Pune’s Ashok Dyalchand among eight nominees for World’s Children’s Prize award for decade

Murhabazi Namegabe from Congo-Kinshasa, Anna Mollel from Tanzania, Phymean Noun from Cambodia, Manuel Rodrigues from Guinea Bissau and Rachel Lloyd from the United States make up the list of eight nominees who had won the World’s Children’s Prize by the WCD during the period 2011-19. Dr Dyalchand won the prize, also known as the Children’s Nobel Prize, in 2019.

Dr Dyalchand from the 1965 batch of Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, initially worked in villages of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh after his postgraduate studies in ophthalmology. He gained extensive experience when he joined a mobile eye hospital and got an insight into the many trials of life in rural India caused by severe social and economic marginalisation. He later switched from ophthalmology to public health and worked at a mission hospital at Pachod in Maharashtra.

In the last 45 years, Dr Dyalchand has been fighting tirelessly against child marriage and for girls’ equal rights and set up the IHMP where his teams have been providing health services to women, children and adolescent girls.

In 1998, a large-scale study conducted in central Maharashtra indicated that over 80 per cent of adolescent girls were getting married at a median age of 14.4 years and were becoming teenage mothers. This was resulting in significantly higher maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity, it was found.
In the last 45 years, Dr Dyalchand has been fighting tirelessly against child marriage and for girls’ equal rights and set up the IHMP where his teams have been providing health services to women, children and adolescent girls.

Dr Dyalchand decided to bring about a change and set up girls’ clubs to end the practice of child marriage and provided them with life skills. The IHMP scaled up sexual and reproductive health programme for married adolescent girls in five districts of Maharashtra. The external evaluation findings indicated a significant reduction in maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality, an increase in the utilisation of contraceptives to delay first birth and a reduction in the prevalence of preterm and low-weight babies at birth. The findings were published in The Lancet which said how focussed community-based interventions implemented by frontline health workers result in rapid improvement and coverage of reproductive health services among married adolescent girls and how replication of this strategy was feasible.

“The aim has been to empower girls. Over 100,000 adolescent girls have benefitted from this programme… The recent National Family Health Survey-5 data indicates that 23 per cent of girls get married before 18 years. This is an average for rural, urban slum and urban general populations. In Maharashtra what the average does not reveal is the fact that the variation among districts and urban slums ranges from 4 per cent to 60 per cent. We still have a lot to do,” he said.

Since the launch of the WCPF in 2000, at least 46 million children have participated in the World’s Children’s Prize programme. More than 74,000 schools in 119 countries support the WCPF. In the global vote, millions of children select the winner of the prestigious award for outstanding work for the rights of children, according to CEO Magnus Bergmar.