenditures for all states from 1951. CEHAT has been conducting trainings and involved in advocacy on budgets among people to raise awareness and mobilize them for demanding higher allocations to social sector especially health. Budget- Whether Central or State –in India is a big event although there have been attempts in last few years to deglamorizing it. The budget apart from being an accounting exercise, documents what has been the state intervention in the year gone by and project where state is intending to make a difference to the economy and in what way and in what sectors. Unfortunate, budget documents suffer from being complicated and non transparent. Whereas inherently a budget of such a big & complex economy is naturally complicated, the budget as is presented is even more than is strictly essential. The technical jargon and the account codes do not help either. Thus, one finds citizens at large not aware of what exactly a budget is expected to do and hence in an ignorant way of commenting on it. CEHAT has undertaken budget analysis and training with the intention to create awareness amongst people and empowering them with knowledge to scrutinise budgets and demand for transparency, accountability in governance. This is with the vision to create a momentum as it will serve the roadmap for mobilizing local groups who will monitor resource allocation and formulate their demand, enhance the rights based perspectives among the activities working at the grassroots and will create enabling environment of accountability and transparency for the good governance.
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Follow-up with the Government on the implementation of rules for the BNHR Act and creating awareness amongst patients about patients rights

The draft rules for BNHRA were submitted to the Government of Maharashtra in June 2006, which remain on paper till date. The main efforts were to regularly follow up with the Public Health Department and the Office of the Director General of Health Services. The Jan Aarogya Abhiyan too made efforts for implementation of BNHRA. In addition to follow up with the health bureaucracy through letters and meetings, CEHAT also worked towards creating awareness amongst patients on the issue of Patients Rights as part of the JSA. The posters and brochures on Patient Right were disseminated among the patients on the world health day. Radio spots on the patient right and Emergency services were done for MUST community radio started by Mumbai University.
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Advocacy and Campaigns on Violence against Women

Along with the service provision and training, efforts are been made to create awareness about the issue and change of attitude in society about violence against women. The main objectives of advocacy is to create awareness about gender based violence and its consequences on women; to create awareness about the crisis centre and its services amongst organisations, other hospitals, health posts and maternity homes and community at large.
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