In an interview with Nidhi Jamwal, Deputy Managing Editor of Gaon Connection, India’s biggest rural media platform, Shubha Nagesh, Director- Research & Follow-up Program at the Latika Roy Foundation, and Shriyuta Abhishek, public health researcher at Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health (SEARCH), Gadchiroli, spoke about the challenges they faced while treating children with disabilities and the tribal communities respectively. 

“When COVID19 hit the world, it was understood that the virus would affect the people uniformly. But children with disabilities are especially prone to suffer way more if they get infected,” said Nagesh who has been working on children with disabilities for the last 25 years.

“How do you ask a child with cerebral palsy to ensure that she/he wears a mask,” she asked. As doctors, they never imagined a time would come when they would have to aid children with disabilities via telemedicine. 

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“Telemedicine is not very effective in speech therapy or physiotherapy,” she said. 

The impact of the COVID 19 pandemic was particularly severe on the adivasi communities too.  

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“Due to lack of connectivity with the urban centres, it took a while for the pandemic to reach these areas. But measures such as the lockdown really disrupted the lives of the tribal people,” said Shriyuta, who is working with the adivasi communities in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli.    

“In the first wave, the tribal communities believed that Corona was something that happened in the cities and they were not very keen on precautions. When the second wave hit these remote areas, it led to a lot of distrust amongst them, and the crisis worsened because of this,” Shriyuta said, adding that public health messaging must be more active and convincing. “There’s a lot of trust-building to be done,” she added.