EHA’s Prem Jyoti Community Hospital (PJCH) was started as a community health program to care for the marginalized Malto tribal hill people of northeast Jharkhand.

This people group struggled with high infant and maternal mortality rates, low literacy, and severe poverty. Their population dropped from one million in 1947 to one hundred thousand by 1997. Witnessing this drop, EHA, along with the Evangelical Fellowship of India Commission on Relief (EFICOR) and the Friends Missionary Prayer Band (FMPB), opened a community health program with just two doctors, a lab tech, and two lay people. Twenty-seven years later, PJCH is a 30-bed hospital with 70 staff members.

From 1997 when the clinic opened to 2016, the infant mortality rate dropped from 250/1000 births to 100/1000. And the maternal mortality rate decreased from 46/1000 to 6/1000. The Malto villages now struggle less with diseases like malaria, diarrhea, TB, and a parasite disease called Kala-azar.

Since the villagers are spread out in the hills with few means of transportation, PJCH operates 72 mobile clinics each year covering 48 different villages. They have trained community health volunteers to give basic care and evaluate patients who need to be brought in for treatment at PJCH.