When Dr Abhay Bang and Dr Rani Bang completed their postgraduate training at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the career paths available to them were enviable. Instead, they returned to India and headed for Gadchiroli — a heavily forested district in Maharashtra, in central India, where the majority of the population belonged to tribal communities, healthcare was almost entirely absent, and 121 out of every 1,000 newborns died before their first birthday.
Abhay Bang had grown up at Mahatma Gandhi's Sevagram Ashram in Maharashtra. The idea that a doctor's place was where the need was greatest had been woven into his thinking since childhood. Rani Bang, trained in obstetrics and gynaecology, shared both the conviction and the willingness to act on it. When they arrived in Gadchiroli in 1985, they began not by prescribing but by listening — holding annual People's Health Assemblies where villagers could voice their most pressing concerns. Infant mortality emerged immediately as the central crisis.
In 1986, the couple co-founded SEARCH — the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health. Their approach was methodical: identify the causes of death, then design solutions the community itself could implement. They found that childhood pneumonia was the leading killer of infants, and trained village women — known as Aarogya Doot, or Health Messengers — to diagnose and treat it at home. When they published their findings in The Lancet in 1988, they faced scepticism from the medical establishment: could village women with limited formal education really deliver effective neonatal care? The data answered the question. They persisted.
They then turned to neonatal sepsis — which accounted for 60% of newborn deaths — and trained the same health workers to detect and treat infections before they became fatal. The results from the intervention trial across 39 villages were transformative. Neonatal mortality dropped from 62 deaths per 1,000 live births to 25 — a reduction of approximately 60% — sustained over seven years. The cost of saving one newborn life was calculated at the equivalent of just a few pounds. TIME magazine named them Global Heroes of Health. In 2024, the Indian government awarded them the Padma Shri, one of the country's highest civilian honours.
The model was validated by the WHO and UNICEF, published in international journals, and formally adopted by India's National Health Mission in 2011. Today, 800,000 community health workers across India are trained in the SEARCH approach, and the model has been implemented in 16 countries. SEARCH now operates across 269 villages in Gadchiroli, treating around 100,000 patients a year. The Bangs have never left.