Protection

The immediate need is for Adventure Ashram to provide medical and educational care and assistance to the remote village communities in the Palani Hill region that surround the mountain hill station of Kodaikanal in southern India. The need for proper medical facilities in these outlying villages is very strongly felt as some of these villages are 30-40 kilometres by road from the nearest hospital and, in such extreme terrain without any transport, in many cases this is 40 kilometres too far. The majority of these villagers are daily-wage earners or farmers with smallholdings who are often unable to afford medical care in Kodaikanal or in any other cities on the plains. They have, effectively, little or no access to sophisticated medical care because of the costs (in both time and money) of travelling to the nearest hospital. This underlines the need to take healthcare to the people, as many cannot afford to tackle illness until it is too late.

Kodaikanal is one of the major towns visited on both the annual Enduro India and Karma Enduro events and at the heart of the project is the plan to start an outreach programme and build a 30 bed clinic in or near Kodaikanal as a base for the undertaking. This will provide modern out-patient and in-patient facilities together with addressing the local needs through direct health care and through health education. It is our ultimate aim to have the Adventure Ashram project recognised as a teaching institution but closer in time will be a formal tie up with a 'nearby' major hospital that will send us extra junior doctors on a rotation basis.

We intend to make the base hospital venture as environmentally friendly as possible and to this end there will be rooftop water harvesting with gravity fed sumps and tanks in order to minimize energy usage for pumping. Solar water heating units will be used to pre-heat water fed into electric geyser water heaters and there will be a water filtration unit for 'grey water'.

The land around the hospital buildings will be used as an organic vegetable garden, irrigated by the water from the 'grey water' filtration system and we hope that the vegetables produced will enable us to set up a programme to feed both the in-patients and their visiting relatives. Our thoughts are that this will enable the people to see for themselves how agriculture without pesticides is feasible. This area will later be expanded into a dietary department which will not only provide special food for diabetics etc, but will also enable us to teach patients to produce economical, nutritious food for themselves.