Bringing health to the hills

It's not unusual, anymore, to hear about people who've given up their jobs to pursue their passions or a new career. But how often do you find people who drop everything to live in the mountains at 29? After almost eight years in journalism, Anand Sankar quit his full-time job in 2010. His story, though, begins in 2013, when the former journalist lay down his pen and moved to the Himalayas in Uttarakhand to do more good than just writing about the mountains as a source of potential energy – a place where we can store water and generate electricity. While working in Delhi, "I covered hydropower and reported quite a bit from the Himalayas – all the way from Arunachal Pradesh to Kashmir. That's when I fell in love with the mountains".

Sankar first set up the Kalap Responsible Tourism project, a for-profit social enterprise that aggregates and empowers villagers to harness community tourism for a livelihood. Having personally trained locals in Kalap as mountain guides, he runs curated experiential walking tours in the Himalayas and has set up a supply-chain model for a tourism operation, complete with homestays and other logistics. But that was not enough. "I felt inadequate in just running a commercial operation when there were so many fundamental structural problems, with respect to access to basic services like education and healthcare, and the need to enhance villagers' livelihood possibilities. I didn't want a one-dimensional approach where everything gets locked to tourism. That's when I realised the need to set up a trust," says Sankar, originally from Bengaluru. In 2014, he formally set up Kalap Trust, a non-profit organisation that works in the remote Tons Valley in Uttarakhand. Its projects span education, healthcare and building livelihoods in 35 villages that are home to around 20,000 people.

Working with 90 village children outside school hours, for about 4 to 5 hours everyday, the alternative school focuses on developing core skills – language, scientific temper, and a deep understanding of the local environment and their community. "We follow a failure-oriented approach, where we're trying to fill the gaps in the government education system," says Sankar, who divides his time between the mountains and his home-office in Dehradun. With sheep and goats aplenty, he also works with shepherds to develop products from sheep and goat raw material.

The Trust had one medical camp in 2014, and ran a clinic in Kalap last year for around seven months. The plan for healthcare now, Sankar says, is to set up a community hospital in Kotgaon – a village in Uttarakhand – that will deliver at-cost services to the 35 villages. "The greatest economic cost that is borne by remote populations in the mountains is for access to healthcare. The nearest general practitioner is 200 km away, so when villagers need to see a doctor, they're looking at an expense of `4,000 only for travel," says the 33-year-old, who was in Mumbai last week to raise funds for the hospital.

With the cost of travel and logistics greater than that of treatment, Sankar says that people avoid seeking healthcare till it's critical. That pushes up the cost of healthcare, because then there are more health problems to solve.

General health will improve once the cost of basic services – a general practitioner, diagnostic services like blood tests and x-rays – is brought down. "To avoid time and monetary waste, we're working on medical data compatibility standards, so that any diagnosis and reports that we generate are compatible with hospitals," says Sankar, who is also working on a model to deploy paramedics in the villages. He tells us that several enthusiastic Mumbai doctors will soon be part of a WhatsApp group along with their doctors in the mountains, so that "whatever the case, we can reach out to some of the best doctors and have a pro bono consult in less than four hours".

While Sankar has a lot planned to help solve health issues in the mountains, the need of the hour is basic infrastructure. That, and doctors who can first filter cases.

Reach out at

www.kalaptrust.org
www.facebook.com/kalaptrust