Abhay Bang

Founder

Founder of SEARCH

Abhay Bang is the founder of SEARCH [1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare, tribal welfare and rural & agriculture from Gadchiroli.

Abhay Bang (born 1950) is an Indian physician and community health researcher who works in Gadchiroli district, Maharashtra. With his wife Rani Bang he founded the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health (SEARCH) in 1985 and developed a model of home-based newborn care delivered by trained village women.

The approach the Bangs devised, in which village health workers visit newborns at home to identify and treat sepsis, pneumonia, hypothermia and asphyxia, was subsequently taken up by the World Health Organization and UNICEF and adapted in other developing countries and in India's national health programmes.

Early life and education

Bang was born in 1950 in Wardha, Maharashtra. His father, Thakurdas Bang, was an economist who was imprisoned for two years for his part in the Quit India movement. Abhay spent his childhood at Gandhi's ashram at Sevagram and was schooled under the Nai Talim system.

He took his MBBS at Nagpur University in 1972, in the same class as his future wife Rani, and an MD in 1977. In 1984 he completed a Master of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Career

In 1985 the Bangs moved to Gadchiroli, one of Maharashtra's poorest and most heavily tribal districts, and founded SEARCH, beginning work in a converted warehouse.

Their central innovation was home-based neonatal care. Village women trained as arogyadoots, or health messengers, visited newborns at home carrying a standard kit, and were taught to recognise and treat the principal causes of newborn death. The trial results were published in The Lancet and were initially met with scepticism about entrusting neonatal care to workers with limited formal education. Infant mortality in the study area fell sharply over the following years, and the model was later adopted by the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

SEARCH also works on maternal and reproductive health, on alcohol and tobacco use, and on rural development in the district.

Recognition

Bang was made an Ashoka Fellow in 1985. He received the Maharashtra Bhushan Award in 2003, the MacArthur Foundation International Award and the Jamnalal Bajaj Award in 2006, and the Distinguished Alumni Award of Johns Hopkins University in 2013. In 2018 the Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on him; in 2024 Abhay and Rani Bang were jointly honoured with the Padma Shri.[2][3]

SEARCH

SEARCH (Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health), founded in 1988 by Dr. Abhay Bang and Dr. Rani Bang, provides healthcare to rural and tribal communities of Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, from its Shodhgram campus. Its community-based newborn-care research has shaped national and global health policy; it reports 150,000+ patient treatments a year.

SEARCH reports the following, on its own site:

1,50,000+ patient treatments annually
17,000+ neonates treated in the community
80,000+ adolescents given life skills education
134 villages covered by its community laboratory and vital statistics system since 1988