Feb 20, 2009, 6:40 GMT
New Delhi - Friends and family of Pinki Sonkar and Mohammad Gulzar Saifi will stay awake in their homes in India's northern Uttar Pradesh state Sunday to catch the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on their televisions.
Eight-year-old Pinki and Saifi, 26, are not part of the cast of Slumdog Millionaire, the rags-to-riches story from the Mumbai slums that is a favourite for the Oscars.
They appear in two separate short documentary films about health issues in India which have been nominated in the Documentary (Short) category.
Smile Pinki, directed by United States-based filmmaker Megan Mylan, is about the struggle of children with cleft lip deformity.
The Final Inch, the second short, focuses on the spirit and resilience of frontline workers in India's polio eradication programme.
Those involved in the films are hoping that an Oscar will bring the issues to the forefront and raise awareness.
Pinki, who lives in a village in Mirzapur district of northern Uttar Pradesh, dropped out of school because of her deformity.
Smile Pinki focuses on the little girl's struggle against cruel taunts like 'the cut-lip girl' and isolation in school and the community.
It shows how her life was transformed by a simple surgery done for free by Subodh Kumar Singh, a doctor based at the GS Memorial Hospital in Varanasi town. The surgery was sponsored by the New York-based global charity, the Smile Train.
Every year 35,000 children are born with a cleft lip deformity in India. Most of them come from poor communities like Pinki's and cannot afford the simple and not very expensive curative surgery.
'The nomination for Smile Pinki for an Oscar is bound to bring awareness about this congenital anomaly among the public and health agencies and is, therefore, good news for all cleft lip patients whose life can change,' Singh, project director of Smile Train India, said in a telephone interview.
The Smile Train project offers free surgery for cleft lip patients from poor families and has sponsored over 150,000 surgeries across India since 2000.
Singh did the first round of surgery on Pinki when she was six. 'Her smile today is my reward,' Singh said, hoping Pinki will have a 'big smile' after the Oscars ceremony which she is attending with her father.
Among the stars of The Final Inch, made by Irene Taylor Brodsky and Tom Grant, is Saifi, who has battled his polio brought-on disability to become a graduate and runs tutorial classes for children from his home in Meerut district of Uttar Pradesh.
But more than Saifi, the real stars of The Final Inch are people like Munzareen Fatima and Ashfaq Bhat, tireless workers in the effort to eradicate polio in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the only two pockets where the disease survives in India.
Fatima is a community mobilizer of the polio eradication programme who works with the UNICEF-led Social Mobilization Network.
The film follows the burkha-clad woman on her tenacious house-to-house visits in poor Muslim-dominated communities in Uttar Pradesh as she convinces families of the urgency that every child below age 5 should receive the oral polio vaccine.
Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that mainly affects small children. It can cause permanent paralysis and death, but can be prevented through immunization. The virus is spread through contaminated food and water.
Fatima's task is not easy. The film shows her trying to tackle misconceptions about the vaccine - that it is a sterilization programme aimed at the Muslim community.
Bhat is a doctor who travels to villages in Bihar by boat and on foot to detect cases of polio and monitor the quality of the vaccine.
India reported 559 polio cases in 2008, about a third of the total cases worldwide. It reported 10 fresh cases in 2009. Its success in eradicating the disease is important in a global context.
More than 465,000 health workers go door-to-door in endemic pockets in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh every six to eight months vaccinating more than 58 million children.
'These heroes are not only writing history, they are paving the way for other endemic countries - Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria - to succeed,' said Hamid Jafari, project manager of the World Health Organization's National Polio Surveillance Project in India.
The Final Inch was produced by Vermilion Films with funding from US-based search engine Google.
Smile Pinki was made by Principe Productions, a non-profit film production company supported by the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
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