Kilkari Initiative | UPSC

‘Kilkari’ (meaning ‘a baby’s gurgle’), is a centralized interactive voice response (IVR) based mobile health service which delivers free, weekly, time-appropriate 72 audio messages about pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare directly to families’ mobile phones from the second trimester of pregnancy until the child is one year old.

Women who are registered in Reproductive Child Health (RCH) portal based on the woman’s LMP (last menstrual period) or the child’s DoB (Date of Birth), receive a weekly call with pre-recorded audio content directly to the mobile phones of pregnant women and mothers with children under the age of one year.

Kilkari audio messages are present in the form of voice of a fictitious doctor character called Dr. Anita.

Designed and launched originally in Bihar in 2013, Kilkari was adopted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, in 2014, and scaled up nationally.

Kilkari Programme is centrally hosted by MoHFW for all the States/UTs and no further investment in the technology, telephony infrastructure or operational costs is required to be borne by States/UTs.

This service is FREE of cost for States/UTs and beneficiaries.

The programme is service is integrated with centralized Reproductive Child Health (RCH) portal of MoHFW’s and is the single source of information for this mHealth service.

Currently Kilkari is under implementation in 18 States / UTs namely Andhra Pradesh, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Chandigarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Uttarakhand  & Mobile Academy is operational in 17 States/UTs except Chandigarh with six languages viz. Hindi, Bhojpuri, Oriya, Assamese, Bengali & Telugu version.

This programme aims to:

• Improve families’ knowledge of preventive healthcare practices,
• Improve uptake of life-saving preventive healthcare practices,
• Enable families to seek timely care for health issues among pregnant women, mothers and their children.

Kilkari adopts a ‘fit-for-purpose’ approach whereby the content and the channel of communication is based on:

women’s access to technology, presence of risk factors among pregnant women, mothers and their children, and

equity encumbrance in women and children.

– Low-risk women and children have access to nuanced voice calls and multimedia content with two-way communication using the WhatsApp messaging platform, based on their access to technology.

• Those with high-risk conditions and/or facing inequities are supported via targeted content, 2-way communication, and long-term handholding (call centre/WhatsApp support).

KILKARI 2.0

• The augmented version of the programme (Kilkari 2.0) uses multiple delivery channels like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and WhatsApp to deliver multimedia content and facilitate two-way communication. Kilkari 2.0 version places greater emphasis on addressing high-risk factors, and challenges with regard to gender and equity.