Opinion Thirty years later, Jamshedpur still contains the world and all its resources within itself

Growing up in the copper factory township of Moubhandar, Jamshedpur, it seemed that the place had everything. Since I grew up inside the campus of a hospital — the hospital of the copper factory where my mother worked — I saw Jamshedpur as a place where patients with ailments too complicated for the simple factory hospital were referred. The distance between Moubhandar and Jamshedpur (read: Tata; everyone called it — still does — Tata) being only about 40 km or so and the easy connectivity by the NH-33 (now the NH-18) and a direct train route of the South Eastern Railway made Jamshedpur an obvious choice for people seeking relatively easily accessible specialised medical care. This was all thanks to the state-of-the-art institution named Tata Main Hospital — known commonly as TMH — established way back in the year 1908. That was in the Eighties and Nineties; more than three decades ago.

As I work in Chandil today, at the local block-level health centre, things have not seemed to change much. Jamshedpur, about 26 km away, is still the first choice we have for referring patients whose cure is beyond our purview. The only thing that has changed is that now the patients and their parties have a whole lot of choices on where they would want to go or take their patients. Apart from the TMH, there is the Meherbai Tata Memorial Hospital (MTMH), the cancer hospital; the Tata Motors Hospital; the Mercy Hospital; the BNH Hospital (which is, technically, in Chandil, on the outskirts of the block); and several other private clinics, hospitals, and nursing homes. But, since we are in the government sector, we cannot directly name a private hospital. For us, it is always the MGM Medical College Hospital, the government-run institution which is also my alma mater. Whenever I call the government-run on-call ambulance service, 108, and the operator asks me where I would like to send the patient and I say, “To MGM Jamshedpur”, the operator invariably asks me, “But you have a district hospital in Seraikela, why aren’t you sending the patient there?” Honestly, I struggle to answer. The conditioning that I have grown up with — go to Jamshedpur and your life will be saved or at least be in better hands — is hard to let go of. So I just say, “Seraikela is 36 km from Chandil, MGM is 26 km,”. That generally does the trick. I just wish I could have this much eloquence while attending the district-level review meetings when a higher official almost always asks us the same question.

So no prizes for guessing what city Chandil shares a boundary with. And no prizes, too, for guessing that many of our beneficiaries from the urban area, Chandil, find it easier to go to a hospital in Jamshedpur than the one in Chandil which is kilometres away in a completely opposite direction. I apologise to the readers of this column for boring them with this technical description of my relationship with a city. There are other aspects of Jamshedpur too: Some pleasant, some not so; the wealth disparity and the insider-outsider experience; and how I found a copy of Diana King’s Think Like A Girl at a makeshift music shop and a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun in the corner of a book shop when I was least expecting to; and which I might have dealt with in other articles published in other places. For now, though, this is all.

Shekhar is a writer and translator