VASA Exhibition

Sandeep Biswas: India's Story Of Triumph Over Polio

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They said India would be the last country to stop polio. The feat was near impossible: to find and immunize more than 170 million children behind every door of every dwelling in this vast sub-continent; to reach the millions who didn’t even exist on a map - brick kiln workers, construction workers, slum dwellers, nomads; to provide two drops of oral polio vaccine to protect India’s children from the most intense transmission of wild poliovirus on the planet, in one of the most heavily, densely populated countries on earth. In each national polio immunization campaign in India, more than 170 million children are vaccinated by more than two million vaccinators. ( Introduction from the book “ India’s Story of Triumph Over Polio” )

I started documenting Polio for UNICEF, India in 2002. Polio then was an epidemic in India and the path to the success of eradicating the desease looked bleak, primarily due to the country’s demography and misconception about the vaccination among various local communities.

Over the last decade and a haIf, I have travelled with the vaccination teams to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra, which were among the most affected states in the country, Mainly due to lack of proper sanitation and increasing human population. Initially one faced a lot of hostility from the local communities due to their lack of faith towards the program. It took the project years to create the faith and reach out to every child in the country. Tremendous hard work, commitment, planning and fantastic teamwork of UNICEF and WHO with support of thousands of highly committed polio workers, finally and officially helped declare India as a Polio free nation on March 27 2014. It is virtually impossible to convey the magnitude of the eradication of polio from India.

My images are a witness to this colossal effort by these truly deserving people. It's been a real honor to capture the history they created after a long struggle and hardship.

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