The ‘Medicine Baba’ Goes Door to Door

The “Medicine Baba,” Omkar Nath Sharma, 75, spends his days knocking on doors in Delhi’s upper and middle class neighborhoods, collecting their leftover medicines and giving them to the poor.

Mr. Sharma, a former medical technician, was jolted out of retirement in 2008, after an under-construction Delhi Metro bridge collapsed in Laxmi Nagar, claiming two lives and injuring several construction workers and passers by. Many of those people had no access to health care or medicine. “I was moved by the plight of the people who were running here and there searching desperately for medicine,” said Mr. Sharma in a recent interview. He said he visited the site of the accident and decided “I will do something to help society.”

Mr. Sharma starts his day at 6 a.m., when he leaves his rented home in Manglapuri, a southern Delhi suburb, and travels by buses on his senior citizen pass to wealthier parts of the city. He has built up a pool of regular contributors in neighborhoods like Green Park, who he calls on when they have medicines they no longer need. Mr. Sharma estimates he walks about three miles a day, collecting everything from painkillers to multivitamins, despite walking with a limp a since he was 12 after being hit by a car.

Wearing an orange shirt that says “Mobile medicine bank for poor patients,” he picks up medicines that he estimates are worth 200,000 rupees, about $3,860, a month, and then distributes them to individuals and charitable clinics for no charge. Mr. Sharma knows that loosely distributing medicine brings real risks, so he said he will only give them out if a patient has a prescription from a doctor.

While the Medicine Baba’s self-created medicine distribution system seems unorthodox, it is also filling a real need in Delhi, patients and doctors who work with the Medicine Baba say. Treatment is free at India’s government hospitals and clinics, but they are often understaffed, overcrowded and their dispensaries sometimes out of key medicines. According to the World Health Organization’s World Medicine Report in 2004, 649 million Indians did not have access to essential medicine.