Gram Chikitsalay uses the same template as Panchayat but with a fraction of its humour or charm, observes Deepa Gahlot.
A clueless young man from the city lands up in a village to take up a new work assignment, meets a bunch of eccentrics and oddballs, and learns how the other half lives. It could be the one-line for Panchayat, but it is TVF’s new show, Gram Chikitsalay, that uses the same template but with a fraction of its humour or charm.
Dr Prabhat Sinha (Amol Parashar), son of a wealthy doctor, who could have stayed in Delhi and made his fortune, chooses to take up a job as the medical officer at the primary health centre (PHC) in a remote village called Bhatkandi in Chhattisgarh.
With idealism as his calling card, he sets out to make a difference.
The show, directed by Rahul Pandey, opens with the now-familiar three-on-a-bike scene, of a village elder being taken to a quack.
The old man expires, and as it happens in village communities, everybody is at the funeral when a flustered Prabhat arrives in an autorickshaw, the driver of which predictably rips him off.
The heath centre’s lungi-clad compounder Phutani (Anandeshwar Dwivedi) and ward boy Gobind (Akash Makhija) never expected a medical officer to actually land up, so are caught unprepared.
Prabhat may have expected the PHC to be badly run, in the absence of a doctor, but even he is taken aback to see that it is totally nonfunctional.
A cranky farmer Ram Avtar (Akhileshwar Prasad Sinha) has planted crops on the land around the clinic’s small building, and belligerently refuses to allow them to cut a pathway to the PHC.
When that is done with the reluctant intervention of a sleepy, punishment-posting cop (‘why not wait till harvest time?’), Prabhat looks in dismay at the decrepit clinic, which has obviously not been used in years, if at all, because no doctor stayed long enough to make it work.
Phutani has been selling the allotted medicines on the sly.
The only one who seems to have some sincerity towards her job is Indu, the nurse (Garima Vikrant Singh), whose responsibility is the dispensing of vaccines.
In the absence of a proper healthcare system, which exists only on paper, the villagers depend on the hit-and-miss diagnoses by the fake medico, Chetak Kumar (Vinay Pathak). He cannot even administer an injection but instinctively knows how to deal with his patients.
Prabhat has a brusque ‘gold medallist doctor from a top college’ manner and needless vanity — a suitcase full of fancy shoes that are impractical in the mud of the village.
Still, the show (created by Deepak Kumar Mishra and Arunabh Kumar, scripted by Shreya Srivastava and Vaibhav Suman) opens well enough.
The comedy, insipid though it is, comes from the dysfunctionality of the chikitsalay, the indifference of the staff as well as the villagers, and Prabhat’s futile attempts to repair the broken rural healthcare structure.
The glow of his noble intentions starts getting dim gradually.
Gargi (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor), a doctor in another village, has acquired the degree of cynicism required to survive in a dead end job.
‘If a place doesn’t accept you, you accept it,’ she tells Prabhat. (There may be a budding romance here hopefully, it moves faster than that of Panchayat‘s Abhishek-Rinky.)
Sure, there is some truth here and scope for dark humour plus a social message. But the well of rural wit was used up by Panchayat, leaving the muddy dregs for Gram Chikitsalay.
The warring politicians — a comedy staple — are eventually pulled out when all else fails, to no avail.
There are two songs introduced into the proceedings, and they don’t add anything to the general torpor into which the show sinks.
The casting of villagers is so authentic that the actors stand out like the outsiders they are.
By the fifth — and last of this season — episode, Prabhat has acquired some humility and one patient, but the show does an abrupt turn into melodrama and Indu’s domestic tragedy.
There is obviously more to the story and to the real education of Dr Prabhat.
Even though this season of Gram Chikitsalay is way short of expectations from a TVF production, Amol Parashar’s earnestness makes one care enough for him to see where his journey takes him.
Gram Chikitsalay streams on Amazon Prime Video.
Gram Chikitsalay Review Rediff Rating:
