BPNI over the years...

To start with..

In 1979 my daughter was born. My wife and me, being doctors decided that she should be breastfed exclusively for the first few months but we failed in a few days, there being no support available from the family or the health care system. Bottle-feeding culture prevailed upon.

The little girl had to give up breastfeeding by 5-6 months. The story repeated in 1981 when my son was born. At that point of time we started looking for information on how one could succeed in breastfeeding but failed to find any thing. Even though we started working as a strong supporters of this useful practice but found ourselves in a position where women were only exhorted to follow breastfeeding but not told how to do so; so they would not do so. The reasons were simple; they never received any help and support.

According to a simple research conducted in the town where we lived, despite the advantages of breastfeeding known to all sections of society, bottle-feeding was an accepted norm of feeding newborn babies and young infants in all hospitals. We attempted to bring changes in the existing hospital practices and launched a campaign that included advocacy with the doctors and putting posters in the maternity facilities, nothing seemed to work.

Commercial influence of infant formula industry on health care professionals was more than visible. Doctors' attitude was generally unsupportive or they did not find much difference between bottle- feeding and breastfeeding. Their knowledge about breastfeeding management was as limited as ours. They strongly believed that exclusive breastfeeding was rather an impossible practice and the need of supplementary milk feeds during early days of child's life was justified.

Exploring how to intervene to change hospital practices and how to counsel mothers effectively became our objective in 1986. Fortunately, in 1989, I got an opportunity of being trained in human lactation management, which I grabbed in spite of being ridiculed for spending a week for learning breastfeeding management .I completed the training and saw the light of hope, gained the knowledge and skill we were missing.

In 1991 an opportunity came to me to participate in a "Super- Trainer Workshop on Recent Advances in Human Lactation and Breastfeeding Management" at Wardha organised by ACASH, IAP and FOGSI. On the last day of this training, December 3rd 1991, when all participants were discussing about recommendations, one of the crucial recommendation that came out was to have an organized front for advocacy on breastfeeding, thus Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI) was born. After it was discussed among the four founders of BPNI, Dr. R.K. Anand, the man behind breastfeeding movement since 1979, Dr. N.B. Kumta, Dr Tarsem Jindal and myself, programme and administrative responsibility was accepted by me as a challenge. This was on 27 March 1992. Thereafter, BPNI started functioning in full strength and zonal coordinators were appointed.

We started with all the trained members imparting training to their fellow colleagues and students of their institutions. Formal activities started happening in the very next year like organizing World Breastfeeding Week (WBW) in India. From there BPNI has grown into an institution and a network of more than 1400 people. State and city chapters have started functioning. Various Task forces focusing on specific area of work also have started working. For its international partners,

BPNI increased the scope its work within south Asia. BPNI's major role was being defined over this period and it acts as special advocate for sound infant feeding policies apart from other works. New agenda was added, focus broadened including issues like child health and nutrition. Since then BPNI has been working with a priority on training of health workers in breastfeeding and lactation management.

Other areas of work included social mobilization through WBW and related activities, monitoring the compliance of the IMS Act, development of advocacy materials on infant feeding and technical support to various national and other institutions. BPNI has been carrying out several activities yet there had been no attempt to document its effectiveness.

In the first part of this analysis report, year-wise activities that have been conducted at BPNI over these years are highlighted and in the second part an attempt is made to study the effect of BPNI campaign in India on the policies or other parameters related to infant feeding. As we are increasingly involved into different areas of work, it becomes important to study the effectiveness to serve as a guide for future work and as well as for others.

1  2  3  4  5

Arun Gupta