For a railway employee stationed in Maharashtra’s Akola, Jalgaon or Manmad, seeing a doctor can mean travelling two to three hours to the Divisional Railway Hospital in Bhusawal. A routine consultation may require taking time away from work, making the journey, and deciding whether the symptoms feel serious enough to warrant it.

“Travelling two to three hours for a consultation is not something people can manage regularly,” says Punit Agrawal, Divisional Railway Manager (DRM) of Bhusawal. “Unless there is a pressing need, people tend to delay it. That delay is what we wanted to address.”

That is the gap ‘Rudra’, Bhusawal railway division’s ‘hospital on wheels’, was created to bridge.

Launched in January 2025, Rudra is a refurbished railway coach equipped with consultation spaces, diagnostic facilities and medicines. It travels across the division, stopping at different stations so railway employees and their families can access basic healthcare closer to where they live and work.

When The Better India first wrote about Rudra, the hospital on wheels had only recently begun its journey. To read how an old railway coach was transformed into a mobile medical unit, tap here.

More than a year later, the experiment has had time to play out across the division. Its experience now offers practical lessons on what it takes to make mobile healthcare work, from planning camps and staffing them to using technology for follow-up care.

How an old railway coach became a medical unit

The scale of the Bhusawal railway division makes that challenge particularly complex. Spread across more than 1,200 kilometres and handling over 225 passenger trains every day, it serves railway employees and families stationed far beyond Bhusawal itself.

Rudra began with a practical idea: use an asset the railways already had.

Punit, in conversation with The Better India, shares, “In the railways, every asset has a defined life cycle. When coaches are taken out of service, some of them can still be used after proper rehabilitation. We identified one such coach and converted it into a medical unit.”

The coach was refurbished at a railway workshop and fitted with the medical infrastructure required for consultations and basic diagnostics. The result was a compact, functional healthcare space with diagnostic tools, consultation areas and medicines. 

Inside, patients can access basic tests such as ECGs and pathology screenings, along with consultations from both general physicians and visiting specialists. For employees and families living far from Bhusawal, it brings services that would otherwise require hours of travel much closer to home. 

When healthcare arrives before it’s too late

Since its launch in January 2025, the hospital on wheels has travelled across the division, stopping at different stations to........

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