Jack Preger

Founder

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Jack Preger is the founder of Calcutta Rescue (1991)[1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare, education and livelihood from Kolkata.

Jack Preger (born 25 July 1930) is a British doctor who worked among destitute people in Kolkata for four decades and founded the relief agency Calcutta Rescue. He is often described as the pavement doctor of Calcutta, and his practice of treating patients on the street is widely regarded as an origin of the street medicine movement.

Preger began treating patients on a Kolkata pavement in 1979 and continued to do so, without official authorisation, for fourteen years. Calcutta Rescue was registered as a charity in the early 1990s and now runs clinics, schools and vocational training centres in the city and elsewhere in West Bengal.

Early life and education

Preger was born in Manchester in 1930. He read at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and took a postgraduate degree in economics and political science. He farmed in Wales before turning to medicine, and was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin in 1965 at the age of 35.

Career

After completing his internship in 1972 Preger responded to a radio appeal for doctors in the newly independent Bangladesh. He worked in refugee camps in Dhaka, learned Bengali and Urdu, and by 1975 had established a clinic with about ninety beds together with two farms. He publicly exposed a child-trafficking operation and was deported from Bangladesh in 1979.

He moved to Kolkata in 1979, briefly working with the Missionaries of Charity before setting up on his own. For fourteen years, from 1979 to 1993, he ran an open-air clinic on a pavement in central Kolkata, working six days a week and dismantling the clinic each evening. Consultations, medicines, dressings and diagnostic tests were provided free, with referrals to hospital for serious cases. His right to remain and to work in India was repeatedly contested by the immigration authorities over the following years, and he had to go to court more than once to secure his residence permit and the charity's permission to receive foreign donations.

Calcutta Rescue was registered as a charity in the early 1990s and permanent clinics followed. The organisation now runs clinics, schools and vocational training centres staffed largely by local employees, with support committees in several European countries, Canada and the United States. Preger retired in January 2019, aged 88, and returned to the United Kingdom; Calcutta Rescue continued under other leadership.

The American physician Jim Withers, who met Preger in Kolkata in 1993, went on to found the Street Medicine Institute in 2009, and has credited Preger's pavement practice as a model for the field.

Recognition

Preger was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1993. In 2017 he was named Philanthropist of the Year at The Asian Awards in London.[2][3][4][5]

Calcutta Rescue

Calcutta Rescue has worked since 1980 to improve the lives of people living in poverty in and around Kolkata. It provides free primary healthcare, diagnostics and medicines through fixed clinics, free education for underprivileged children, fair employment through a handicrafts project, and a safe drinking water project addressing arsenic contamination in rural West Bengal.

Calcutta Rescue reports the following, on its own site: