| How it started: Amitabha, a friend
of ours and presently the president of the society is a doctor in a remote
village called Rangabelia in Sunderbans. He often goes from village to
village in boats to conduct medical camps. The medical facility in the
whole of sunderbans is really meager and lack of proper transportation
and poverty makes things worse. In those camps he found many children who
were suffering from congenital cardiac diseases whose treatment now-a-days
is very very expensive and most of their families cannot gather two square
meals a day hence treatment for them is really a dream. In 2001 he
detected the case of Koruna Mondal in a medical camp in Kumirmari. Koruna
an 18 yr. girl was suffering from a congenital disease called the
Tetralogy of Fallot. She was a bluish girl unable to move properly and
had never received any sort of medical attention before her parents took
her to the camp. Amitabha helped them to arrange some money so that they
can come to Calcutta and have the initial investigations done. Amitabha's
diagnosis got confirmed and the estimated cost of surgery was about Rs.
87,000. Koruna, whose fathers monthly income was a mere sum of Rs. 800,
had lost all hope for life. Amitabha told us of Koruna. We appealed to
our friends for help, and in a months time the money was with us. Koruna
was successfully operated in Narayan Hrudalaya of Bangalore and she is
doing fine now.
Koruna's case raised high hope within us and also within the local people of Sunderbans. More and more cases got detected who needed help badly. We decided to form a society which would help children coming from economically backward families who needs cardiac surgery. |
| How we function: Currently we have kept
ourselves restricted to a Sunderbans, a region in Bengal which is economically
quite backward. The justification behind choice of Sunderbans is twofold.
Firstly, given its geographical location and topography Sunderbans is quite
unique is Bengal, and logistic problems and economic backwardness makes
medical services near impossible to the people living there. Secondly,
one of our members is a practicing doctor in that are, hence we always
get genuine cases.
Once a case is detected, we encourage them to gather some money so that preliminary investigations can be done. The Rabindranath Tagore Institute of Cardiac Sciences provides free investigation to the cases referred by us. But, for most of the families coming to Calcutta and a few days stay there is also not possible, the money they gather is used for this purpose. Finally, if preliminary investigations point out a need for surgery then firstly we provide information to the family members of the patient about how they can obtain financial help from various societies meant for the same. If enough amount cannot be raised from other societies, we appeal to individuals like you for help. Currently we do not have a standing fund, and also have no plans to create one. We go by case to case basis and raise money only when we are in need of it. |
| home | current
cases |
old
cases |
about
Sunderbans |
we need
your help |
contact
us |
help us to
know you |