Fifty years of care in Mirik, from a family of doctors

For close to fifty years, one name has been spoken in Mirik whenever someone fell ill: Dr. Swapan Kumar Kundu. Long before the town had the clinics it has today, his door at Krishnanagar was open to tea-garden workers, students, traders and travellers alike.

He did not build it alone. Radha Madhav Medical Hall was started at the same time by Dr. Kundu and his wife, Pushpalata Gurung. While he saw patients, she ran the counter: the stock, the accounts, the credit book for families who could pay only after the tea-garden wages came in. The hall had two founders from its first day.

Health camps in the tea gardens, free check-ups on Sundays, medicines sent up to villages by whoever was heading that way. None of it was called community service at the time. It was simply how the hall worked, and it still is.

Pushpalata Gurung is the reason the hall felt like a home and not a dispensary. She knew every family by name, which child was due a vaccine, and which grandmother would forget her evening tablet unless it was counted into a paper fold for her.

In a hill town where Nepali, Bengali and Hindi are spoken in the same queue, she made sure nobody left the counter without understanding their medicine. That habit became the hall's rule, and it is still how the staff are trained.

A professional nurse and a close relative of the Kundu family, Tika Chettri has been a guiding presence in Radha Madhav's journey since its founding days. While her independent nursing service is practiced outside Radha Madhav Medical Hall, her healthcare experience and family ties helped shape the clinic's spirit of attentive, caring service.

As a co-founder rooted in family trust, she stood firmly beside Dr. Swapan Kumar Kundu and Pushpalata Gurung during the hall's formative years in Mirik, offering enduring encouragement and vital support to their shared mission.

“A pharmacy is not a shop. It is the last person a sick family talks to before they sleep.”