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Ford's Tribute On International Women's Day
This International Women's Day Ford India has provided mothers in India with a special gift. Last month marked the completion of the Ford initiative "Sustainable Urban Mobility with Uncompromised Rural Reach (SUMURR)" pilot program. A program undertaken by Ford India which provided expecting mothers and their infants in remote parts of Tamil Nadu with pre and post-natal care.
According to figures from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), which was last conducted in 1992-93, more than 37 percent of pregnant women in India do not receive prenatal care during their pregnancies and this results in the death of more than 100,000 women in India. Ford's SUMURR programme reached out to the far corners of Tamil Nadu where health care facilities are almost non existent, providing aid to pregnant women.
The program, which began in June 2012 and concluded in last month saw 27 temporary pediatric and gynecology camps being set up. According to Ford's announcement, about 1,600 women and children were provided with essential medical assistance and an additional 3,100 were helped as the program reached 54 villages, creating awareness related to maternal and child health care.
Ford was aided by other organizations in its efforts, which included the Department of Health of the Government of Tamil Nadu, U.S Department of State, George Washington University, IIT Madras's Rural Technology and Business Incubator, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Reliance IIT Center of Excellence, Hand in Hand India, and the University of Michigan.
According to K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior technical leader for open innovation at Ford, "..the mass-market applications of technology used in SUMURR are another benefit. For example, in some of the remote hilly villages where the Endeavour was used, cellular phone signals were extremely weak. As a result, researchers are developing a way to use the open source platform OpenXC to create a local cloud housed in the Endeavour. This enables nurses in the village to record and store information about patients and transmits it when connectivity is available later."
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