Improving Rural Health Care, One Boat Trip At A Time
by The Daily Eye Team June 9 2015, 4:06 pm Estimated Reading Time: 0 mins, 35 secsMore than 10 years ago, Sanjoy Hazarika heard about the death of a mother in a remote island in Assam, a state in northeast India, because she couldn’t get to the hospital in time. This led the soft-spoken professor to think: Why not bring the hospital to the people? And he did just that. In 2005, the Center for Northeast Studies and Policy Research, where Hazarika serves as managing trustee, realized the Indian government wasn’t going to build clinics on the geographically isolated islands along the Brahmaputra — a transboundary river flowing from Tibet to Bangladesh — and that people there couldn’t access services on the mainland.