Global grant helps clean Indian city


Cardiff Bay Rotary has been working with seven Rotary clubs in India as part of an imaginative hygiene project in the city of Pune.


Thanks to a global grant, the Welsh club has joined forces with seven Rotary clubs in Maharashtra, led by the Rotary Club of Pune Inspira, to address the challenge of the safe disposal of sanitary napkins. Pune Inspira is a modern, currently all-female Rotary club and this was its first


Global Grant project.


Some 250,000 used sanitary napkins are discarded in Pune every day.


They choke drainage pipelines, litter footpaths and infect the waste pickers scavenging on landfill sites. What’s more, they take 500 years to degrade. This $77,000 (£54,700) project involved installing 168 incinerators in colleges, girls’ hostels, Mahila Ashrams, schools and public places across Pune.


Rotarians also delivered basic hygiene training to over 10,000 girls.


It is estimated that 16,000 women and girls will continue to benefit directly and 70,000 people indirectly from this project every day. It has also demonstrated that Rotary is playing its part in the campaign to clean up India’s great cities by 2019. Cardiff Bay’s contribution to this project was £9,500 with further funds contributed by the Indian Rotary clubs and matched by Rotary Foundation grants from both Districts’ Designated Funds and the World Fund. Cardiff Bay members were anxious to ensure that they were responding to a genuine local need and not simply imposing a project on a community that was not a priority for that community.


80 Years of Rotary


The Rotary Club of Abertillery and Blaina celebrates its 80th Charter Anniversary this year.


The club will hold a Charter evening on 26th October 2018 at Greenmeadow Golf and Country Club.


The Charter Night is the highlight of any Rotary Club’s social calendar and is, in effect, a birthday celebration of another successful year since the


club’s Charter date (formation). 07763106656


India was thought of as the most challenging place on earth to eradicate poliomyelitis. This was because of the sheer number of children that needed to be vaccinated, the vast area to be covered with people living in isolated, difficult to reach places and the low sanitation levels. Despite these challenges, the goal of polio eradication was achieved in January 2014 , thanks to the gigantic efforts by the WHO, The Government of India, Rotary International, UNICEF and other agencies. One of the four critical strategies used to achieve this goal was the holding of National Immu- nisations Days. These are campaigns of mass immunisation of all children in the country over as short a period as possible, preferably a single day. NID’s have been held in India since 1993, and still continue to be held every year to ensure the country remains polio free. On each of these days 172 million children under the age of five years receive the oral polio vaccine in 700,000 booths spread all over the country. On following days, groups of health workers and volunteers go from house to house especially in the slum areas to ensure that no child has been missed in the campaign. Rotarians in India play a vital part in NID’s with over 100,000 members participating in the campaign every year.


For a number of years now groups of Rotarians from UK and other countries have been travelling to India to assist the local Rotarians and take part in the immunisation programme. While some have travelled on their own, others have joined organised tours. Generally the visiting Rotarians are hosted and taken around by local Rotarians and in addition to taking part in the NID get the opportunity of visiting tourist attractions, enjoying Indian hospitality and getting a taste of Indian culture.


On the day itself and on the following “mop up” days, many visiting Rotarians find themselves taken to the poorest slum areas just to experience the difficult conditions in which local Rotarians render service every day. Rotarians returning from these visits are not only full of praise for their Indian hosts for their help, hospitality and friendship but also full of admiration for the service they render in such difficult conditions.


13 National Immunisation Days in India


By Subrahmanyam Ganesh, Merthyr Tydfil Rotary (pictured with friends at the International Rotary Convention in Toronto.


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