Park Circus: A young woman who lost her father two years ago to an illness that she believes would have been cured if her village had basic health care is now studying medicine to serve her people and build a hospital there.
Mosammad Hasina Parvin, a first-year MBBS student at Calcutta National Medical College, is from Jhumka in Murshidabad district, a small village that depends on an ill-equipped government hospital in the nearest town for its health care needs.
Hasina's family lives in a one-room house with a tile roof and her mother sews clothes for a living. Life is hard and cracking the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for medical admission seems to have brought on a new set of challenges.
"My mother earns some money doing stitching jobs and we have a cow whose milk we sell. We make about Rs 3,000 a month," Hasina, the recipient of the Dr Amiya Kumar Bose Memorial Award at The Telegraph School Awards for Excellence 2018, presented by IIHM and powered by Sister Nivedita University, told Metro .
The award, instituted by Bose's daughter Gitasree Mukherjee in 2015, comes with a scholarship that Hasina intends to spend on a bone set that medical students need. "I am told the price of a set comes to around Rs 16,000. I can use the scholarship to buy one," she said.
Hasina's classes started on August 1 but she doesn't have textbooks of her own yet. "I have borrowed books from a friend who is a senior at Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College. I will buy mine as and when possible," she said.
The prospect of completing her medical studies without assured financial support appears daunting but Hasina soldiers on because she has a mission that goes beyond her own needs. "A hospital closer home can reduce the suffering of families like mine," she said. "For any medical assistance, we have to go to Beldanga town. If the illness is even slightly complicated, a patient is referred to Behrampore town. All this travelling delays treatment and that sometimes costs lives."
Back in 2016, Hasina's father Mohammad Ali had been taken to the state-run Beldanga hospital with severe stomach pain. The 50-year-old received hardly any treatment there before being referred to another government hospital in Behrampore, 20km away.
When Hasina's father was advised an endoscopy, it turned out that the hospital did not have the equipment and expertise to do the procedure. The family was forced to shift him to a private nursing home, where he was diagnosed with stomach ulcers.
"But the doctors there were not confident about operating on him. By the time my father underwent surgery, his condition had deteriorated. He died after 10 days," Hasina said.
The pain of loss spurs the 21-year-old as much as the daily adversity does. The roof of her home would leak during every spell of rain, but it seldom interrupted her study schedule. "I scored 88.12 per cent in Madhyamik while living there," Hasina said.
After Madhyamik, Hasina studied at the Birbhum centre of the Al-Ameen Mission and scored 84.8 per cent in the Higher Secondary exam. Her mother, who could not study beyond Class VIII, was a constant source of encouragement. "There were occasions when I would get disheartened, especially after I failed to crack NEET in my first attempt. But my mother made sure I didn't give up," she said. "I don't look at others or compare. I know that I have to struggle and rise in life."
