“The real test of our healthcare system is not what we provide in plush urban hospitals, but whether the last child in the remotest village has access to life-saving care,” public health activist, medical researcher, and founder of SEARCH, Dr Abhay Bang, once said.
In the instance of Javadhu Hills, sparsely populated settlements are nestled deep within forests and rugged terrain, the inhabitants have restricted access to healthcare. The region, covering about 200 km, has only six or seven primary healthcare centres. To reach them, residents have two options — to steer their two-wheelers on the only working tar road, or to board the two or three buses that run throughout the day.
Dr Chandrasekar Chandilya, who conducted two relief camps at the war-torn Jaffna in Sri Lanka, for Apollo Hospitals, and at Batticaloa in Sri Lanka, during the 2004 tsunami, says these experiences led him to establish Beyond Frontiers Trust (BFT). It’s a trust built with a mission to bring quality healthcare closer to communities that have lived without it. Dr Chandrasekar, senior consultant physician, internal medicine & diabetology, Apollo Hospitals, says, “With this simple vision in mind, to reach out to people and communities whose reach doesn’t allow them to access modern, quality healthcare, we set out three years back to the Javadhu Hills to see how we could improve the lives of the people there.”
Following the very vision of WHO’s primary goal to reduce premature deaths from major Non-Communicable Diseases by one-third by 2030, Dr Chandrasekar started trekking the routes of Javadhu Hills to understand the needs and frame a plan of action.
Over three months, beginning on August 16, 2025, the trust conducted three camps under the auspices of HAND-IN-HAND, an organisation in Kancheepuram, to realise that “there are so many diseases that the tribals have lived with, which they don’t know they suffer from. These illnesses, from diabetes to dermatitis, were curable and treatable,” notes Dr Chandrasekar.
The population living on the hills “probably go to the primary health centres after saving money over two months because they have to travel quite a distance to reach there,” he explains.
Almost a year later, the team — comprising 16 senior medical professionals, including two paediatricians, one paediatric neurologist, three gynaecologists, three physicians, two pharmacists, and two diagnosticians — has spread to 150 of the 229 accessible villages, touching 4,000 lives. Diagnosing patients for diabetes, hypertension, thyroid diseases, polyarthritis, kidney diseases, cervix, and breast cancers early enough, the doctors screen “anywhere between 200 and 250 patients in one session of the two held on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings,” notes Dr Chandrasekar.
Having completed 18 camps to date, some under the strategic advice of Srinivasan Services Trust, a CSR arm of TVS Motors, Beyond Frontiers Trust conducted a celebration in the city on Wednesday at MMA Management Centre.
Simultaneously, the trust is also digitising all medical records so that the people of the hills, the malaialis, can visit nearby hospitals for treatment. In addition to setting up a community nutrition kitchen that serves a cluster of villages. It aims to provide young children and pregnant mothers with food high in nutritional supplements in order to fight anaemia and protein-calorie malnutrition. “Anaemia is rampant in the region. Women go through menopause at the age of 39, and by this time they would have had four children,” flags Dr Chandrasekar.
BFT, using Srinivasan Services Trust’s mobile medical unit, plans to install screens on the side of the unit to repeatedly play three-to-five-minute AV educational clips on anaemia, sanitation, handwashing, and the importance of immunisation during pregnancy, as offered at the primary health centre. The unit will have a driver, a nurse, and a doctor, covering two villages a day.
In line with WHO’s primary focus across the world, the trust plans to integrate diagnoses and treatments into the state’s evolving healthcare systems like ‘Makkalai Thedi Maruthuvam’ and Comprehensive Maternity & Obstetric-Neonatology Centres (CMONC) while setting up a full-fledged clinical lab in Jamuna Marathur that will have equipment to run basic blood tests and diagnostics that are easily accessible to the people of Javadhu Hills.
With a goal to make quality healthcare, a fundamental right, easily accessible to the people of Javadhu Hills by 2027 and move to many more villages, Dr Chandrasekar is building a grassroots healthcare movement that aims to bridge the gap between remote communities and essential medical services.