Helping others is a good deed. It is not only good for them but also for us. It makes us happier and healthier. Helping doesn’t mean in monetary terms only. You don’t have to be rich to help. You just have to have the drive and will to do it. We can give them our time, ideas and energy rather than giving them money. Helping others also connects us to many other people. It makes a better and positive environment for everyone. Helping others comes from within. Nobody can teach you to help others. Even if you are taught, there always will be an obligation to do it. You’ll think that you HAVE to do it. If you have it in you, you’ll automatically enjoy helping others. Helping teaches us that we shouldn’t wait to thank you or we shouldn’t expect anything in return while helping. Help because you want to help and not because you’ll gain something out of it.

Dr Rani Bang has been working with one of the most under-developed tribal communities in central India. She is a gynaecologist by profession.

Dr Rani Bang’s first encounter with the troublesome health education and care in rural India happened in 1978 in the village of Kanhapur, in Maharashtra’s Wardha district, when a widowed landless labourer’s two-year-old daughter died in front of her eyes.

The woman had come to the gynaecologist to seek treatment for her infant daughter for gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Looking at the severely dehydrated child, Dr Bang had told Rai-bai to take her to the nearest hospital. Rai-bai didn’t.

Two days later, when Dr Bang arrived at the clinic, the same infant was gasping for breath in her five-year-old sister and died right there before her eyes.

Dr Bang was furious when she found out that Rai-bai had gone to the fields. But Rai-bai had gently said that she was a widow and she could manage to light her ‘chulha’ (stove) at night with her earnings from working as a daily wage labourer. If she takes her child to the hospital, who would earn for the day’s food? She had an older son of thirteen years and a girl of eight. She couldn’t let her other children go hungry at the cost of saving this one. If she feeds the older children, they will grow up and help her ease my difficulties.

It was Dr Bang’s first lesson that healthcare was not solely about medicine and healing, but also about being sensitive to one’s patients. It had a great impact on her life.

Jump to 2018. It has been 30 years since Dr Rani Bang and her husband, Dr Abhay Bang, dedicated their lives to the social and educational upliftment of the lowest of the low, in Maharashtra’s tribal district of Gadchiroli.

The Padma Shri winning couple returned from the US to set up a grassroots health organisation, SEARCH (Society for Education, Action & Research in Community Health), in 1986. Through their extensive health surveys and researches in the villages that helped them to discover that a lot of women in those villages had gynaecological disorders, a majority of which were STD-related. Dr Rani was the only gynaecologist in the district when she started working there. She was the first one to perform a cesarean surgery in that area.

Their ground-breaking research on how pneumonia and not diarrhoea was the principal cause of under-five mortality shook the World Health Organisation and made it change its drug manufacture strategy. Their papers were published in the internationally acclaimed journal, Lancet, which honoured them as “the pioneers of healthcare in rural India”. Dr Rani and her husband set up Shodh-gram, 17 km from Gadchiroli, on a 13-acre plot in 1993. Apart from their renowned, cost-effective Home-Based Newborn Care Programme, the couple has been giving rigorous training to women/dais in villages. This includes examining expectant mothers, diagnosing their health, alerting experts in case of any concerns, and administering basic medicines to the mother and the newborn child. These women termed as ‘arogya doot’, which means, ‘health warrior’, are also trained to administer injections to newborns.

Today, Shodh-gram is their home, research campus, and the quarters for their voluntary organisation, SEARCH. The 13-acre plot is always bustling with activity. It also has a de-addiction centre, a farming patch to train tribal youth and a programme that imparts sex-education to school kids.

It could have been easy for Dr Rani Bang and her husband to live a comfortable life but they decided to return to their country and work for the poorest of the poor. It is indeed visionary medical professionals like them that drive India into the future.

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