Overview

The healthcare landscape is widely different in India’s rural and urban regions. While people living in urban areas prioritise routine health check-ups, those in rural and underserved areas don’t see a doctor until a health challenge disrupts their daily life.

A key reason behind this difference is that rural regions lack the infrastructure, manpower, and services needed to provide high-quality diagnostic healthcare services at a cost affordable to all. As a result, people develop serious health challenges that could have been easily prevented if they had access to affordable diagnostic facilities near their homes.

Hence, we at Manav Vikas Sanstha (MVS India), a 25-year-old NGO in Jaipur, started Project Aarogyya to bridge the gap between rural residents and diagnostic services. Today, in this blog post, let us delve into the healthcare realities in rural regions and how our Project Aarogyya is helping address them.

Healthcare Access in Rural Areas: The Current Reality

In many villages, healthcare is still something that people turn to only when the body demands attention. You will rarely see rural residents going for routine health check-ups because they’re too expensive or because diagnostic facilities are far from their homes.

Travelling long distances to get their health checked would usually cost a day’s wages, which isn’t financially viable for many. All this makes it challenging for rural residents to access preventive healthcare. As a result, health conditions keep getting worse in silence until they become too big to ignore.

In this regard, we at Manav Vikas Sanstha (MVS India) firmly believe that many chronic diseases can be prevented if they’re identified early and treated accordingly. Hence, we started installing health ATMs as part of our Project Aarogyya in rural regions across India. These FDA- and CE-certified diagnostic kiosks offer free diagnostic tests for 45+ vital health parameters. People living in rural areas can routinely get their health checked at no cost using these diagnostic facilities.

Importance of Early Health Screening in Rural Areas

As part of Project Aarogyya, we at Manav Vikas Sanstha (MVS India) have installed approximately 57 health ATMs across the rural districts of Punjab, Rajasthan, Tripura, Goa, Mizoram, and other locations to facilitate cost-free, early health screening.

We’re actively working to install these ATMs in more rural areas across India, as they can help rural residents access high-quality early health screening at no cost. Here’s why it matters:

• Detects Diseases Before They Become Disruptive

There are many such health conditions that, despite being serious, remain silent in their early stages. As such, without routine health screening, these conditions are likely to remain unnoticed until they spread and begin to visibly affect a person.

This especially becomes a problem in rural households, where physical work translates to income. Timely health screening helps identify health issues much before they reach a critical stage. Hence, people can take appropriate treatments well in time and avoid any interruptions.

• Makes Treatment Simpler and More Manageable

When a health challenge is detected early, it’s usually easier to manage. Treatment at the early stages involves basic medication, regular monitoring, and small lifestyle changes.

However, if the condition is discovered at a later stage when the issue has already worsened, it requires more complex care, longer treatment, advanced facilities, and far more money.

Early health screening helps reduce this escalation, making healthcare more practical and less overwhelming for rural families.

• Reduces Financial Strain on Families

In many rural households, health insurance is still not the norm. Here, healthcare expenses are to be borne by people only. This means that late diagnosis will straight away translate to higher medical costs.

Additionally, the financial burden that comes along is not just treatment-related; it also includes travel, hospital stays, and lost income during recovery.

With early health screening, people can address these situations before they turn into absolute emergencies. It allows families to avoid sudden and heavy financial burdens.

Project Aarogyya: Making Early Health Screening Accessible to Rural Indians

To make timely health screening not just available but also easily accessible for the rural population, we at Manav Vikas Sanstha (MVS India), a well-known NGO working in Rajasthan for the past two decades, chose to install health ATMs in government PHCs and CHCs as part of Project Aarogyya, our much-appreciated CSR initiative. These ATMs enable early disease detection and prevention of complications, so that rural residents can lead a healthier life. These ATMs can accurately scan a person’s health against 54+ vital health parameters, such as –

• Body temperature
• Blood Sugar
• Far and Near Vision
• Haemoglobin
• Pulse
• Total Cholesterol
• Colour Blindness, and more

People can get an accurate diagnosis done within minutes using our health ATMs. It will result in timely diagnosis and treatment initiation (if required), so more people can become healthy at a community level.

If a person registers for these services using their ABHA or another digital health ID number, the results will be automatically linked for easy retrieval.

Wider Reach for Impactful Results

We have collaborated with multiple businesses, including IRCON International Limited, BRN Infrastructures Private Limited, KONICA MINOLTA, ECGC Limited, etc., to expand our reach for health ATM installations. The result is 57 health ATM installations in the following districts:

• Shravasti, Uttar Pradesh
• Banaskantha, Gujarat
• Lunglei, Mizoram
• Vadodara, Gujarat
• Nagaon, Assam
• Leh, Ladakh
• Gangtok, Sikkim
• Bathinda, Punjab, and more

All these ATM installations are now helping people living in rural areas get timely diagnostic tests without out-of-pocket expenses. Not only have these ATMs made early health screening accessible to every rural resident, but they have also contributed immensely to maintaining good health.

Conclusion

At Manav Vikas Sanstha (MVS India), an ISO 9001:2015-certified and NITI Aayog-registered NGO in Jaipur, we firmly believe that quality healthcare services are a fundamental human right, and everyone (regardless of their financial status) should have access to them. It’s a key reason why we launched Project Aarogyya in collaboration with various business organisations.

As part of this CSR initiative, we have touched the lives of numerous people across 10+ Indian states and union territories. We’re actively working to expand our reach to pan-India, benefiting more of the rural population across the country.

If you want to be part of this health revolution and make high-quality early health screening accessible to all, you can volunteer or donate to our social project. Businesses planning to align their CSR initiatives along these lines can partner with us to launch more health ATMs in additional Indian districts. You can call us at +91 8955009377/ +91 9549127666, or email us at hello@mvsindia.org for queries.