A small room inside the panchayat office in Amballur, a tiny village near Vaniyambadi in Tirupattur district, has been functioning as a sub-health centre of the village for decades.
The centre has a village health nurse (VHN), who can attend to simple ailments. Villagers, mostly farmers, have to travel to Vaniyambadi, around 13 km from the village, for medical emergencies, including pregnancy-related complications, as it is the nearest town that has a government taluk hospital.
Their ordeal will soon come to an end as K. Dinakaramohan, 75, a farmer and an inhabitant of the village, has donated 10 cents (4,340 square feet) of his land for the construction of a government health centre in the village. A gift deed was registered at the sub-registrar office in Vaniyambadi a few days ago, with the land being donated to the Department of Health of the State government.
The sub-registrar for Vaniyambadi confirmed to The Hindu that the land has been donated for public use. “As our village does not have any government land, someone has to come forward. So, I donated the land after consulting my family,” said Mr. Dinakaramohan, a father of three.
As a farmer, Mr. Dinakaramohan has been cultivating coconut, a dominant crop in the village, for many decades. Farming has been the major occupation of his family for nearly eight generations.
Providing space for public causes is not new for him as the existing building for the police station in the village was built on land that once belonged to him.
Interestingly, residents said the tradition of donating land for public uses was not restricted to him alone in the village. A.K. Subramanian, a retired engineer from the village, donated 20 cents of his land to build an animal husbandry clinic many years ago. Likewise, A.P. Murugesan, the panchayat president, donated five cents of land for a gram seva centre a decade ago.
