This article originally appeared on Healthy Newborns Network.

In a bright and colourful room in the government-run Veerangana Avanti Bai Women’s Hospital in Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow, mothers are quietly nurturing their premature infants through their touch.

With soothing music in the background, the skin-to-skin contact or Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) between the mother and the baby works wonders ensuring the survival of these babies.

KMC is a standard therapy for caring low-birth-weight infants in under-resourced settings that can reduce “morbidity and mortality” and recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to estimates, the therapy has the potential to reduce 1 million infant deaths globally every year.

Sridevi, who uses one name, is one such mother to have benefitted from the innovative therapy. For Sridevi was worried about the survival of her daughter who weighed just 900 grammes at birth. She was all the more precious because she was the second surviving child of six pregnancies.

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