Seventy-nine-year-old Dharnidhar Chaudhary (right) speaks to health minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey about his dream for a hospital in his hamlet, at the minister’s janata darbar in Patna on Tuesday. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Patna, Sept. 13: Twenty-five years ago, IIT-ian Dharnidhar Chaudhary left his job as a senior mechanical engineer with National Aeronautical and Space Administration (Nasa) in the US and decided to return to his village in Bhagalpur district to work for the welfare of his own people. Now 79, Chaudhary, who has started a school, is struggling to find his way through the bureaucratic minefield to get a hospital started.

When he came back, Chaudhary had two dreams — to have a standard school and a quality hospital in his sleepy and small hamlet of Pothiya, about 40km from Bhagalpur town. After investing his lifetime’s savings in the school, Chaudhary did not have any money left for the hospital.

For the last 15 years, Chaudhary has been running from pillar to post to get a government hospital opened on a one-acre plot donated by him.

But the government, he alleged today in the janata darbar of health minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey, is simply not interested.

“I have met many health ministers over the past 15 years. One of them took pity and issued orders for the appointment of a doctor and a nurse at the makeshift hospital that I got constructed on my school premises. But my pleas to get a six-bed primary health centre built have fallen on deaf years. Now my hopes rest on you,” Chaudhary told the minister.

Choubey assured the former engineer that the building would be constructed once the newly envisaged Bihar State Health Infrastructure Development Corporation starts functioning. “You can get in touch with me in the next six months. We will get the hospital construction work expedited in your village on a priority basis,” the minister said.

Later talking to The Telegraph, Chaudhary said he was fed up with red tape in the health department. “I first approached the department in 1996 with the proposal. Though I have donated the land, they have not been able to move the file for so many years. This is so frustrating,” said Chaudhary, who invested Rs 3 crore to set up a state-of-the-art school in his native village where 200 children, from his own hamlet as well as from neighbouring ones, study.

“I have been a man of academics and have travelled to 75 countries. I have studied various subjects and have earned degrees in engineering, management and economics from foreign universities. My stint at Nasa was exciting but I always wanted to come back to my own people and work for them. So I returned when I was 54. But my efforts have not been supported by the government,” said Chaudhary.

The son of a small farmer, Chaudhary had never left his village to see even other parts of the state. Academically brilliant since an early age, Chaudhary graduated in mechanical engineering from IIT Kharagpur. Subsequently, he went to Seton Hall University, New Jersey, Rutgers University, New Jersey, Columbia University and the University of Houston from where he earned further degrees in petroleum engineering and an MBA in engineering management and public administration. He also got himself enrolled for a course in international law at Zurich, Switzerland, and learnt French at a university in Nice, France. Later, he joined Nasa as mechanical engineer.

Chaudhary, who considers himself to be a “maverick”, never married as he thought his life partner would not understand his dedication towards social service.

No wonder then that he finds the government apathy so frustrating. The proposal for a health centre has been moving from one table to another in the department, much to the dismay of the ageing man who runs his dream school single-handedly in his village.