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Jitender Gupta
The Ganiyari team of doctors in rural Chhattisgarh
Profile
The Gutsy Gang
Ganiyari Doctors, Chhattisgarh
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the good doctors
In India's jungles, remote hills, dusty plains these specialist doctors have sacrificed all they had to spread hope
Anjali Puri
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Profile
The Georges, Sittlingi
S. Anand
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Profile
Dr Pradeep Trehan, Ranikhet
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Opinion
Docs in villages need to be multi-skilled. For, there are very few of them.
Kavery Nambisan
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In this part of rural Chhattisgarh, plastic soapcases travel—in thousands. Health workers in remote villages hand them over to schoolchildren, who walk them to the highway, where a bus driver collects them on his daily route, and honks loudly outside a medical centre in village Ganiyari. Lab staff here know what they have to do. Examine under a microscope the blood smears contained in the cases, and send back the result—malaria positive, or negative. By the same route, in the same soapcase.
The people behind this amazing scheme aren't short of ideas. Their Jan Swasthya Sansthan (JSS) in Ganiyari buzzes with energy and inventiveness—a Rs 40 safe-baby delivery pack, diagnostic kits, cheap drugs, outreach clinics deep in sal forests where a tribal woman 100 km away from a motorable road can see a doctor, get her blood tested, and take home medicines at one go.
The big idea, JSS itself, was born in the heads of a mid-30ish group of doctors training at AIIMS in the late-90s—Yogesh Jain, Biswaroop Chatterjee, Anurag Bhargava and Raman Kataria—for whom politics wasn't anti-reservations brouhaha, but the inequities of the healthcare system. In end-'99, they dropped anchor here, with their wives, and a few fellow travellers. No one knew the region—it virtually chose itself. A derelict, tree-less government irrigation colony in Ganiyari was available on cheap lease. The health indicators for a population subsisting on single-crop, rainfall-dependent farming, were appalling. Nearly seven years later (with money raised from a few donors, such as Tata trusts) there are restored buildings, bustling opd clinics, labs, radiology equipment, a 15-bed hospital, two operating theatres, a trained staff of 70, flowering bougainvillaea, and many trees.
But this is no rural idyll. I feel like an intruder from another planet, trying to interview women doctors seeing patient after patient and then driving 20 km in the evening to Bilaspur, the nearest town, to attend to home and children. Schooling—a big worry for any rural doctor—is the reason they live in town. But the men spend about 12 nights a month at Ganiyari, to ensure there's always a doctor there. Each doctor draws a 10K salary—which means zero reserves for emergencies. One of the team has had to take up a short assignment in Libya—to fund expensive treatment for his own seriously ill child.
The other side of the story is huge, palpable goodwill for the "Ganiyari doctors", and it's not hard to see why. Their community health programme in 21 tribal villages has halved infant mortality rates—"from alarming to disturbing", says Jain wryly—and the incidence of malaria has dropped by two-thirds. Patients from more than 1,100 villages flock to Ganiyari, and many come from towns, too. There are 30,000 consultations a year, 1,500 surgeries. But that is not the story the doctors want to tell. They would much rather I used media space to write about over 300 of their patients, many of them young people, who suffer from life-sapping rheumatic heart disease—for whom there is no affordable surgery available in Chhattisgarh.
|
the good doctors
In India's jungles, remote hills, dusty plains these specialist doctors have sacrificed all they had to spread hope
Anjali Puri
|
|
|
Profile
The Georges, Sittlingi
S. Anand
|
|
|
Profile
Dr Pradeep Trehan, Ranikhet
|
|
|
Opinion
Docs in villages need to be multi-skilled. For, there are very few of them.
Kavery Nambisan
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|
|
|
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