Tata Steel Foundation Partners with Gumla District to Combat Maternal, Child Mortality

The Tata Steel Foundation joins hands with Gumla District Administration, inking an MoU to replicate and scale up the successful MANSI+ initiative, aiming to reduce maternal and child mortality.

JAMSHEDPUR – The Tata Steel Foundation and district officials of Gumla recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding to implement the Maternal and Newborn Survival Initiative (MANSI).

Deputy Commissioner of Gumla, Sushant Gaurav, IAS, and Chief Executive Officer of Tata Steel Foundation, Sourav Roy, signed the MoU.

According to the MoU, Tata Steel Foundation will launch the project in Gumla from June 2023.

The initiative aims to cut down preventable maternal, neonatal, infant, and child mortality rates by 50 per cent over the next five years.

MANSI+ will cover all 12 blocks of Gumla, catering to a rural population of more than 96,000, spread across 159 panchayats in 948 villages and over 18 lakh households.

The project will be carried out through 1623 village healthcare workers of Sahiya, supervised by 103 Sahiya Sathi and 1660 Anganwadi workers.

The program will operate through 12 Community Health Centres in Gumla district.

MANSI+ provides a lifecycle-based approach to healthcare.

Having completed a decade of practice, the initiative stands as a reliable model serving the communities of Jharkhand in a PPP mode.

Gumla district, located in one of Jharkhand’s most remote corners, currently houses over 90,000 adolescents and over 2.26 lakh pregnant and lactating women.

The region also has more than 1 lakh children.

The introduction of MANSI+ will equip the district to handle high-risk pregnancies, addressing a key gap in healthcare.

Both Gaurav and Roy expressed their commitment and hope for this partnership to improve health outcomes in the region, especially by addressing core health gaps through MANSI+.

The partnership occurs at a time when Tata Steel Foundation is ramping up efforts to augment public health facilities across Jharkhand and Odisha.

MANSI+ has shown considerable success in decreasing infant and maternal mortality during childbirth, making it an ideal model for nationwide replication.