External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, in his book, talks of the "India Way" in international relations. An "India way" is catching on in health care, too: The way to free, quality health care for all. Two young men, Bollywood singer Sumeet Tappoo and Bengali lab owner Subhajt Roy Mukherjee, happily wandered into this way by starting free health care services in Fiji and Kolkata five years ago. They went about their missions separately but were united in their devotion to Sathya Sai Baba.
People who thought that these initiatives were unsustainable look at them with awe and respect today. In March this year, Fijian President Jioji Korote visited his country’s first free heart hospital for children, which was built on the rock of Tappoo’s devotion. Ready for inauguration, it will become a lifesaver for many of the 2,500 children who are born in the region every year with congenital heart disease.
The director of the Sai Prema Foundation of Fiji, Tappoo had started with a free mobile health care service in the countryside in 2016. It was supported by the island’s health ministry and leading citizens. Later the foundation opened a health centre in the capital city, Suva. Realising that congenital heart disease was a leading cause of preventable deaths among Fijian children, the foundation brought in a surgical team from India’s Sathya Sai Sanjeevani Hospitals. The team operated on nearly one hundred children for free.
By then, Tappoo was dreaming of building a free heart hospital for children on the island. Baba’s followers the world over shared his dream and helped him build a $25 million hospital with 30 beds. The Fijian government and the WHO extended it all support. The United Nations Development Programme offered the foundation technical support for the hospital, and the Japanese government donated a hospital-on-wheels. Teams of doctors from India, Australia, New Zealand and the USA are keen to come and do surgeries for free, once the Covid-19 pandemic eases and borders reopen. Local pre- and post-operative care capacity has been built by training Fijian medical personnel at Sanjeevani heart hospitals in India. All free of charge.
The lab owner Subhajt Roy Mukherjee established his health care service Aarogya Vahini in 2017, with a hospital-on-wheels and an ambitious goal of creating a rural zone free of non-communicable diseases (NCD) within 70km of Kolkata. Aarogya Vahini took the mobile hospital to 20 nodal spots five days a week for screening for NCD. Those at risk were investigated and given medicines free of cost. Trained community health workers doubled as health awareness creators and strengthened links between Aarogya Vahini and the villagers. Impressed by this work, Prashanthi Cancer Care and Tata Trust donated a hospital-on-wheels each to Aarogya Vahini. Four years later, Aarogya Vahini has completed more than 200,000 screenings, with a beneficiary pool of 75,000.
Though NCDs were its target, Aarogya Vahini noticed the dire need for a nutrition programme for children, as well as access to primary health care for expectant mothers, and secondary care hospitalisation and surgeries for many other patients. It started a ‘Nutrition Seva’ by serving a nutrition supplement, Saisure, to the children; their numbers will touch 30,000 in the next two years. Networking with hospitals, Aarogya Vahini has facilitated 500 cataract surgeries and 60 general surgeries free of charge and, in the process, raised an Aarogya Bandhu brigade of volunteers. The volunteers help the patients by serving as bystanders and by taking them to hospitals for surgeries and follow-ups.
Aarogya Vahini plans to extend its services to 100,000 villagers across eight districts in West Bengal and neighbouring states of Jharkhand and Assam. The health departments and district administrations of these states have appreciated Arogya Vahini's work. Youthful volunteers of the organisation did impressive relief work during Cyclone Amphan and sustained for several months 30,000 marooned people in the Sundarbans by providing them with rations and essential medicines.
Both Tappoo and Mukherjee have followed Baba's ‘Triple-S' formula, which taps the synergy of partnership between dedicated 'Sansthas’ (organisations), ‘Sarkar' (government) and ‘Samaj’ (civil society) for the public good. Both of them have been feted; Tappoo received the highest civilian honour of Fiji while Aarogya Vanini has won the Dr Abdul Kalam Award for Excellence. Inspired by the duo and led by Baba's former student, the mystic Sadguru Madhusudan Sai, Malaysian and Indonesian youth have launched free health centres and mobile health care services in inaccessible mountainous areas in their countries.
Baba's devotees are building a secondary care hospital in Batticaloa, home to 30,000 war widows, in Sri Lanka. In Enugu, Nigeria, the 35,000 sq foot Aruike Hospital serves all for free under a liberal Christian priest, Father Charles Ogada. The Sanjeevani team flew into Nigeria too and operated on scores of African children with congenital heart disease for free.
Mississippi, the poorest state of the USA, has a unique Sathya Sai Healthcare Centre: it is on the premises of an IT hub called People’s Shores in Clarksdale. Inspired by Baba, entrepreneur Murali Vullaganti of Rural Shores fame, established the IT hub to train people and generate employment in the largely African American neighbourhood. The free Health Centre was launched in 2018.
In India, beating the pandemic, the Sathya Sai Sanjeevani hospitals performed life-saving surgeries on more than one thousand children in the first six months of the lockdown. A "Mother and Child Health" programme, which is expanding across states with government and societal support, provides expectant mothers and toddlers quality antenatal care and nutritional supplements. To cater to the underserved Bastar tribal belt of Chhattisgarh, the groundbreaking ceremony was performed last month for the first of ‘Mamatwa’ Maternity Hospitals for the rural poor.
The young Sadguru Madhusudan Sai and his protégés are set to disrupt the belief that quality health care is impossible without expensive hospitals and hefty insurance premiums. They are steadfast in their conviction that, in the Indian spirit of "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam", we can ensure quality health care, including tertiary care, free of charge through the cooperation of nations and governments, dedicated organisations and global citizens.