Healthcare

Read how Sevamob is using mobile technology to bring quality healthcare and insurance to low-income groups including students, employees and elderly through its unique web-based model in cities as well as villages in India.

CanSupport, a wonderful initiative aiming to enable people with advanced cancer and their families in making informed choices and decisions, has received an overwhelming response for providing appropriate physical, emotional, social and spiritual support to cancer patients and their families. Harmala Gupta, the lady behind the mission, joins us to talk about this dedicated NGO.

>Dimagi, which means 'of the mind', is a team of intellectually committed professionals who envision applying innovative, scalable, open-source technology solutions to improve community health programs around the world. Here we present the Dimagi founders, Jonathan Jackson and Dr Vikram Sheel Kumar, two enthusiastic young men with Harvard and MIT background.

When one lives in the city and enjoys excellent health care at one’s beck and call, it is difficult to appreciate the hardships suffered by the poor in remote locations of India. SEWA Rural is an organization that aims at improving the lives of these very deprived people. From healthcare to vocational training, they have been providing holistic development to the needy in Gujarat for 33 years now, and even today, they continue to serve the poor with utmost enthusiasm.

Read about a remarkable organization working from villages in Tamil Nadu, and exemplifying service in its every deed. With various initiatives ranging from orphanages and a school to medical care and an old-age home, it is interesting to note how they manage the many activities, and how these complement each other and come together as one cohesive whole.

Remember the 2004 Bollywood film in which an NRI Mohan Bhargava (played by Shah Rukh Khan) returns to India and is moved by the harsh realities faced by the people in his village to become an agent of change? The name of that film was Swades, and here is an organization called Swades Foundation that shares a similar mission - to bring about change in rural India. To know how they are doing this, read more.

There are several people our society does not accept willingly. The leprosy-affected and the mentally handicapped are some of them. Imagine an entire village dedicated to them, where they can live freely and without prejudice, and receive loving care and attention from dedicated staff. This is what Sahyog Kushtha Yagna Trust in Gujarat attempts to achieve.

Imagine someone who cannot walk and has no hope of even having the gift of walking on his own two feet. Polio Foundation has been relentlessly working for 25 years to bring in a ray of light in such darkened lives! Since its birth in Ahmedabad in 1987, the foundation has been striving to fulfill its objective of aiding the physically handicapped children by way of corrective surgery and giving them necessary appliances so that they can walk on their feet without anybody's assistance. This does not merely bring about physical gratification; it also has tremendous impact upon the psychological development of the child coupled with immense happiness to the family. All treatments, care and calipers are provided without any cost to the patients.

Organ donation is still a relatively fledgling concept in India, and people are still grappling its moral, social, religious and other implications in the Indian context. Mohan Foundation has been promoting organ donation since 1997, and helps people understand what it entails - the rewards, the fears and the process. In the end, you could be gifting life to not one but several beneficiaries.

A unique concept - boat clinics - are offering crucial medical assistance, advice on family planning, and most importantly, hope to the millions living in the many small, flood-prone islands in Assam where hospitals and dedicated medical centres are unheard of, and at many times in the year, inaccessible.