Nalbari: Amid pouring monsoon rain, men, women and children run alongside the torrential Brahmaputra, waving at people in white coats on a boat. This is their boat of hope – a floating clinic, equipped with basic medical facilities and manned by doctors and paramedics taking healthcare to people in far-flung island villages that are deprived of it.
For the nearly three million people on the 2,500 islands on the Brahmaputra, amongst Asia’s largest rivers, the floating clinics are literally their lifeline.
With hospitals a far cry and communication made even worse during floods, the unique initiative of boat clinics by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research (CNES) is a ray of hope for the most vulnerable communities of Assam living on the ‘saporis’ or islands of the Brahmaputra.
The journey of these ‘ships of hope’, as they are popularly known, began in 2005, with a single boat called Akha (or hope) in Dibrugarh district of upper Assam. The initiative got the support of the district health authorities.
The successful intervention in reaching out to the marginalised, rural communities got the attention and support of Unicef and the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), Assam, resulting in a public-private partnership (PPP) and the subsequent spread of the boat clinic programme to 13 districts of the state with 15 boats.
“We need innovative but simple approaches based on the knowledge of those who know best, the river dwellers and the host makers, because they can understand the river better than anyone else,” said CNES founder Sanjoy Hazarika, who designed, developed and implemented the boat clinics before establishing the partnership with the NRHM. That’s how the boat clinics started.
While its special focus is on women and children, and clinic visits are timed in accordance with the immunisation schedule, its ultimate aim is to take sustained healthcare to islands.
While the work has been effective, it is nevertheless very challenging for the health teams as sometimes at the risk of their own health and safety, Hazarika pointed out.
“For instance, the water level has to be at least three to four feet deep for the motorboat to move and there have been times when boats have got stuck in one of the river’s channels and the team has had to go on foot for as much as 10 km to the villages,” Dipankar Das, chief executive officer of CNES, told IANS.
“In monsoons, the floods again wreak havoc. Just last month, one of our boats with 12 team members had to be rescued by Indian Air Force helicopters, as they got stranded in the swelled up river while going on a mission,” he added. (IANS)