Ooty: This year’s Women’s Day, falling on March 8, is something very special to the hills here, especially for the Toda tribal community which is one of the primitive tribes in the country, as for the first time in history, a Toda tribal girl has become a “doctor”. She is a dentist, heralding that Toda women are on the road to progress through education.
Bharathi Mandesh, daughter of Mandesh Kuttan, a Toda tribal leader, residing at Denadmund Toda hamlet near here, made it big this year as she now plans for higher studies in dentistry to script a new era history in the annals of tribal education and development.
Stating that she is the first ever “doctor” as far as Toda tribal community is concerned in Nilgiris, she said that only after pursuing dentistry she came to know the importance of oral and dental health and its importance in keeping a good health.
“In future I will try to become a dentist in a government hospital. I will use my time to conduct dental camps in tribal villages to ensure that the tribesmen keep a good oral and dental hygiene,” she added.
Saying that to study MBBS was her childhood dream, she said that she missed the chance as she could not score enough marks in the Plus-2 examinations. “But, I joined dentistry course in a private college in Coimbatore. I was satisfied for making it to ‘BDS’ as it is also a medical course and would give me the ‘Dr’ prefix”, she said.
“I did my schooling in Tamil medium. Initially, I found it little difficult in studying BDS through English medium of instruction. But, my professors at college helped me a lot to learn the subjects well as I completed the course recently,” she explained.
