Cricketer Anil Kumble administers vaccine to a child

There is more on the theme front surrounding children this festive season beyond pencils and lozenges.

One of the biggest health concerns of our time ? polio ? may become the theme of Kali puja in a Diamond Harbour club this year, drawing inspiration from a similar effort in the city.

It was a club in Kasba which had chosen polio as the theme around which to decorate their Durga puja pandal this year.

?Experts from an international agency have contacted us and promised to buy the 30-odd models depicting various aspects of polio awareness after seeing our Durga puja pandal,? informs Tarak Das of Bediadanga Sarbojanin Durgotsav in Kasba.

?We heard that the concept may also be used in a Diamond Harbour Kali puja with our models,? he adds.

In a city where every second pandal churns out a different theme, usually with an eye on footfall and awards, the focus on polio by the 56-year-old Kasba puja deserves kudos.

?Control of polio is an important social concern in our country, even in our state, and we thought that it would be worthwhile to educate pandal-hoppers on the issue,? observe secretaries Asim Bain and Laxman Das.

The idea had caught the imagination of the thousands who flocked the pandal on the Puja days.

?Many visitors quizzed us on the materials we had put up for display at the pandal. We tried to answer their queries with the help of the awareness materials received from different sources,? inform the young turks of the club who conceived the theme.

The effort put in to understand the issue is apparent in the models and the paintings addressing the disease in the minutest detail.

The paintings that had been put up at the puja site deal depict a range of vignettes ? a polio-stricken child, motivators trying to impress upon the female folk the virtues of vaccination, marking of the resistant household, female workers administering polio drops in houses...

A field at the Bediadanga puja was turned into a typical village. Other than the pandal itself, it had a primary health centre, tea shop, mud huts, including a resistant one ? where the motivators were trying to convince the male member of the family with his wife looking on from a distance ? and a primary school.

?The whole thing was planned in such a way so that one could have a fair idea about the details of the polio programme,? explains club member Amaresh Haldar, a physician.

?Use of such a theme for a social occasion like Durga puja proves that the awareness of the common people has increased manifold about the disease. They are now ready to take up the onus to eradicate polio,? observes Jude Hendriques, programme communication officer of Unicef, the organisation spearheading the polio campaign in the country.

Unicef and its partner non-government organisation in the city EnGIO provided awareness materials like leaflets, posters, T-shirts, cassettes with songs on polio to the puja organisers.