The Mana Bidda Project, a sensitisation and quality improvement program, was started by Aarti Home in the Kadapa district. It was headed by Prabhu Podipireddy and involved Aarti Home’s older girls and local village women. The European Commission funded the project.
Mana Bidda aimed to increase gender equality in rural areas and hoped to place a firm bar on the rising number of female foeticide and infanticide in these areas. This was done by sending the girls and women out into villages to meet with local governments, doctors, lawyers, police officers, and the village people themselves in the hopes of educating them and sensitising them on the importance of the girl child. The project was led by five project officers: Nagaveni, Harija, Venkateshwari, Sowmika, Kanchana. It also involved local village women, often cast away from their homes, who wished to improve and better the situation of girls in Kadapa. These women acted as counsellors and mentors to other women who faced similar problems, including social ostracisation and forced sex-determined abortions.
Under Sandhya Puchalapalli‘s leadership, the Mana Bidda project had flourished in many rural areas. With the help of legal aid, Aarti Home was also able to provide legal and official help to many women. With a sustained effort in this program, we hoped to see a steady improvement in the gender ratios as they were currently drastically low in some areas. Mana Bidda was working at a large scale to provide information, sensitization, education, and aid to people in and around Kadapa (and hopefully soon more parts of Andhra Pradesh) in helping to preserve and nurture the idea of femininity.
The girls told me that they were working hard to secure the life of a female child and that she should not be thrown in the trash just because of her sex. With the fantastic work that Mana Bidda was doing, Kadapa and its local areas were slowly developing a more objective mindset, one that would, in the long run, be revolutionary.