POONTHALEER

“The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother  is something absolutely new.”

                                                                                                                                – Osho

In the photo above you can see Harini: the girl who has been saved by Tdh CORE from infanticide. She proudly shows the photo of her birth. 

Infanticide is the horrible practice to kill a newborn infant, very often due to the sex of the child. Female infanticide has a deep-rooted history in India – and the practice, especially during the past century, was very widespread in Tamil Nadu, with one of the highest percentages of female infanticide of India. The main region having this problem was the District of Salem.

We knew that no mother could ever want to kill her baby, but that she is forced by her family and the community to do it. Tdh Core extended its services in the District of Salem to stop this horrible practice by appointing field staff directly to reach the community and also to give awareness about infanticide.

On 12 October 1998, TDH CORE started its rescue activity through a project named Poonthaleer: the name Poonthaleer represents the stage at which a bud begins to flower.

PONTHALEER HOME ( March 2022)

164

CHILDREN

The total number of Beneficiaries 594 (Childhood to adult) so far.

Poonthaleer project brought a positive attitudinal change in families towards female babies by interacting with families and pregnant mothers to let them understand how much important is the life of these babies.
Starting with the second female baby, the risk of infanticide is higher. So, thanks to this information, we started to work based on identifying pregnant women who already had one female baby.

After the identification, from the 5th month of pregnancy onwards, we interact with the family to save the baby girl by promising to give support to grow-up the child. If the family still refused to keep the baby, we offered to take the baby under our care.

With our Poonthaleer project, during the last 20 years, we won the conflict against community managing to reach zero-killed baby girls in the Salem Area.

From 1998, we saved more than 1558 newborn girl children: 90% of the babies stayed with their families and 10% of the babies were given to Poonthaleer home for care.
Since 2008, no infanticide has been reported from the 72 villages of Edapadi Taluk, Salem district.

At present, Poonthaleer supports 181 rescued children.