The small price of helping a mother

by Dr. Jaya Singh

I need four hundred rupees.
Four hundred! Ka bhail? Why do you need so much money?
My wife, she gave birth yesterday. The child, he is dead, I want to save my wife, I have to take her. To the hospital.
But if the child is gone, what use is the hospital now? Four hundred….

This dialogue is not from a novel or a film. Nor did it take place in another place, another time. This conversation took place in the first week of August 2010, in the air conditioned environs of my Delhi home.

Our man Friday, Bigun Das, you see, is from Bihar. A cheerful, twenty something, Bigun often gets frantic phone calls from his family in his village. A roof to be thatched, a cow to be bought, a phone card to be recharged, a life to be saved. As the sole breadwinner for his family of five; a widowed mother, two unmarried sisters, a polio stricken older brother and his handicapped wife; Bigun is often faced with financial decisions.

This was one such decision. Bigun’s sister-in-law has delivered two babies in the last two years. The first child was born premature, in the dead of winter, and died after a week despite their best efforts to keep it warm in bales of hay. The second child was born last week. Still born, at peace. Bigun’s sister in-law, on the other hand had developed a fever, and was bleeding. His brother made the controversial decision of transporting her to the closest hospital in the district-a ten mile journey to Tekari, for which he’d have to arrange a rickshaw, and pay the associated medical expenses.

Four hundred rupees was all it would take. Eight dollars. The price of a latte and a muffin at Starbucks on some continents, the price of a month’s worth of rations on another.

This was a big decision for Bigun. Four hundred rupees, was this a fizool expense? Or essential? Could they take a chance with his sister-in-law’s health, placing their trust in their family gods, or did they really need to take her to a medical facility where some clean shaven doctor was likely to fleece them of more money- Bottles of blood will be needed! Medicines! Hospital stay!-the four hundred likely to become at least a thousand if not more, by the next day.

Is it really worth it, didi? Necessary? That’s the question Bigun asked me.
Yes, I answered. Yes.

One mother at a time, one family at a time, one village at a time. Save a Mother’s latest impact analysis on the Swasthya Sakhi Program in 256 villages shows the realization of this vision. Within nine months, maternal mortality has dropped from 645 to 65 and Infant Mortality from 41 to 9.7