January is special for many doctors in Nagpur as it is in this month that they spend three days serving tribal Madia Gonds in Hemalkasa at the jungle hospital set up by Prakash Amte and his wife Mandakini in Naxal-affected Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra.
They feel part of Baba Amte’s dream of integrating tribals with the developing world, and in the work carried out by Amte’s son and daughter-in-law in the last three decades, since they left Mumbai with their medical degrees, they see its fulfilment.
This week, the Amtes were named winners of the Magsaysay prize for community leadership. However, another doctor — Binayak Sen — who had dedicated his life to working with tribals of nearby Chhattisgarh, again a Naxal-affected area, has been in Raipur jail for the past one-and-a-half years for his alleged association with Naxalites.
Amte, who has also been thrown close to the Naxals in the three decades of his life there, maintains a studied silence on Naxals and the way their paths cross with those of activists.
“It is a big issue. The doctor has been in jail for a year and a half,” he says, lapsing into silence amid the festivities.
But he does not regret the life he chose. The hospital was set up in 1974, when a young Prakash Amte, fresh out of his medical college, as a birthday gift to his father Baba Amte, declared he would dedicate his life to working for his father’s dream project for the development of Madia Gonds. And hence was born the Lok Biradari Prakalp or Brotherhood of the People.
His wife Mandakini, a city-bred girl and an anaesthetist, also decided to work for the tribals with her husband.
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Today, the couple’s eldest son, Arnav, a doctor educated in Mumbai, has also followed his parents’ footsteps and dedicated himself to the welfare of Madia Gond tribals; and so has his gynaecologist wife.
The younger son, Anu, also works with the Hemalkasa project where the Amtes are running a hospital which treats about 45,000 patients annually, and a boarding school which houses about 600 tribal students.
The Amtes know what the prize exactly means. “It will save a lot of effort in highlighting the needs of the tribals, motivate the youth, and bring all these to public knowledge,” Prakash Amte says. Amte, who was turned away by the US embassy for being too poor to deserve an American visa two years ago, also knows too well that help is not easy to get when working in the jungles.
“People come and want to learn and do something. Often, they want to run the whole project. They sometimes replicate it in their areas... that is the secret of its success. But interest does not always mean any material gain for the project, he adds.
Prakash Amte, whose son and daughter-in-law have also joined him and his wife in working for the tribals, feels the process of young doctors turning to rural areas was inspired by Baba Amte’s work for leprosy patients, but has now reduced to the minimum.
“The motto of doctors now is different. When you spend Rs 25 lakh to acquire a doctor’s degree, you would not want to live in the jungles earning nothing,” he adds.