Since launching the foundation, Nehra and the handful of medical, public health and pharmacology students who have joined her have been working to raise $4,000 for books and $3,000 for medical supplies. University of Missouri-Columbia and earned her undergraduate degree in biochemistry and creative writing. “When I was teaching in India three years ago, I realized that most of my rural students had never been asked what they would like to be when they grow up,” she says. “Government schools in rural India are in shambles and a proper education has become difficult. Children at a very young age were becoming jaded by school and no longer believed in their own potential. They had dreams just as I did when I was a child, but few resources to achieve them.” Hoping to reach those children, Nehra started a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing health and education assistance to rural communities. The Nehra-Savent Foundation, named for her paternal and maternal grandparents, is currently raising funds to support two projects that will benefit six medically underserved villages in Haryana: a clinic to provide free primary health care and education, and a children’s library at the local public school, which serves approximately 600 kindergarteners through twelfth graders. Nehra started the foundation in October 2009 after an earlier experience in Haryana had convinced her to do more. It was 2006 and she had just finished her first year of medical school. Capable of providing only minimal medical care, she decided to offer what she could.
20 | CHIRONIAN / New York Medical College
She raised a little money, filled a couple of suitcases with new and gently-used art supplies donated by the College community. She brought them to the village in Haryana where her extended family still lives. “My students in India had never seen construction paper, and only the oldest ones had desks,” Nehra recalls. What they needed was, she says, “a place to explore their thoughts, ideas and ambitions.” Haryana, like much of India, lacks doctors, nurses and basic medical care. The need is urgent, given the region’s prevalence of infectious and waterborne diseases as well as many noncommunicable diseases typical in Western countries. In addition, many would-be physicians decide to go abroad to attend medical school, or emigrate to the United States or Europe after finishing medical school in India. “In my state in India there isn’t a single child psychiatrist,” says Nehra, who begins an unusual three-part residency this summer in pediatrics, adult and child psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. “I chose the triple board program because I want to be a physician of the body and the mind. In underserved areas, just as anywhere, mental health is just as important as physical health. The primary difference is that it is difficult to treat the mind without first taking care of the body’s basic needs.”
Since launching the foundation, Nehra and the handful of medical, public health and pharmacology students who have joined her have been working to raise $4,000 for books and $3,000 for medical supplies that she plans to bring to the clinic—a separate room on the side of her grandfather’s house—when she returns this summer. It may not sound like much, she says, “but for every dollar I get, we can buy two or three books and several packets of medical supplies.” And every child, parent and grandparent she reaches represents another small step toward a better life. “I have two homes, India and America,” she says, “and I have one dream, to be able to provide for the underserved in both countries. Our India project is just the first step of many that need to be taken.” n