Help at hand: A tea-stall clinic on a railway platform

Hridaypur (North 24-Parganas): Take a train to Barasat from Sealdah station and get down at Hridaypur station. One glimpse at the tea stall — Anil er Chayer Dokan — on platform No. 2 and you would, perhaps, relate the place with its name. The goings-on at the stall would surely prove that people here have a hriday, or, a heart.
The ‘dokan’, equipped with wooden benches and chairs, double up as a dispensary that has helped cure hundreds of critical patients almost for free.Run by NGO Prayas, the stall has been the go-to place for the poor — from as far as Bangladesh — for last 15 years. ‘Daktar Dada’, the brain and soul of the stall, is not a doctor but an income tax official, who facilitates the treatment with a band of doctor friends and other professionals.
On weekdays, the stall is swamped with patients in the evening. And on weekends, they line up since morning to meet Shyamal Das. There is no day-off for him. His phone rings continuously, and he makes it a point to attend each call. He would then disconnect, surf through his contacts, call up the appropriate doctor and then connect the patient to him.
The practice had started 15 years ago, but today, Das is not alone. He has a band of young doctors from the neighbourhood who share the load with him. Further, over 30 senior doctors from various departments of government medical colleges are also in his network.
The parents of Anindya Ojha (17), incapacitated with severe knee pain, could not afford anything beyond a local physician. Finally, they were at the ‘platform dispensary’. “It was an orthopaedic complication. I first got Kaushik Chakraborty, a senior faculty of the SSKM’s orthopaedic department, to look at him. He referred the boy to sports and physical medicine expert R Paramanik. All formalities were done for free and the boy now plays football,” Das said.
“It all began by chance with a critical patient whose family needed urgent help. I was posted in Chinsurah then and often helped local doctors with filling their I-T returns. Luckily, when I asked one of them to help out with this patient, he readily agreed without charging any fees. That encouraged me,” said Das.
Some doctors who have shared the burden with Das are chest specialist Chandan Ghosh, gastroenterologist Rajib Sarkar, Calcutta Medical College’s cancer specialist Asit Ranjan Deb and retired neuromedicine specialist from NRS hospital Subrata Banerjee. Oncologist Subir Ganguly, who is involved with Prayas, said, “Shyamal’s never-take-no-for-an-answer attitude is infectious. It has inspired a lot of doctors like me.”