A significant share of Punjab's healthcare is provided by charitable institutions rather than by the state or the market.
Pingalwara at Amritsar, founded by Bhagat Puran Singh, takes the destitute and the disabled and asks nothing. The Radha Soami hospital at Beas is large and free at the point of use. Guru Nanak Mission hospitals, Kalgidhar Trust institutions, and dozens of gurdwara-run dispensaries operate on donations.
The eye camp and the medical camp, run in a gurdwara or school for a few days by visiting doctors, are standard across the state.
This is daswandh and seva working as a health system, and it fills a gap left by rural vacancies in the government service.
It is also unaccountable, unaudited in most cases, and dependent on the continued goodwill of donors. It is a strength and a symptom at the same time, like most of what is described on this site.
They are run by gurdwara committees, deras, trusts and diaspora associations, and across large parts of rural Punjab they are the nearest thing to a working hospital.
The mission and dera hospitals, the Pingalwara institutions and a long list of village dispensaries are funded almost entirely by donation.
They fill a gap the public system leaves and they are not a substitute for it. What they can do is limited by what a donation buys and by who is willing to work in a village.