The Hindu : National : Language barrier confined him to hospital

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 02, 2005

National

National

Language barrier confined him to hospital

By Marcus Dam

KOLKATA, MARCH 1. Had 37-year-old N. Raja, who speaks only Tamil, been conversant in any other language he may not have been languishing for a fortnight at the surgical ward of Kolkata's State-owned Nil Ratan Sircar Hospital.

It has been 24 days since he was brought to the hospital with head injuries and a severed limb after having been hit by a lorry. He was found lying by the roadside on the northern fringes of the city. The driver had fled.

He was unable to make himself understood simply because none could be found to understand Tamil, the only language he knew. The language barrier was becoming both an embarrassment to the hospital authorities and a cause for Raja's desperation till a local non-governmental organisation, Diganta, and the city's unit of the All-India Tamil Sangam came to his rescue on February 18, two weeks after his admission to the hospital.

Another five days elapsed before contact could be established with his family, who reside in a remote village in Vijaymangalam of Erode district in Tamil Nadu.

His family members are expected to arrive any day now and till they come he cannot be discharged from the hospital.The Hospital's Deputy Superintendent,Dilip Kumar Jha, told The Hindu today that "we have learnt from the experience and the staff have been instructed to inform the higher authorities in the event of the admission an unknown patient with whom communication is difficult..."

What rankles Utpal Roy, general secretary of Diganta, is "the failure of the hospital authorities and the local police to find an interpreter even after 14 days of Raja's admission."

To find someone who speaks the language in a city which has a Tamil population of roughly 20,000 should not be a problem. As for those who can speak the language the figure should be higher, he says.

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