Our fight against polio finally paying off: Amitabh Bachchan

With half the world's population now living in urban areas, Unicef's State of the World's Children report 2012 focuses on millions of children who live in poverty and deprivation in our growing towns and cities. In the report, to be launched in India today, Amitabh Bachchan describes the challenge of immunizing slum children against polio.

"Today, India stands on the brink of eradicating polio - arguably the greatest public health achievement in its history. When the polio eradication campaign started in 1988, India was reporting around 500 polio cases per day. Since then, more than 4 million children have been saved from paralysis or death. All our hard work is paying off. But the simple truth is that as long as polio exists anywhere in the world, the threat will persist.

"Polio is now a virus of the poorest, making its final stand in the most forgotten places, among the most forgotten people. Reaching these people - the slum dwellers, the nomads, the migrants, the families of construction workers living beside the plush high-rises they build - is one of the greatest challenges in public health.

"India's polio eradication programme is actively following a detailed 'underserved strategy' to target India's hardest-to-reach people, including those living in urban slums, in order to raise immunity among those populations at highest risk. It is not an easy task - literally millions of migrant families move back and forth across the country each week, and in the traditionally polio-endemic states of UP and Bihar, around 750,000 children are born each month. In order to eradicate polio in India, it is essential to reach and immunize every last child. And in the swelling slums of India's heaving cities, every last child is hard to find.

"Consider Dharavi, one of the largest slums in my home town of Mumbai - home to a million people in just 3 square kilometres. Here polio virus immunization teams must follow carefully developed micro-plan maps, walking single file along the tiny lanes, scrambling up rickety ladders to reach the children living in corrugated iron homes stacked one on top of the other, three or four stories high. The immunization teams then mark these corrugated iron walls with chalk so that the monitors who will follow in the coming days can see which houses have been reached. Additional teams return to cover any children who were missed.

"Mumbai, India's financial capital and home to its film industry, is among the world's biggest and richest cities. It is also believed to contain the highest proportion and largest absolute number of slum dwellers. By some estimates, between 100 and 300 new families arrive each day in search of work. All too often, migrant families of low socio-economic status find themselves in a slum. All too often, the hardest-to-reach children in our country are living right under our noses.

"India's polio eradication programme demonstrates that it is possible to ensure equity in the availability of health services in even the poorest, most densely populated environments. It proves that you can find every last child in the city. And it means that in Mumbai, while the children of the slums continue to face many threats, polio need not be one of them."