Vedanta Aluminium conducts week-long filaria awareness campaign for communities in Jharsuguda, Odisha

Jharsuguda : Vedanta Aluminium, India’s largest producer of aluminium and value-added products, concluded a filaria awareness campaign in 80 villages in and around Jharsuguda, under its health & sanitation community development intervention. As part of the awareness drive, District Magistrate and Collector of Jharsuguda, Saroj Kumar Samal, flagged-off Vedanta’s ‘Filaria Awareness Rath’, a van equipped with visual aids and announcement systems for sensitizing communities on filaria. The week-long mobile health campaign sensitized residents on ways to prevent filaria and distributed filaria prevention tablets in the villages.

Speaking on the awareness drive,  Sunil Gupta, CEO-Vedanta Ltd., Jharsuguda said, “Our community healthcare initiatives strive to ensure the well-being of Jharsuguda’s residents. We have undertaken several health interventions in this region, including providing quality doorstep healthcare services to people in over 27 villages through Mobile Health Units. Our COVID-19 interventions have benefitted more than 1.5 lakh people to date. With such projects and many more health initiatives, we are committed in our efforts to improving the quality of life of our local communities.

Appreciating the initiative,  Saroj Kumar Samal, Hon’ble District Magistrate and Collector of Jharsuguda said, “Vedanta’s efforts to sensitize the community towards the prevention of filaria will go a long way in supporting our fight against this endemic. They have also helped us in administering preventive medicine to the communities, which  will bolster the State administration’s efforts to prevent filaria in the villages.”

In line with its objective of improving the health conditions of local communities, Vedanta provides a wide spectrum of basic and specialized health services at Jharsuguda such as:

• Doorstep healthcare services in 27 villages through a Mobile Health Unit, covering 32,000 people per annum. This has led to a reduced incidence of seasonal diseases in the community.
• Specialised camps on malaria, anaemia, dengue, jaundice, mother & child health in association with Wockhardt Foundation, Apollo Hospitals, District Health Department, etc.
• Project Jagruti, India’s first employer-led model (ELM) project on HIV/AIDS prevention in partnership with National AIDS Control Society (NACO) and Odisha State AIDS Control Society (OSACS), covering 30,000 people to date.
• Clean water and sanitation program, as part of which Vedanta regularly undertakes pond cleaning, tube well cleaning and repairing, drain cleaning and repair, etc. in peripheral villages, to ensure the cleanliness of communal spaces and the community’s access to good quality water.

Vedanta’s social interventions in the domains of quality education, sustainable livelihood, women empowerment, health, water and sanitation, bio-investment, and community infrastructure benefit nearly 80,000 people across 72 villages in Jharsuguda and nearby areas, in a year. It empowers more than 4000 women from over 330 SHGs, provides doorstep healthcare services to about 32,000 people annually, gives educational support to more than 6400 students, has planted more than 1.48 lakh trees in partnership with the community, and built 570 plus infrastructural projects at the community level.

Vedanta is India’s largest producer of green metal, aluminium, operating a world-class 1.6 MTPA aluminium smelter and 3615 MW thermal power generation facility in Jharsuguda, Odisha. The only Indian smelter in the global ‘1 Million Tonne’ production and export club, Vedanta Jharsuguda is a leader in value-added aluminium products that find critical applications across core industries. With its state-of-the-art facilities, unparalleled engineering prowess, R&D and innovation abilities, Vedanta Jharsuguda is working towards a sustainable and greener future for all by spurring emerging applications of aluminium, the ‘Metal of the Future.