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India's first rural cancer hospital being set up in Gurgaon

Vinod Behl

Gurgaon, in the fast-developing National Capital Region, is getting the first-ever rural cancer hospital in India.

The charitable hospital is constructed over eight acres of a land in Mirpur village, close to Gurgaon. The hospital is the brainchild of Dr S S Yadav, director, Post Medical Institute of Medical Sciences, Rohtak.

A recipient of the B C Roy National Award for the Eminent Medical Man of the Year (1995) Dr Yadav has worked for 35 years in the field of cancer research.

"I embarked on this philanthropic mission... because there are only a handful of cancer treatment centres, all in the urban India. Moreover, these hospitals... are out of the reach of poor patients. Also, villagers often don't have means to travel to far off places for cancer treatment," he says.

Dr Yadav chose to set up a hospital in Mirpur essentially before that's where his family belonged to. Initially meant to host 20 beds, it relies on grants from government agencies and the World Health Organisation. Many NGOs and individual donors have also been approached for monetary aid. Dr Yadav himself has donated his award money -- Rs 100,000 -- to the hospital.

"Though we are getting liberal financial aid, we are not spending this money on five-star facilities," says Dr Yadav, promising to use typical village architecture and a rural ambience so that villagers can feel at home.

"Since cancer treatment is very expensive, we will be spending all our funds on medicines," says Dr Yadav, who is also the chairman of the hospital which is to be operational sometime this year.

Eminent doctors are also being hired, to help provide the best possible treatment to cancer patients, one of them being Dr R Mukund Patel, a medical expert earlier located in the US.

Once the project gets going, Dr Yadav hopes to expand the hospital, with plans ahead for a 200-bed trauma centre for accident victims, equipped with modern equipment provided with Japanese aid. If things work out, the trauma centre, proposed to be the biggest-ever in Asia, will be up in another year at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Rohtak.

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