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✅ Completed COVID-19 Response

Two mobile ambulances for rural Thanjavur's post-COVID trauma care

📍 Pattukottai and Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, India

✅ Project Value: $73,862 — Reached

A Rotary Global Grant funds two fully equipped mobile ambulances for post-COVID trauma and emergency care across rural Thanjavur and Pattukottai, Tamil Nadu.

By mid-2021, with India's second COVID-19 wave still unfolding and a third considered likely, Rotary District 2981 turned its attention to what tends to get overlooked in a pandemic response: the patients COVID-19 leaves behind. Survivors face a heightened risk of cardiac and neurological events in the months after recovery, on top of the usual toll of undiagnosed diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in rural communities.

A mobile answer to a distance problem

Global Grant GG2127942 funds two mobile medical clinics — fully equipped ambulances that travel to rural communities rather than waiting for patients to reach them. Hosted by the Rotary Club of Thanjavur Mid-Town (District 2981) and sponsored internationally by the Rotary Club of The Hills-Kellyville (District 9685), the project partners directly with Government General Hospital, Pattukottai, and Thanjavur Medical College & Hospital.

What the grant delivered

Backed by US$73,862 in funding, the project supplied:

  • 2 Force Traveller ambulances, fully fitted out as mobile trauma units
  • 2 multi-parameter monitors
  • 2 portable suction units
  • 2 portable ventilators
  • 2 infusion pumps
  • 2 defibrillators
  • 2 intubation kits

A ten-year commitment, not a one-off

Each ambulance was handed to a local charitable trust — the Rotary Club of Kottai Pattukkottai Social Educational and Charitable Trust, and the Rotary Club of Thanjavur Mid-Town Charitable Trust — both of which have run similar community health projects for more than a decade. Under a signed MOU, the trusts commit to keeping the vehicles running for at least ten years, funded partly by modest, below-market charges to patients. A trained driver, nurse and nursing assistant staff each van.

A note from Haran Ramachandran, International Sponsor: Watching this project take shape from Sydney, what stood out to me was the ten-year commitment behind it — this isn't equipment handed over and forgotten, it's two local charitable trusts already a decade into this work, taking on vehicles that will keep serving their communities long after the pandemic headlines fade.