It was the first Thursday of Margashirsha month. A woman decked up in a saree and jewellery was busy installing an idol of goddess Laxmi, while another slept quietly on her bed. Few other women sat in a row, watching a television series on a common TV nonchalant about the fact that it was the first Thursday of the auspicious month. Rituals are performed with families, unfortunately, the women were abandoned by them. This is a scenario of the patients' wards in the morning at Acworth Municipal Hospital for Leprosy, Wadala.

Till last week, the wards in this hospital had 80 senior citizens who are leprosy-affected and abandoned by their dear ones due to social stigma. Few of these patients have been staying in the Acworth Municipal Hospital since few decades.

"While most of them were admitted in the hospital when they were in their teens. They are still in the hospital because of being socially abandoned by society. Only 10 per cent of these people get visitors," said a medical officer from the hospital.

A patient who came to the hospital around five decades ago was 15-year-old when she was diagnosed with leprosy. Since then the hospital has been her home. "No one inquired about me after I was admitted to the hospital. I don't complain, people here have become my family."

Since a few years, the leprosy patients are admitted in this hospital on a temporary basis, unlike these leprosy-affected patients who are living in the hospital for a few decades. As per the hospital authority, even today there is a lot of social stigma in rural areas but awareness and advancement in medicines have played a major role to reduce the number of infected patients and early detection of cases.

While around 60 to 70 cases visit the OPD of the leprosy hospital for follow up treatment, in a recent campaign of the BMC, around 52 new infected cases of Leprosy are found of which 27 cases were of multibacillary leprosy.