Dr. Vikasben Desai, an active citizen and a veteran doctor
of city, along with Mr Anuj Ghanekar, insists on ‘Developing the ‘culture’ of
resilience…’ and shares their work, by by Urban Health & Climate Resilience
Centre – UHCRC- Surat.
“Culture means ‘the way of life’. The way of thinking,
the way of behaving, the way our value system operates, the way our family
system functions, the way we celebrate our festivals – all that and much more
is all the part of culture. Surti culture relates with climate change,
environment and health in many direct and indirect ways.
It may be the way we worship and treat our river Tapi.
It may be the written and unwritten rules of city traffic. It may be our food
culture which benefits or harms our health. It may be societal protocols for
using and disposing plastic and so on… the list is unending and widespread if
we look around in our society. Unless we make an effort “climate and health”
agenda to merge with “Surti” culture, the “resilience” remains a dream.”
Dr Desai / Mr Ghanekar, further shares the details
about The role of UHCRC in community
resilience….
Urban health and climate resilience centre (UHCRC)
initiated five pilot community action models.
- § “Surat Arogya Samvad” a community health dialogue forum, to exchange scientific and local climate and health information among citizens.
- § “Healthy Surat Working Group” a local multidisciplinary technical group of academicians and professionals for advocacy to SMC.
- § “Climate smart healthy Children” The Peer Educators of a school imparting the knowledge, skills and attitudes of “healthy living action towards Climate resilience” to that of another school with vigour and creativity.
- § “Surat Alliance for Urban Agriculture & Resilience” is a multi-stakeholder partnership that promotes terrace-kitchen gardening and urban agriculture.
- § “Surat Urban Development , Climate and Health Resilience is an academic institutions’ consortium to explore research and training needs and scope
Dr. Vikas Desai – Technical Director (UHCRC), is a qualified and experienced personnel
in Public health, community Nutrition and Reproductive and child health and has
38 years in public health teaching & training to Medical, Health, Nutrition
& Public health engineering students, in service candidates and faculty.
She has served as Additional Director (FW), Director RCH for 5 year at state
level and has actively participated in community level trainings and advocacy
process. She is a member of editorial board of Text book on “Environmental
Epidemiology" World Health Organization. She has several national and
international publications to her credit and has designed and implemented
various state level child health programs like Nirogi Bal, MAMTA Abhiyan, MAMTA
Taruni, IMNCI, Balsakha, Integrated Nutrition program.She is a founder
secretary of Urban Health Society of India. At UHCRC, she is focusing on
various studies on health vulnerability on climate change, heat effect on all
cause mortality and development of training manuals for Urban Planners in relation
to climate change.
Mr. Anuj Ghanekar – Social anthropologist (UHCRC), is a young professional having training in
field of social anthropology i.e. study of human beings in totality. Ghanekar
is passionate about qualitative research, involving local community in action
research and exploring the linkages of urban culture with climate change and
health development. Currently he is working as consultant on piloting the
project “Building Community Resilience” under UHCRC.
Sincere thanks, Dr Vikasben and Mr Ghanekar.....
Himanshu (Arjun )
Padhya
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