If Vandana Kolhe had not been irritated by the continuously buzzing phone, she would have died. “I picked up the call, and someone was speaking to me in an extremely calm voice,” she recalls.
“I am far from you but just a second away on a call. Don’t cry,” she heard the stranger say. Kolhe stepped back and slowly began walking toward her hut in Lonhar village of India’s Maharashtra state. “I was about to attempt another suicide, but something stopped me,” she recalls the challenging moments from 2021.
The calm voice on the phone was Accredited Social Health Activist, or ASHA, worker, Netradipa Patil.
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About the author
Sanket Jain
Sanket Jain is an award-winning independent journalist and documentary photographer based in western India’s Maharashtra state. He is a senior People’s Archive of Rural India and an Earth Journalism Network fellow. His work has appeared in more than 35 publications. Sanket is the recipient of the Covering Climate Now Award, One World Media Award, New York University’s Online Journalism Award, and several other national and international awards.
