Twenty-five-year-old Khemwanti Pradhan is a ‘Mitanin’ – a trained and accredited community health worker – based in the Nagarbeda village of the Bastar region in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. Since 2007, Pradhan has been informing local women about government health schemes and urging them to deliver their babies at a hospital instead of in their own homes. Ironically, when Pradhan gave birth to her first child in 2012, she herself was unable to visit a hospital because government security forces chose that very day to conduct a raid on her village, which is believed to be a hub of armed communist insurgents. In the panic and chaos that ensued, the village all but shut down, leaving Pradhan to manage on her own. “Security men were carrying out a door-to-door search for Maoist rebels.

They arrested many young men from our village. My husband and my brother-in-law were scared and both fled to the nearby forest. “When my labour pains began, there was nobody around. I boiled some water and delivered my own baby,” she said. Thanks to her training as a Mitanin, which simply means ‘friend’ in the local language, Pradhan had a smooth and safe delivery. But not everyone is so lucky. Increasing levels of violence across India due to ethnic tensions and armed insurgencies are taking their toll on women and cutting off access to crucial reproductive health services.

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