A beacon in the medical field

PROFILE: Dr Binayak Sen

The 400-bed Shaheed Hospital, situated in the Dalli Rajhara industrial area in Durg, Chhattisgarh, completed 25 years of its establishment last Sunday.

But there was no celebration because the doctor who helped set up the hospital, Binayak Sen, was behind the bars for alleged ties with Maoist insurgents.

It was a pioneering effort on Sen's part to build a health programme and a hospital owned and operated by a workers' organisation for the benefit of the common people of the area.

It was built after his activist friend Shankar Guha Niyogi was shot dead in the '80s for speaking for labour rights. Today, the hospital has become a source of inspiration for all those across the country who dare to stick their necks out for civil rights.

Health activist Meera Shiva says Sen, a gold medalist paediatrician from Christian Medical College, Vellore, could have easily migrated to the US and made million of dollars.

But he chose to work among the poor. His associates in the Medico Friends Circle and the People's Health Movement are today involved in a frenzied signature campaign against his arrest.

Born in Kolkata in 1950, Sen was honoured with the Paul Harrison award for community health work by his alma mater in 2004.

He was a faculty member at Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health in the 1970s before moving to work in a community-based rural health centre in Hoshangabad district in undivided Madhya Pradesh, paying special attention to tuberculosis. In 1981, he moved to Dalli Rajhara "" the mines area of Bhilai Steel Plant, to help set up Shaheed Hospital.

Since 1991, Sen has been working to develop relevant patterns of community-based primary healthcare, both at the policy and field levels, in different parts of Chhattisgarh. He was also a member of the state advisory committee set up to pilot the community-based healthcare programme of the mitanins, the trained women health workers in Chhattisgarh.

As general secretary of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, he organised numerous fact-finding campaigns against human rights violations in the state, including custodial deaths, fake encounters and death due to dysentery and malnutrition.

He also worked to expose oppression and bad governance in Salwa Judum "" the state government-sponsored people's movement against the Maoists. His arrest is bound to affect these campaigns as well as the oppressed people for whom he used to fight.

For more, visit www.pucl.org