- Friday, February 28, 2025
During her long career, Kathija also witnessed the changes that India’s healthcare services underwent and how the approach towards women’s healthcare transformed.
By: Shubham Ghosh
IN India’s healthcare system, nurses and midwives are important when it comes to delivery of babies and Kathija Bibi, a nurse from the southern state of Tamil Nadu who recently retired, oversaw more than 10,000 successful deliveries of newborns during her 33-year-long career, the BBC reported.
The 60-year-old Kathija, who also received a government award for her feat, feels proud that not a single one of the 10,000 babies that were delivered under her watch died.
Ma. Subramanian, the health minister of Tamil Nadu, recently told the BBC that Kathija recently received the government award for her flawless record in delivering childbirth.
During her long career, Kathija also witnessed the changes that India’s healthcare services underwent and how the approach towards women’s healthcare transformed.
As Kathija worked in a government health centre in Tamil Nadu, India changed from a country with a high maternal mortality rate (MMR) to one nearing the global average. She told the news publication that she saw people’s attitudes towards the girl child changing and the inclination towards having less number of children.
The retired nurse was herself pregnant when she started working in 1990 but she still helped other women who were expecting.
“I was seven months pregnant… yet I was helping other women. I returned to work after a short maternity break of two months,” she told the BBC, adding, “I know how anxious women are when they go into labour, so making them comfortable and confident is my first priority.”
Kathija, who concluded her illustrious journey in June, is a composed personality. Her clinic, which is located in a rural town of Villupuram (around 150 kilometres from the state capital Chennai), doesn’t have facilities to do Caesarean sections and if she found any complications in the patient, she immediately referred them to the district hospital.
Kathija was inspired by her mother Zulaika, who was also a nurse serving in the villages. She said that she used to play with syringes in her childhood and got accustomed to the smell of the hospital.
It was not long before she understood how important her mother’s work was in helping the poor and semi-literate rural women to get healthcare. Those days, private hospitals were not common and women relied more on state maternity homes.
For Kathija, the professional challenges helped her with a good learning experience.
“When I started, there was one doctor, seven helpers and two other nurses. Work was very hectic in the first few years. I couldn’t look after my children. I missed family functions. But those days gave me a very valuable learning experience,” she told the BBC.
In 1990, India’s MMR was 556 deaths per 100,000 live births while it saw 88 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. The MMR now stands at 97 per 100,000 live births while the infant mortality rate is 27 per 1,000 lives, government data showed.
Kathija feels government investment in rural healthcare and growing female literacy rates helped in achieving this progress.
While she would handle one or two cases generally, Kathija ended up delivering eight babies on March 8, 2000, which happened to be the International Women’s Day. That, she recalled, has been her busiest day but she also said that all her stress was gone when she heard the newborns cry.
According to Kathija, she helped deliver 50 pairs of twins and one pair of triplets.
She has also seen a big societal change in all these years of service. While earlier, some men refused to visit their wives if she gave birth to a girl child and some women wept after having a delivered second or third daughter, Kathija now receives a growing number of requests from husbands who want to be with their wives during childbirth.
There are also couples now who want two children, irrespective of the gender, she added.
