Just about everybody in Himachal Pradesh seems to have heard of Dasmal, a small village 170 km from the state capital and 10 km off the Shimla-Manali highway in Hamirpur district. It has neither inspired Rudyard Kipling, who came visiting the state every year during his stay in India, nor is it home to Ruskin Bond. Tucked away behind tall deodar trees in the foothills of the Himalayas, it is not a tourist destination either.

Instead, it is the native village of Dr Devinder Singh Rana, a Delhi-based nephrologist, who brought home state-of-the-art healthcare facilities by setting up a healthcare centre here in February 2007. Equipped with ultrasound, X-ray, ECG, telemedicine and hemodialysis facilities, Parvati hospital has proved to be a boon to not just Dasmal but also around 100 neighbouring villages and towns.

A metalled road laid by the state government recently leads to the hospital, located at the highest point of the village, where services began with just one doctor and one paramedic. Now four doctors and 10 paramedics attend to as many as 80 patients a day for as little as Rs 15 for consultation.

Chanchal Devi, 59, resident of the neighbouring Tikkar village, has been coming here regularly for the past one year for her weekly dialysis. Her nephew Ranjit Thakur says it costs Rs 700 per dialysis here, which is just a fifth of the amount they had to shell out earlier when they used to travel all the way to the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGI) at Chandigarh.

While the nearest dialysis centre in Chandigarh is at a distance of 300 km, the nearest government hospital at the district headquarters in Hamirpur is just 30 km away. Shakuntala Sharma from Bilaspur, for instance, has however travelled around 50 km to reach here. Sharma, who had been suffering from excruciating back pain for quite some time, came here on the recommendation of a friend who advised her to choose Parvati hospital over the government hospital in Hamirpur. Just a few sessions of physiotherapy later, her pain eased and she started smiling again. Both she and her son Somesh Sharma, who accompanied her, said they couldn’t thank Dr Rana enough.

The Parvati hospital in Dr. Singh's native Dasmal

“That is my village and they are my people. Who will take care of them if not I?” asks Dr Rana. Though he finally managed to launch the hospital in his native village only in 2007, he had been planning something along these lines ever since he got through medical college in Shimla in 1972, and later went on to do a Master’s in medicine at PGI, Chandigarh in 1977 and then a specialisation in nephrology from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi in 1980. The next year he joined Sir Ganga Ram hospital, where he served in various capacities before becoming chairman of the department of nephrology and honorary secretary in the board of management.

People from his village and neighbouring areas had, however, been flocking to him for treatment and advice right from his student days in Chandigarh. His fellow students aptly named his room ‘Himachal room’, which turned into ‘Himachal Bhavan’ after he settled down in Delhi and got his own house in Rajinder Nagar.

But Dasmal wouldn’t have had the fortune of Parvati hospital if misfortune had not struck Dr Rana one cold winter night 45 years ago and changed his life’s goal posts. Until that day all that young Rana wanted to do was to follow in his father’s footsteps for a career in the army. But fate had other plans for him. His mother had been keeping unwell right through the winter and that night was particularly bad. Her temperature just wouldn’t drop in spite of all home remedies. So his uncle and he started the long walk to fetch the nearest compounder who lived some miles away.

“We walked nonstop that cold winter night in pitch darkness for almost three hours,” he recalls. It was then that it struck him like a bolt of lightening. Dasmal needed a doctor more than an army officer. “What could an army officer contribute to this village, I thought. Instead if I became a doctor, I could make sure another young Rana would not have to walk for three hours to get a compunder.”

Many young Ranas may have walked the road in the time that Rana became Dr Rana and then a very successful nephrologist before he could find the resources to fund his dream. But five years ago he realised his dream when he enticed some friends and relatives to form a society to run a school and hospital. The society, Parvati Education & Health Society, named after his mother, supports computer education in a the village government school besides running the hospital.

Running a hospital in a rural area is, however, even harder than setting it up. But he found just the right person in Dr Kunwar Mehar Singh, one of his classmates in the medical school. Dr Singh had taken premature retirement from army medical corps and was living a retired life in Noida. Dr Rana cajoled him out the city life and made him the chief medical officer of Parvati hospital.

GOOD DOCTOR’S GOOD FRIENDS: Dr Kunwar Mehar Singh and wife Veena at the Parvati hospital in Dasmal

“The sheer commitment of Dr Rana towards his people made me make up my mind to come down here and settle down along with my wife,” says Dr Singh. With both their daughters married and settled abroad, Dr Singh and wife Veena find solace in the service of Dasmal villagers.

While Dr Singh attends to regular patients, his wife acts as an administrator for the hospital. “My job is to ensure this place runs without any difficulty and the patients who come here get quality healthcare,” she says. Recently, the hospital added a physiotherapy section with 15 beds on the first floor of the hospital. “Because of the difficult terrain, we often get patients with severe pain in the back. So we added this facility so that they do not have to travel to Shimla,” says Veena.

Dr Subhash Sharma, a physiotherapist, was similarly approached by Dr Rana. “One day I received a call from Dr Rana. He introduced himself and informed me about this hospital and asked me if I was interested in the offer,” recounts Dr Sharma. “Since I belonged to Himachal Pradesh, an offer to serve my own people excited me and it did not take me long to make up my mind.”

Dr Rana made good use of his association with Sir Ganga Ram hospital too. When telemedicine centres tarted in the Delhi hospital in 2007, Dr Rana made sure he got one for his village too. The centre at Parvati hospital is linked to the Sir Ganga Ram hospital through video conferencing and thousands of rural patients have been benefiting from the specialisation available in the capital.

“Telemedicine facilitates consultation with the experts at Ganga Ram hospital through video conferencing whenever complicated cases come to us,” says Dr Kunwar Mehar Singh.

Dr Rana also ensured that his hospital got a dialysis machine. “People in and around my village had to travel all the way to Shimla or Chandigarh, so we had to have our own facilities,” he says. The Rotary Club of Hamirpur donated a dialysis machine in May 2009, making Parvati hospital only the second in the entire state to have this facility.

The district administration too appreciates Dr Rana. “We provide all the help he requires in fulfilling his pious objective. I have sanctioned Rs 3.5 lakh for expansion of the hospital,” says Abhishek Jain, district collector of Hamirpur. Word has travelled to Delhi too which honoured him with a Padma Shri last year. Carry on doctor.

(This first appeared in Governance Now magazine dated March 16-31, Vol.01 Issue 04)