2. Rural India - a different country ?

Doctors who have graduated from government medical colleges in Maharashtra (and some other states as well) have to undergo a 1 year posting in a rural area of the state. This is done to recover the subsidized fees of our course in medical college. A doctor can be assigned as a Medical Officer in a hospital or health centre in any part of the state, as per the vacancies.

This blog is about my personal experience as a medical officer at a rural hospital in a village in Maharashtra.

The village of Poladpur is located in Raigad district of Maharashtra, with a population of 5000-15,000. There is a Wikipedia link that talks about the town and its surroundings. The National Highway No. 17 forms the main street of the village. It is en-route to the popular tourist destinations of Mahabaleshwar and Goa, so it receives a lot of vehicular traffic. The main language spoken is Marathi and a number of its Konkani dialects and the main occupation of the people is agriculture. 

Main village square

National Highway No. 17

Like the rest of the state, the surroundings of the village are breathtaking. It lies between the mountains of the Sahyadri range and thus experiences extremes of temperatures – heavy rainfall during the monsoons, hot summers and chilly winters.

House on the village outskirts

Village farms

The Rural hospital of Poladpur was to be my first posting as a Medical officer.

Like a lot of my colleagues, I was brought up and educated in a sheltered city atmosphere.  My exposure to rural life had been limited to short holidays and what I had seen in Indian movies, so this was to be a major lifestyle change. What I was not prepared for was the realization that I may have been living in a different country till now.

There is a very simple way of life followed. People greet you with a genuine smile on their faces. They are willing to go out of their way to help you. They are untouched by the world’s events, seemingly content in doing their daily work and being involved in their community’s welfare. Festivals are celebrated with devotion and fervour, without any false pretense or vulgar display of wealth. This village may only be 200 kilometres (125 miles) away from the city of Mumbai, but figuratively it is a world away.

But you can never be too far from the ugly face of human nature. One tends to hear about the local superstitious beliefs, about how the local politics unnecessarily interferes in your work. You see the effects of unqualified “quacks” offering “treatments” to gullible and desperate people. And you realize how difficult it is to change age-old traditions and beliefs. One glaring example that comes to mind is the desire for male children – the staff nurses at our hospital were worried that if there were too many female children delivered at the hospital, pregnant patients and their families would consciously start avoiding it.

This posting was going to be challenging in more ways than one. And I hoped that I would be up to it.