Tribal Health & Nutrition Portal -“Swasthya”

• Tribal Health & Nutrition Portal: One-stop solution for the health & nutrition status of the tribal population of India. The Ministry of Tribal Affairs in collaboration with Piramal Swasthya, the Centre of Excellence has developed this Tribal Health and Nutrition Portal ‘Swasthya’, a one- stop solution presenting all information pertaining to tribal health and nutrition related to Scheduled Tribe people. ‘Swasthya’ is the first of its kind comprehensive platform for health and nutrition related information of the tribal population of India. It has a dashboard, knowledge repository, partner segment, Sickle Cell Diseases (SCD) support corner.
• The dashboard presents data curated from multiple sources for the 177 identified high priority tribal districts. In addition, the Portal also has research studies, innovations and best practices on tribal community curated from multiple sources related to tribal health and nutrition. In addition, the SCD Support Corner available in the Portal encourages people with Sickle Cell disease or trait to register themselves. It is hoped that this Portal will bridge the existing knowledge, drive evidence-based policy making and catalyze a series of actions which will ultimately lead to overall improvements in the health and nutrition status of the tribal population in India. The Portal will be managed by the Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Knowledge Management in Health and Nutrition, established by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in collaboration with Piramal Swasthya Management and Research Institute. This CoE works towards consolidating data for tribal health & nutrition, facilitating evidence-based policy making, documenting successful models, best practices and innovative solutions, disseminating and facilitating exchange of knowledge, creating networks and collaborating with stakeholders to improve tribal health & nutrition outcomes.
• Linguistic diversity — a point that becomes even more apparent when you look at the actual list of languages, which include 25 from the Indo-European family, 4 Turkic languages, 3 Uralic, and 1 each from the AfroAsiatic (Arabic), Sino Tibetan (Chinese), Dravidian (Tamil), Kartvelian (Georgian), Japonic (Japanese), and Koreanic (Korean) families, as well as Basque. The ethnological Atlas material is, of course, not the only criterion the study uses for identifying cultural proximity, but digging in to other aspects of the analysis reveals similar assumptions. As my friend Lavanya Murali noted to me, the treatment of geographic proximity and shared linguistic history, for example, doesn’t really contend with the dynamics of how people interact across linguistic boundaries such that similarities can be produced through interaction, rather than as an inherent property of language — with both these elements, in turn, abstracted from an idea of “culture”.
• All of this, for me, calls the conceptual framework that this research relies upon into question, and at the very least, demonstrates that this work doesn’t support linguistic anthropologists’ claims about language and culture. As such, this is not a matter of saying the same thing with different methodological evidence, but rather saying something completely different based on an entirely distinct set of assumptions about language and culture – ones that, in fact, I work really hard to teach students to examine as ideological claims rather than fundamental truths. This even presents something of a meta-commentary, as it’s worth noting that meaning doesn’t even align within languages, and that the meaning of ‘meaning’ isn’t always clear and translatable — I could go on, but you get the point. In addition to all this, I want to ask — why this research? Why ask these questions? This has been a central piece of the critique I have brought to my less-sarcastic Twitter comments, and that still holds after reading the study itself.
• The researcher interviewed makes the claim that this is the first “data driven” approach to the question, and further explains that the motivation comes from a desire to improve upon the time-consuming need to do things like “conduct long, careful interviews with bilingual speakers who evaluate the quality fo translations”.