It has been nearly four years since the Chaupal team started visiting villages in Haryana to conduct health camps and find solutions to the problems people faced. Not only did they diagnose and provide relief for ailments afflicting the rural folk, they educated them about how to follow a healthy lifestyle, take care of their environment and village resources, and provide better opportunities for their children. With the help of contributions, Chaupal has held nearly 150 health camps to provide care to close to 400 villages. Each camp averages attendance of over approximately 1500 village folk. With its efforts, Chaupal has touched the lives of over two hundred thousand people since its inception. Everyday, over 115 patients are treated at the Chaupal health center, which covers an area of more than 20 villages.
The Chaupal model offers several benefits. It provides a feeling of well-being for the individual, family, and community by timely attention and care. Besides early detection of illnesses such as blindness and cancer, there are significant economic benefits to be had in terms of savings and gain in output and productivity by containing illnesses in time. Costs are cut by bringing all specialists at one location and preventing the inconvenience experienced by a patient in moving from one location to another. Chaupal delivers multi-specialty quality care, high quality yet affordably priced generic medicines and immediate relief measures such as refraction and vision-correction glasses, hearing aids, crutches and wheel chairs at the same place. It ensures early screening and referrals to the health center. For a daily worker, for whom everyday's wage counts, this saves precious wages lost in trips made to a hospital or a private clinical practitioner who may exploit this fact to make more money.
The organization also offers a sense of pride to the villagers who see highly educated medical professionals visit their community and spend considerable amount of time with them every weekend. It also takes head-on issues that have been swept under the carpet for ages like health of the girl child, dental care, mental healthcare and joint diseases that are often misdiagnosed. Significant to note is the treatment of psychiatric illnesses provided by the Chaupal team in rural areas since the whole village society is in flux due to the changing socio-economic order. They also tackle social issues surrounding health emphasizing girl child's care from the womb to the tomb, emancipation of women, female nutrition, and a rightful place in the society for women who work inside and outside the household. Female feticide is a prevalent social evil in Haryana and female fetuses are selectively aborted after pre-natal sex determination.
This extreme manifestation of violence against women is reflected in the grossly skewed sex ratio of the state. Chaupal strongly discourages this malpractice. By recruiting young doctors for health camps, Chaupal also inspires them to work in the villages, exposes them to opportunities in the rural landscape and gives them the critical, applied experience in public health that the government sector has identified as a a need for medical education in the country.
