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Covid dispatches: An account of how quacks 'treated' patients in absence of doctors in rural Bihar

Scroll | March 23, 2026 2:40 PM CST

While I reported that fewer people were going to Patna’s top COVID hospitals, I also needed to understand the situation in rural Bihar. Who was treating the patients in villages?

To investigate this, Sajid and I travelled together to Arrah (Bhojpur) district on May 8, 2020. In various blocks, clinics were closed, leaving patients to fend for themselves. Abandoned by the system, patients were left in the care of pharmacists or village quacks, commonly known as jhola-chhaap doctors. These ad-hoc rural healthcare providers had become the first line of treatment.

A quack is typically a male who has spent substantial time assisting qualified doctors or working in hospitals before starting his own rural clinic; he is essentially a layman with an elementary knowledge of medicine.

Although there is no concrete data on the exact number of quacks in India, a 2018 report published in Mint estimated that over 1 million quacks were active in the country at the time. In Bihar, which has over 44,000 villages and a predominantly rural population, more than 400,000 quacks are estimated to be operating. In comparison, West Bengal is estimated to have around 100,000 quacks. The numbers for Bihar are significantly higher than those for other states.

The quacks outnumber qualified doctors...