Can training ‘fake doctors’ improve India’s healthcare?

Unqualified medics, popularly known as quacks, are routinely arrested in India for posing as doctors. But a charity is now trying to train them in primary medical care. Atish Patel explains why.

Sanjoy Mondal opened his small clinic with just a desk and a few plastic chairs in eastern India 15 years ago, after a short stint assisting a doctor working at a government hospital.

Although he has not studied medicine, Mr Mondal says he has conducted countless minor surgeries and prescribed drugs to hundreds of patients in a village of mud-walled homes in West Bengal state.

Now, the 40-year-old is one of thousands who have been taught the basics of front-line care by a non-governmental organisation which wants to ensure patients aren't harmed by self-taught medics.

"I now understand what safe drugs and what unsafe drugs are," Mr Mondal says, boxes of pills piled up behind him on shelves hammered into the sky-blue walls of his dark, dingy clinic.

Liver Foundation, the Kolkata-based charity offering the training, says most of India's medical establishment will criticise such a programme because they think unqualified practitioners are the bane of the country's healthcare system.