New Delhi’s ‘Medicine Baba’ distributes unused medication to the city’s poor
India spends just over 1 per cent of its gross domestic product on health care – one of the lowest rates in the world.
Omkarnath spends his days searching New Delhi for drugs. A call to the phone number printed boldly on his saffron-coloured tunic reveals his alternate identity: “Hello, I am Medicine Baba.”
The chatty, 79-year-old retired blood-bank technician has been collecting unused prescription drugs from the affluent for the past eight years, and distributing whatever hasn’t expired to patients who need medicines they cannot afford.
Omkarnath, who like many Indians uses only one name, is not a trained pharmacist, and must see a doctor’s prescription before he’ll help supply any drug. He doesn’t charge, though he says the value of what he gives away each month is more than US$9,000.
“Every bungalow in Delhi has extra medicines, but they are throwing them in their dustbins,” says Omkarnath, who walks with a limp after an accident that left him with dislocated bones in both legs.
“Medicine Baba” – baba is an honorific term meaning wise man – walks more than 7km, stopping door-to-door to ask for unused medicines. On one such trip Sunday, he had collected a huge bagful of donated prescriptions in just an hour and a half.
Some 40 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion people have no access to modern medicines because they are too expensive or simply unavailable in government hospitals where supplies are often scarce.
