By Our Correspondent
AJMER(Rajasthan)—A first-of-its-kind hospital established by a madrasa in the remote Oontra village, situated in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, is rendering yeoman’s service to provide health care to all communities in a rural segment which lacks the basic medical facilities. The 40-bed hospital, built on the madrasa premises with Zakat and other charity funds, has completed 200 institutional deliveries of women, including nine by caesarean section, since its establishment in December 2021.
Setting an example of communal harmony in the rural area, the hospital was established by Idara Dawat-ul-Haq, which has been imparting religious education since 1998 and had registered itself with the State Government’s Education Department for running multiple schools in 2009-10. One of the schools has since been upgraded to the senior secondary level with 30 students pursuing studies in science and biology.
Significantly, Dawat-ul-Haq Hospital is the first medical facility created by an Islamic seminary in Rajasthan. The hospital offers health care at nominal prices to people of all religions, castes and creeds. In addition, the emergency, ambulance and medical store facilities are available round the clock, while the hospital has made a remarkable contribution to the institutional deliveries of women in the region.
Idara Dawat-ul-Haq’s head Maulana Mohammed Ayub Qasmi, said the initiative for institutional deliveries in the hospital was a blessing for women in the region, who were earlier deprived of medical care during pregnancy and childbirth in the absence of adequate health infrastructure. The hospital has four full-time doctors, including a gynaecologist, 28 nursing personnel and other paramedical staff.
The Islamic seminary boasts of a strength of 4,600 students, including girls, in 14 schools, madrasas and maktabs, functioning in Oontra and other villages in Ajmer district, in which both religious and worldly education has been arranged and hostel facilities provided. The hospital is the latest addition to the institution’s work for benefiting the villagers.
With a population of 6,000, Oontra, situated 26 km away from Ajmer, has a primary health centre that only refers the patients to more prominent hospitals in the nearby Kishangarh tehsil headquarters as well as the district headquarters. The Dawat-ul-Haq Hospital has installed an X-ray machine and a sonography machine, which is fully functional.
Maulana Qasmi, 54, said an intensive care unit and a special care nursery for children were currently being constructed in the hospital, while construction of a full-fledged paediatric ward and a project for establishing a 100-bed nursing college was in the pipeline. The hospital has become popular among the villagers in the region for childbirth through institutional deliveries because of the availability of an experienced female gynaecologist, Dr. Shabana.
Maulana Qasmi, educated in some reputed madrasas in Delhi and Hapur, said the institution was offering a fine blend of religious and temporal education. “Our alumni are working as Imams in mosques and also as teachers, railway employees and revenue officials,” he said while highlighting the significance of education for the Muslim community.
The doctors at the hospital are experts in the field of general medicine and they regularly treat patients suffering from seasonal ailments. In addition, the seminary has already been sponsoring about 250 cataract and other eye surgeries of villagers, which are done every year at a private hospital in Kishangarh since 2010 as a philanthropic gesture.
Kirti Mehta, Nursing Officer in Ajmer’s Jawaharlal Nehru Government Hospital, who has been instrumental in planning and executing the medical facility project at the madrasa, said it had helped reduce the high infant and maternal mortality rates in the region. “The villages here have been facing problems for a long because of inadequate health infrastructure. This is the first sincere attempt to provide relief to them,” she said.
As Rajasthan has become the first and the only state in the country to legislate the right to health after a Bill on the subject was passed in the State Assembly this week, salutary initiatives like the one taken in Oontra village will help the State Government in ensuring emergency and other medical treatment to every person as a statutory right.
