About JSS

Jan Swasthya Sahyog (JSS) is a voluntary, non-profit, registered society of health professionals running a low-cost, effective, health program providing both preventive and curative services for the past 10 years to people from the tribal and rural areas of Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh through a community health program and a rural health centre, which includes a hospital. The team at Jan Swasthya Sahyog includes specialists in Medicine, Paediatrics, Public health, Gynaecology, Surgery, ENT, Ayurvedic Medicine and Microbiology,as well as a Research Scientist, many of who were trained at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

The situation as we see it

The health of people in rural India is in a precarious situation. The traditional systems of medicine are in decline due to different economic and cultural reasons. But modern medicine as it is being practiced is not meeting the health needs of the rural population, especially those from the economically and socially backwards sections. This is because of high cost and inaccessibility The high cost of this kind of health care, as well as the loss of wages during the period of illness pushes these people into a grim cycle of debt, bondage, and deepening poverty.

The grim situation that has been prevailing for a number of years has worsened with the new economic policies being followed by the government. While the rural population has always received less than its fair share of resources (including health care), the new economic policies envisage a further decrease in these resources. These policies include the privatisation of drugs and medecines, which ultimately result in pushing health care out of the reach of poor people.

We feel a need for a low-cost, effective, community based health care system which is readily accessible to the rural poor

What we are doing

Ganiyari Outpatient Clinic

JSS runs a Referral Health Centre functioning since 2000 between the villages of Ganiyari and Beltukri in Takhatpur block. The centre houses an outpatient clinic with a low-cost pharmacy, diagnostic laboratory and X-ray and ultrasound facilities. We also have a Ward with 30 beds and 2 Operation Theatres where high-quality surgical services have been provided till present date to more than 10,000 patients at a very low cost. The clinic has provided over 250,000 consultations at an extremely low cost to patients drawn from nearly 1,200 villages of Bilaspur and other neighbouring districts.

Rural Outreach Clinics

Three outreach clinics with a full team of doctors, laboratory and pharmacy staff are regularly run every week in three different forest and forest-fringe villages. Two of these clinics serve clusters of forest-fringe villages around the villages of Semariya and Shivtarai that are 24 and 25 kilometres away from our referral centre. The third clinic serves nearly 20 forest villages around the village of Bamhni in the Chhapparwa sector of the Achanakmaar Game Sanctuary. The Bamhni clinic, more than 60 km away from our referral centre, caters particularly to the Baigas, a primitive tribe that has benefited little from the processes of modernisation.

Village Health Program

A Village Health Programme, functional for the past six years, provides preventive and curative services with the help of 104 village health workers (VHWs) in 53 tribal and forest-related villages of Kota and Lormi blocks of Bilaspur district, having a combined population of 25,000. All of these VHWs are women, who work as volunteers after having been selected by their respective villages and trained by us. The village health programme is engaged not only in the delivery of curative services for diarrhoea, upper respiratory tract and ear infections, pneumonia, skin infections, excessive vaginal discharge and malaria but also in community-based initiatives for the control of undernutrition, malaria and tuberculosis and in the surveillance of diseases. As a result of these efforts, mortality in children has gone down in these villages.

Other Activities

JSS also undertakes a variety of other activities, including village creches, development of low cost medical technology, technical training and resource activities, helping villages achieve economic self-sufficiency, field, laboratory, and clinic based investigations into tuberculosis, malaria, childhood pneumonia, and diarrhoea, and promotion of organic and sustainable methods of agriculture.