About the Project

Leprosy Empowerment and Awareness Drive (LEAD) is a social initiative that aims to comprehensively empower people living with leprosy in India by deconstructing the widely pervasive stigma they are met with and furnishing them with the requisite resources to improve their daily lives. Given how social exclusion greatly exacerbates the vulnerability of leprosy patients, LEAD endeavors to ensure that they are able to build robust mechanisms of health support that meets their different needs to change their conditions for the better. 

Taarah envisions a world, and she would consider her vision for LEAD complete, if she manages to  convey that one dose of the treatment renders you non infectious. Leprosy starts with a small patch and is extremely slow-progressing. The timeline from the appearance of the patch to disability, if left untreated, is 3-5 yrs. How does one ensure that all such patches are picked in time and treated, knowing that one dose makes you safe again? This is what was foremost in Taarah’s mind when creating the resources of her project

At the heart of it, LEAD taps into the power of digital media today to amplify unheard voices and overlooked opinions, thereby shedding light on the lived experiences of leprosy patients who have, time and again, been relegated to the peripheries of society. To this end, the project’s unique approach aims to redefine conventional strategies for raising awareness by amplifying leprosy patients' voices, lives, and unaddressed concerns. In today’s digital age, as visual mediums offer the most impactful avenue to capture stories, LEAD’s ardent desire is to lend a helping hand to the underserved by drawing attention to their bodies that are otherwise perceived with unfair forces of stigma and prejudice, using fascinating visual mediums, specifically compelling documentaries that foreground patients’ voices. 

Here, through the project, apart from strengthening existing stories of empowerment and changing our understanding of care and empathy, LEAD also aims to raise financial resources to bolster leprosy care. The underlying vision propelling this project is the idea that social exclusion is a dehumanizing feeling that no one should be subject to, as all patients are deserving of care and empathy, which the healthcare industry owes them. In fact, medical colleges teach only a paragraph on leprosy. So the medical fraternity also has to  become equally cognisant of its potential for early diagnosis and treatment. To foster an equal and safer future, it is important that everyone feels included, and LEAD hopes to help us make a considerable leap to a brighter tomorrow.