Experimentative Imagination of ManeSiri & Other Updates from Channapatna Health Library

From the Narrative Report for MAYA Annual report. Period covered: April 2023 to March 2024

Channapatna Health Library now has ~200, tagged and annotated, searchable audio-video snippets about local health knowledge, practices and lived experiences. We have been using this library to bridge the gap between the community and the public health system. In July, we had an interactive session with Junior Health Assistant (JHA) and Health Inspector from the Community Health Center, Channapatna on Women’s health & family planning. We focused the CHL collection on experiences of menstruation, family-planning, and menopause: questions and concerns emerged from the community data-donors and the Health Navigators (HNs). We sought answers from the local public health actors; some questions were answered, some were raised for the public health actors to take back to their superiors. Through these interactions we imagined possibilities for the HNs to become local health researchers and information mediators between community concerns and local public health actors through the use of CHL digital infrastructure.

Setting up and stabilising Community Network and Digital Infrastructure.

In June 2023, we moved into our own space, central and closer to the bus- stand in Channapatna. We faced challenges of shifting the server, re-tuning Papad, and extending the current mesh to get the Internet to the new space; our plans of setting up the editing, recording and distributed engagement studios enabling the HNs to engage communities around their homes with health advocacy and activism with CHL, got delayed. By September, we setup the network, server, updated new version of Papad and HNs began to learn using desktop computers to carry out basic activities of browsing the internet, emails, and using LibreOffice suites for text and numbers. We held initial conversations with the HNs and some data-donors on data governance framework for CHL repository. We will realise our collective vision of a distributed set of studios located in/near the HNs homes along the mesh-mash network by the end of this year, to enable us to continue experimentation with content design and public engagement for the next year.

Experimenting with ManeSiri – a women’s producer organisation.

In May 2023, we began an experiment to see if we can imagine and practice what it means to collectively own the infrastructure and work. A serendipitous discussion turned into an idea we implemented: Every month, each one of us contributes 500 INR. We decided that the money goes into Mangala's bank account, as everyone agreed she is the most trust-worthy. Mangala devised a reporting format of the money collected and deposited every month. After three months, we had enough money to initiate the idea of procuring and processing local millets. The first round we packaged the millets as is and sold them in half KG and 1 KG packets. The HNs meanwhile explored community needs and challenges of integrating millets in their food as part of collecting experiences to be added to the CHL repository. Based on these insights, the next round Mangalamma came up with a recipe for a powder of 9 millets and some herbs, that makes its usage flexible and versatile: add it in dosa / idli batter, or boil with milk as a drink, or add it in rotis, or make steamed balls to be eaten with spicy curries.

During this period we also did two learning trips:

a)        to Kanakapura in August 2023, visiting and conversing with two women-led Farmer Producer Companies to understand supply- chains, processes of packing & branding of local millet products.

b)        Sittlingi Valley Organic Farmers Association in January 2024.

We named the range of products as ManeSiri (Bounties of a Home), and we hope to grow it into an initiative that will sustain the work of building and maintaining CHL.

This experiment turned out to be the main stay of our work this year, given all the other challenges. Over these three months we made a profit of 13000 INR, but more importantly, there is an increasing demand for the powder in the communities - it is versatile, tasty and healthy.

The experiment is showing us a clear pathway to organise ourselves as a producer company, as well as confidence in our management of supply-chain, logistics, finances. Of course, we will need to plan for scale of operations when we have 50 HNs as shareholders. But for now, we take solace in the collective efforts led by the HNs: The experiment was Ramakka’s idea, who manages the supply chain; Mangala, Mangalamma, Anita, and Sarasamma manage the processing & packing; Managala and Mangalamma manage finances; design members help in branding and structuring the process for diversifying products, and the other HNs including those beyond the current core group, sell the nutrition products to their community members, earning an individual income as well as for the collective.