Barnes in Common

the magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
May/June 2008

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India is Booming

by Katherine Makower

India is booming. Booming with develop ment and with noise, I thought, as we drove along the new motorway between Chennai (which used to be Madras) and Bangalore. Construction sites, half-built engineering colleges, multi-
national companies – Nokia, Hyundai, Dell, – and traffic. Huge buses and lorries weave in and out, hooting piercingly before overtaking, whether on the inside or the outside no-one cares. Once our driver slowed suddenly. A cow was on the motorway. There was no pile up. All was well.

I was heading west, a two and a half-hour drive to Vellore. Eventually weird shaped hills appeared on the horizon – the Eastern Ghats. Vellore is at the foot of these hills – one of India’s colourful, chaotic towns where everything takes place on the streets. There are few pavements, so life flows seamlessly from shops and small businesses to roadside stalls where people squat, stand and bargain, to the kaleidoscopic melee of cyclists, pedestrians, auto-rickshaws, lorries and buses which fills the road.

I had come here last October, invited by my friends Dr MC and Dr Anna Mathew, to write a book about their work. Since the late Eighteenth Century, a remarkable American family, the Scudders, had lived and worked nearby, bringing medical help inspired by their Christian faith, a faith first brought to southern India centuries before by St Thomas, one of Christ’s disciples. At the end of the Nineteenth Century, Ida Scudder, a young grand-daughter of the pioneer doctor John, was made dramatically aware of the dire need of Indian women for medical help, which it was not acceptable for men to give them at that time. As a result, she trained as a doctor in America and then returned. In 1900 she opened her first hospital – a clinic with one bed, in her father’s house. Gazing down at the small town from what is now known as Hospital Hill, a vision of a hospital for women and children began to form in her mind; also of a medical college to train women, (now it’s mixed).

The hospital now dominates the town – a cluster of well-planned buildings housing all the facilities and expertise of a modern medical centre, treating thousands of patients. 5km away the medical college, set among jungly flowering trees and beautiful gardens, hums with colourful Indian young life.

The Mathews, both Indian Christians from Kerala, having lost a disabled baby themselves, set up a small clinic for children with special needs in Madras in the 1980s. It was something new for India at that time, and not much understood. Their main concern was to reach out to families when a child was born with some neuro-developmental need, to assess and work out a programme for helping the child to reach its full potential and to involve the parents in this programme, thereby giving them hope. In 1997 they were invited to transfer their work to the Christian Medical School and Hospital (CMCH) Vellore, setting up a new department of Developmental Paediatrics. Here, in beautiful new premises, they not only welcome and help children with special needs and their families, but they are now setting up training and a Ph D programme, with the hope of sending trained doctors to establish similar departments in other parts of India. Yes, India is booming, but some people could fall by the wayside, and the Mathews are concerned for these.

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