Doctor in ashram offers succor to 400 villages with Gandhian lifestyle

Vibha Augustin works in interior UP with belief that you have to be the change you want.

The Banwasi Seva Ashram, a voluntary organisation, was established in 1954 by Gobind Ballabh Pant dedicated to gram swarajya: Based on the principle that cooperative self-sufficiency of a village could create a model of self-reliance and nurture the innate decency of human beings, even if they were unlettered. 

Some of Mahatma Gandhi’s principles roll off the tongue smoothly and sound practised and glib today. For instance, that there is enough in the world for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed. Gandhi saw village life as the ideal form of intimate sacrifice and high culture, where tiny republic state based on self-sacrificing morals would sustain itself far from the mess of modern industrial life and interest-driven politics. The BSA interpreted, analysed and put into practice this and other Gandhian ideals to emerge as a transformative force in an area that is wretched in backwardness: the Sonebhadra district, home to one of India’s most monumental environmental disasters. The district was the site of the Rihand dam that created a humanitarian crisis after hundreds of villages were inundated and displacement of people caused impoverishment and loss of livelihood on an unimaginable scale. A drought in 1966 deepened the misery.

Around this time a young man fired by Gandhian ideas of trusteeship, leadership and resistance to injustice, came to the ashram accompanied by his doctor wife. Prembhai and Ragini behan had no intention of setting up an NGO empire. All they wanted to do was create health facilities that combined the principles of allopathy with native Indian medical knowledge, set up schools, and put their intellectual assets to use to help people become free. What ultimately emerged instead was a centre of the praxis of Gandhism that their doctor daughter, Vibha Augustin helps run.

The BSA covers around 400 villages in a corner of Uttar Pradesh and attracts people from Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. It represents a refuge to some. To others, it is a life-giving source because it teaches you to think.

Dr Vibha, who spoke to Business Standard from the Ashram on the telephone, says her parents would not have judged her if she had opted, after her MBBS at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences at Wardha, to go for further specialisation. What made her return, after her MD, to the ashram was the mild note of challenge in her father’s voice when he said, several times: “You are not like your mother — go ahead, study,  but you will not be able to return to the ashram and manage without your fancy gizmos and diagnostic tools. Your mother only needs her stethoscope and medical knowledge to reach a diagnosis. You will crave sophistication. You won’t get it here”. Slightly irritated, Dr Vibha would always respond that if there was anywhere she wanted to serve as a doctor, it was at the ashram — why did her father think she was so unworthy?

Return, she did — after spending several years in a Gandhian hospital in Dindigul, the Gandhian Institute of Rural Health and Family Welfare Trust. At Wardha, she passionately wanted to study psychiatry after she saw the way children, especially mentally challenged children, were treated. But ultimately, it was to gynaecology that she turned. At the BSA, she heads the medical wing of the ashram. Apart from treating patients, the ashram also trains people to diagnose and treat common medical problems using a mix of allopathy and nature cure. “When I first started practising in the Ashram, we used to have a lot of cases of burns. People here didn’t have too many clothes to keep themselves warm. They would sleep next to a fire. Frequently children got burnt by the flames. I developed a healthy respect for traditional medicine when I saw my mother treat a case of 80 per cent burns with haldi and oil. In any hospital, the man would have died.” Malaria was the most common ailment: paracetamol and painkillers would suppress the fever but the larva stayed in the body, attacking the liver and spleen with such ferocity that the patient would die in days. However, several were saved because of jeera (cumin) that has properties of reviving bile and the liver. 

Dr Vibha says controversially, that one reason why doctors, even government doctors, don’t like to go to rural areas is the repeated upward salary revision that bureaucrats get. That creates the need to consume and spend: and in a village where there is barely any electricity, no cinema, shopping mall or library, where can you spend? The Ashram offers people an alternative way of spending your life. But people have to be ready — and committed — to accept and adopt it.