What drives Bengal's 'Bike Ambulance Dada'?

The ingenious ambulance by Karimul Hak has ferried about 6,000 people with medical emergencies during the past 16 years.

Karimul Hak is proud of the rampant nature around his home. On the one side is a lush green tea garden as far as the eyes could see, on the other side is a forest famous for its one-horned rhinoceros that rangers are busy keeping safe. Hak, a former tea-garden worker living near the Gorumara National Park in Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal, is hard at work in his own way, caring for humans needing emergency medical attention.

Karimul Hak, aka Bike Ambulance Dada, in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal.

Fondly called 'Bike Ambulance Dada' by villagers in Dhalabari, about 50 km from Jalpaiguri in northern Bengal, Hak is a humanitarian always on the move. With the help of his motorcycle, he has ferried thousands of the seriously ill from Dhalabari and nearby villages to hospitals in the past decade and a half. The ambulance service is free and round-the-clock.

When it was launched in 2007, the free ambulance was just a motorcycle pulling an iron box-like carrier for the sick. Today the bike has a more sophisticated sidecar for the patient fitted with an oxygen cylinder. The service has two motorcycles and an equal number of four-wheeler vans transporting three to four patients every day.

"A bike ambulance is an easy mode of transport for the sick in villages where there are hardly any proper roads," says Hak, explaining the benefits of his bikes. A mobile phone number is displayed on the motorcycles and ambulances. Hak, his wife Anjuwara Begum, and their two sons, Raju and Rajesh (their two daughters Seemu and Leja are married and live in nearby villages), and Begum and Hak's two daughters-in-law are available to receive the calls for help. Sixteen years after he drove his first patient to the district hospital in Jalpaiguri, Hak still drives his 'motorcycle ambulance'.

"My first case was a snakebite patient," recalls Hak. "It was a woman whose family called me for help and I immediately drove her to hospital. She was discharged after four days." After the woman returned to her home, her family called Hak to thank him for saving her life. It was a time when a 'motorcycle ambulance' was a laughable idea in Hak's village. The first case brought a semblance of seriousness to Hak's makeshift ambulance and his mission of saving people's lives.

Born in Dhalabari, Hak, 57, was the third of his parents' six children.  He dropped out of school early to do the odd jobs at a nearby tea garden to support his father and mother who were farm labourers. "He, perhaps, studied till Class III," says Biswajit Jha, a former journalist, who wrote a biography of Hak two years ago. Bike Ambulance Dada: The Inspiring Story of Karimul Hak (Penguin India, 2021), Jha's book, told the story of Hak's journey as a humanitarian determined to help the poor and the needy. Last year, the book got its first translation in Malayalam.

Karimul Hak was a prominent speaker at the fourth edition of the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, last month.

"Several of his fellow workers in the tea garden told me that even as a young worker, Hak was the first to come forward to take a sick worker or a family member to hospital," says Jha, who went to meet Hak in his village in 2014 after hearing about his "bike ambulance" from news reports. "He believed that the best help a person can give to a fellow human is when the other is fighting to live," adds Jha, who quit his journalism job in Delhi in 2003 to work as a social activist in West Bengal's Cooch Behar.

Hak says he decided to start an ambulance service after his mother passed away following a heart attack in 1995. "My mother was not fortunate to get a vehicle to take her to a hospital. I swore that day that I won't let anyone die without getting help," he says. He soon began saving up a few rupees every month from his meagre tea-garden salary. In 2007, Hak took a bank loan to buy his first "motorcycle ambulance".

As news of his ingenious ambulance service spread, help started coming in slowly. "The service is funded entirely by donations from individuals and companies," says Hak about his free ambulance work. A year ago, he resigned from his job at the nearby tea garden he began as a preteen. He quit as an assistant manager.

"Hak's family is his biggest support," says Jha, who has just finished writing his second non-fiction after Bike Ambulance Dada. Hak's wife Anjuwara (they got married 30 years ago) is his biggest admirer and supporter. "My wife accompanies patients to the hospital and stays with female patients for as long as they need her," says Hak. "It is important in life to help others," says Anjuwara, "I tell him (Hak) not to worry about today and continue the work that we do every day."

"He is courageous and doesn't lose hope. He is the happiest person I have ever met," says Jha about Hak's perseverance. "When you work for the welfare of others, you will always be happy." Jha, who runs a free school in Cooch Behar to train tribal students for jobs, remembers an occasion when Hak was called on to help a sick elderly man, this time without receiving a distress call. "Hak and I were going to the town in my car when we saw an old man lying by the roadside. He was obviously unwell. We stopped the car and went to him. As soon as he saw Hak, the man told him: 'I knew you would come.'"

The ambulance service has grown today to add a hospital, a nursing training centre and a tailoring institute, all in Hak's small family land, for the predominantly tribal community in Dhalabari. In 2017, the Indian MNC, Bajaj Group, and the PSU giant Indian Oil Corporation, gave enough funds for a generator to supply electricity to Hak's hospital and training institutes. A year later, the Tagore Sengupta Foundation, a non-profit in Pennsylvania, the US, and the Kolkata-based NGO, Society for Technology With a Human Face, donated a water tank. "Donations help us keep serving the poor," says Hak, who is dreaming of more generous donations in the future so that he could buy a modern life support ambulance.

The then president Pranab Mukherjee conferring the Padma Shri award for social work to Karimul Hak in 2017.

In 2017, the government conferred the Padma Shri on Hak for social work. Among other recipients of the award that year were star cricketer Virat Kohli, famous wrestler Sakshi Malik and renowned scientist Madan Madhav Godbole. After Jha's book on him, a Bollywood biopic is on the cards. Hak recently signed an agreement for a film on him in Hindi with a Mumbai-based producer.