Sex and Reproductive Health Education Project: India

Sex and Reproductive Health Education Project: India

by Susannah Ross

November 1998

BBC World Service Training

Sexwise was a major BBC World Service Education Initiative designed to improve knowledge and awareness of sex and reproductive health amongst listeners in South Asia. The project comprised 9 radio series and accompanying support material, and was produced in collaboration with the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, South Asia Region and its members FPAs. The radio programmes were produced in Hindi, Bengali, English, Nepali, Pashto, Persian, Sinhala, Tamil and Urdu. Each was uniquely crafted to suit the needs of local listeners and material was recorded on location in the appropriate countries.

Following the success of Sexwise, the BBC World Service was approached by the Ford Foundation in India, to develop a capacity-building project in India which would encourage and enable local tv and radio producers to develop such programming. Susannah Ross, who managed this training project on behalf of BBC World service Education and World Service Training, describes how it went.

The catalyst for the project was the radio series, Sexwise, which the BBC World Service Education broadcast three years ago (in 1996) with co- funding from the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the UK Overseas Development Adminitsration (now DFID). In fact it was nine different series on the same subject -- one in English and one each in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Sinhalese, Nepali, Pashto and Persian. These programmes gave people information in a straightforward way -- about puberty, conception, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, homosexuality etc -- and had a great impact on audiences all over South Asia. They were so successful that the Sexwise project is now being extended to other regions, starting with Europe, Russia and Central Asia. In Delhi, the Ford Foundation saw the Sexwise programmes as breaking new ground and was interested in encouraging more programmes on sex and reproductive broadcast on Indian radio and television, made by producers in India. So Ford asked BBC World Service Education to propose a training project, which it did in collaboration with the World Service's Training Department.

In fact this project was highly unusual for us, and not just because of the subject matter. The BBC usually keeps training and production quite separate. One reason is that an important part of being on a training course is to be able to experiment, make mistakes and learn from them. On the other hand, if the BBC has any part in the making of a programme, the BBC expects to have editorial control. But Ford's concern was to get programmes on air. So this project has been a marriage of World Service Training's objective of developing the skills of producers and Ford's objective of increasing the spread of reliable information on sex and reproductive health through the mass media in India.

When I was asked to run the project, I must say that as someone from a background in broadcast journalism and training, rather than any specialisation in health, I was somewhat apprehensive about people's reactions. I was surprised how many people said "Oh how interesting" without giggling. But I was not surprised that one of the most consistent responses was "Oh yes, that's very important. But of course you can't talk about sex on radio or television in India."

One of our principal tasks has been to persuade producers that they can. It depends how you do it. It is a bit of a paradox. Most of us think we know a lot about sex especially, dare I say it, men. "What is there to learn?", they say, and they soon find out, thanks to our specialist trainer Hazel Slavin, what an incredibly broad subject it is and how much there is to know. Most producers start with a feeling that it is quite important. But one of the joys of this project has been to see producers' attitudes change, as they realise how much people's health and happiness and their very lives may depend on being given the right information. The producers have become enthusiasts for communicating accurate facts in an acceptable and indeed entertaining way.

We learn by experiencing, so a key element of the training has been to create an atmosphere in which producers feel comfortable talking about virtually any aspect of the subject. It is amazing how quickly that can happen. One of the producers we have worked with, Sumit Chowdhury, wrote of the first workshop in Delhi, which lasted only three and a half days,

"I was amazed that people with different upbringings and cultural backgrounds talked freely and frankly about things they wouldn't discuss even with close friends. A Bombay socialite and a portly, middle-aged Punjabi exchanged views on female orgasm; a Tamil brahmin, a Kashmiri muslim and a Marxist Bengali debated the merits of a particular contraceptive; a girl, probably still in her teens, held forth on the longevity of sexual desires.

As for me, the workshop was an eye-opener. It revealed how vast the canvas of sex is, how intrinsically it is linked with the issues of population, health, gender, religion and politics and how varied are the perceptions about its many aspects."

So we can talk about it. "But that's all right for us", we might say. It's quite another matter to get ordinary people to give interviews about such things. Well, again, it depends how you do it. Another of our key messages to producers has been to get ordinary people to convey the information. Let's get away from experts and authority figures -- doctors, officials, politicians. You don't need an official to tell you how to use a condom. You don't need a doctor to describe people's health problems: they can tell you themselves. You don't need an academic to explain why women are blamed for producing girl children: ask anyone in the family. But it takes a lot of work, a lot of research to find people with the relevant experiences and to establish a relationship of trust to encourage people to tell you, the producer, and through the producer the audience, about them. Of course you need experts for some things, to explain biological processes or how certain drugs work or what a particular surgical intervention involves. But there is a lot to be said for conveying information through people that the audience can identify with, backed up with the necessary expert knowledge, so that people do not feel they are being lectured or talked down to.

So the programmes have a great variety of people talking quite easily. This was not achieved simply by putting microphones under their noses. The producers put in hours of preparatory work with the people who appear in their programmes, not just with the children, young people and so-called ordinary people. The experts needed working on too. Just because someone is an expert in a field does not mean he or she is a good communicator. Our producers often had to put in a lot of effort to select experts who were also effective, sympathetic communicators. Questions had to be rephrased or repeated. Sometimes whole interviews were re-done to ensure that the right information came across clearly to the audience.

The first event of the project was the short workshop in Delhi in January 1998. Our project co-ordinator in India, Gautam Ojha, invited applications from the state media and from independent radio and television producers from as many different parts of India as we could. From the 75 independent producers who applied we selected 13. Doordarshan and All India Radio sent eight producers each.

We packed the three and a half days with sessions and exercises with Hazel Slavin on various aspects of the subject, some with our production trainer, Clive Holloway, on how we get messages across to an audience, a talk from a specialist in sex education in schools in Bombay, Dhun Panthaki, and a talk from the producer of the Hindi version of Sexwise, Pervaiz Alam. We had Usha Bhasin from All India Radio talk about the youth programmes she had made, and we brought with us examples of BBC programmes of sex education for school children in Britain and other programmes, and a lot of printed material for participants to read.

At the end we invited the participants to submit proposals for programmes they would like to make. These applications were in effect applications for further training and a budget. All the independent producers applied and about half the Doordarshan and All India Radio producers. The six we thought would make the best programmes were given further training in Delhi in March 1998. This time the workshop lasted two weeks. We had a detailed examination of the subject -- talking about puberty, about conception and contraception, about sexual response and sexual problems. Each producer's proposal was gradually refined in a series of interviews with the trainers and they worked on a demo to show or play to the group at the end of the second week. They were then given a budget and an agreed production schedule with the end of August as the deadline.

During the following five months the two trainers and I monitored their productions from London. We required them to send us outlines of their programmes with the message that each was intended to convey. We sent them written feedback. They had to test a sample of their programmes on two or three groups of people and report back the reaction. Again we sent them feedback. Once they had made their programmes, or most of them, we went back to Delhi to see and hear the rough versions before the producers did their final edit.

As for the training methods, I describe them as informal, but highly- structured. I especially like the photograph of Clive being informal but highly-structured on the floor. There isn't one of Hazel doing anything similar because she took the photographs. Just as important to convey the atmosphere we worked in are the pictures of the participants. We needed to make people feel comfortable talking about the subject, learning and discussing as much as possible. When it came to the production training, it was also important to create an atmosphere in which people were enjoying themselves and did not feel they were on trial or on show, rather that they could experiment and make mistakes and learn from them.

I've given you a hint of the rigorous examination that the six proposals were subjected to. This critical approach was accepted and indeed welcomed by the producers because, I believe, we had established a relationship of confidence. One session in the training was called giving and receiving feedback. This session gave rise to the slogan "lots of support and lots of challenge". We gave the producers a lot of support, but we also challenged their ideas and their ways of putting them across all along the way. That critical and self-critical approach is essential to making really good programmes.

The programmes are in no sense a portfolio. They are six individual productions. They do not pretend to cover the range of topics that might be dealt with. We decided quite early on that there was no way we could produce a definitive series or ensure that we had programmes from each of the main regions, or in each of the main languages of India, or examples of each of the main programme formats. When selecting the projects, we simply chose the ones we thought would make the best programmes. We ended up with programmes in three different languages -- Hindi, Bengali and English. Two are radio series and four are television. There are three documentaries, one children's programme, a chat show and a drama. They show what a variety of ways there are of approaching the subject and demonstrate that it is possible to talk about it. What the programmes have in common is that they know what they are trying to do and we think they do it pretty well.

First the two radio series. Malabi Gupta's programmes in Bengali start with how the sex of a child is determined at conception and end with safe delivery, going through the various aspects of healthy pregnancy, and particularly how mothers should safeguard their health by spacing their children, among other means, and how deaths in infancy can be prevented. The first programme has at its core one simple fact -- that the sex of a baby is determined by the father not the mother. She demonstrates the enormous implications of the widespread belief that it is the other way round and particularly that the mother is blame for giving birth to girls rather than boys. In the programme we hear various people talking about the consequences of this belief, then Malabi has a doctor explain how the chromosomes in the man's sperm determine the sex of the child.

Whereas Malabi's target is girls and young women in rural areas, Simi Chakrabarti's series on sexual relationships called Sath-Sath, in Hindi, is aimed at young people in urban areas, and within that group she leans towards women. Simi explores various aspects of relationships apart from pregnancy and contraception, informing her audience about sexual health, sexual response, sex and power and different sexual orientations.

There are four television productions. Starting with the youngest audience addressed, Ramakrishnan's programmes called Growing Up are in English because he has found the English-medium schools more receptive to the idea of sex education for children -- in other words before or during puberty, rather than after it has all happened. On the premise that you have to start somewhere to show what can be done, he has used a mixture of entertaining devices to put across the messages starting with the idea that some aliens, represented by puppets, are looking at pictures of human beings and wondering how and why they go through this process of changing size and shape. They ask their computer to explain.

The next topic is adolescence but the target audience is really the parents of adolescents, because Neela Kapadia's aim is to encourage parents to talk to their children more as they go through puberty and beyond. Her short documentaries consist entirely of interviews, but without the questions. They show a range of opinion among adolescents and parents and put in the views of experts, all leading to the conclusion "let's talk -- we can change the way we do things".

The target of the third television project is the student age. This time we see young people talking together, under the guidance of an experienced moderator, exploring issues of sexuality and examining their own attitudes. Chandita Mukherjee has called her programmes a workshop-on- air.

Then we come to those thinking of marriage. Sumit Chowdhury has called his film Love Story. He uses the idiom of a Hindi movie -- music and songs and fantasy -- but places his couple in a modern urban setting and has modern versions of the traditional Suthradar deliver serious messages about equality and compromise in relationships. The young couple go through courtship, marriage and the birth of their first child observed by a couple of magical figures whom they can't see and who comment on the difficulties the young couple have and how they could overcome them. In fact the magical couple represent a mature, warm and successful relationship, if only the young ones could see them.

Susannah Ross

November 1998

Revised August 8, 2002.