I was visiting a Primary Health Centre in Baisi block of Purnea district in Bihar recently and came across this sign. It says 'Pariwar Kalyan Pakhwara', which means Family Planning Fortnight. The Pakhwada or fortnight, has become the favoured unit of time for many government supported interventions these days. We currently have the Diarrhoea Control Fortnights that‘s an effort to get health workers at all levels, especially in villages, focused on treating diarrhoea among under-five children with simple solutions like ORS and Zinc. Solutions that can save more than 200,000 children's lives every year. Policy makers understand that a two week focus will not rid the country of diarrhoea, but our public systems have become used to working in a “mission mode”. Building a habit for doing some basic things doesn’t come easily, so we try and get people to do things for a fortnight with a hope that some of those activities stick.
There’s a wide collection of Pakhwadas. The Measles Fortnights and the Intensified Immunization Fortnights. We even have 'Wajan Pakhwadas' or Weight Fortnights when we try and fatten up kids in 14 days. There are the ubiquitous and much dreaded Hindi Pakhwadas where people will spend much of their time flipping the pages of a Hindi dictionary to make sense of the memo they just got, hopefully adding to their vernacular word power in the process.
My favourite is the Janasankhya Sthirita Pakhwara (the Population Stabilization Fortnight) where we try and Stabilize the Population for a fortnight. For some reason I have this image of a billion people trying to stay standing on one foot, with one eye on a two-week calendar, counting down the days till they can go back to being themselves and procreating. And somewhere near AIIMS a digital billboard releases steam as the population clock takes a breather. If only that was true. Then we could just do a fortnight, every fortnight.
