TARGET India's Street Dentists

India's Street Dentists
Are a Vanishing Breed



Starting shot
JAIPUR, India - A street dentist, a 25-year veteran of his trade, crouched on a hot and dusty sidewalk, hard by M. I. Road, a main thoroughfare in this fabled pink city in northwestern India.

He plucked the fruits of his labor, a long yellowed incisor, out of a metal bowl and held it aloft. "It wasn't working right," the dentist, Mahender Singh, said. "It kept turning left and right when he ate." Mr. Singh gestured toward his patient, a 48-year-old from Lucknow who was spitting streams of blood into the gutter.

Mr. Singh, whose family immigrated to India from Lahore, Pakistan, many decades ago, is brisk and understated when discussing his trade. He is the poor man's dentist, he says, and he likes it that way.


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"I am not from a rich family, so I work here," he said, gesturing to his corner of the sidewalk on a weekday afternoon. "I work locally for the poor people."

Street services are hardly an anomaly in the cities and villages here. Around the corner from Mr. Singh, a sidewalk apothecary promotes medical concoctions derived from trees. A few paces away, a man sits in the street repairing bicycle tires, his tool kit in his lap. Roadside barbers are plentiful. And sidewalk chefs preside over vats of hot oil to fry sweet and savory pastries.

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But the street dentist is no longer so ubiquitous. Dr. Ajay Kakar, a periodontist in Mumbai who maintains a Web site for his dental colleagues, estimates that fewer than 100 remain.

India has 80,000 dentists with degrees - and offices. Each year, 11,200 join the field, Dr. Kakar said.

The nation's first dental institution was the R. Ahmed Dental College in Calcutta; it had its first graduating class in 1958.


Mr. Singh took a different route. He learned his trade from his father. Later, he taught his son, giving the boy, now 25, his blessing and former location, on a sidewalk in busy area near the "old city," where signature rose-painted buildings glow in the afternoon sun.

Mr. Singh's cousins and uncles are dentists elsewhere in India and as far away as Manchester, England. "They have offices", he notes.


His own "office" is tidy, albeit dusty, a few steps from a public water faucet. The work area consists of tarps laid on concrete under a bamboo and linen awning with a chair and its leopard-print cushion. The tools are neatly arrayed on a cloth atop concrete block. A pot of water simmers over a copper stove. An enormous tin box like those favored by carpenters holds extra dental tools.


Between patients, Mr. Singh douses his weathered hands with a purple antiseptic, although he is less than consistent about using it.

When approached by a former patient, who immediately popped out his dentures to register a complaint about an irritation, Mr. Singh plunged his fingers into the man's mouth seconds after they were in the mouth of another patient.

The occasional fly alighted on his hands, the instruments and patients.


Still, there is a modicum of sophistication about the ancient art. No swig of whiskey or bite of a bullet is offered to assuage an ache. Mr. Singh injects an anesthetic into the gums.

Asked whether patients passed out from the pain, he said: "All the time. Right here in the street."

At his side, arranged like museum pieces, are two dozen or so pairs of used dentures on a red tarp.

The dentally challenged or merely curious poke at the wares and hold them up to the sunlight.


This being India, where socializing is as necessary as air, a small crowd gathered as Mr. Singh filed down a partial bridge for patient No. 2, a 45-year-old aide at a hospital. The patient, Zaman Ali, could scarcely wait for Mr. Singh to remove his hand before praising him.

"I work for the government hospital," Mr. Ali said. " But I don't like to go to the doctors there."


Mr. Singh is also cheaper. For his new slimmed-down bridge, Mr. Ali paid 125 rupees, or $1.35. At dentist's office, the fee could run 10,000 rupees.

Gopilal Lodhirajabuth, the man who popped out his bridge for an impromptu consultation, testified to Mr. Singh's talent. "No complaints for four years," he said.


Mr. Singh was eager to display acknowledgments.

Within minutes of meeting a visitor, he displayed a letter from an aluminum box that was an undated thank you from Marjorie Simpson, a dentist in Florida who stopped on a tour of the city.


Mr. Singh also keeps a framed article about him from a Hindi newspaper. But he was irked by a German tourist, who, Mr. Singh said, had photographed him and pasted the pictures at train stations throughout Germany.

"Too many tourists come to see me," he said.

Cavity-inducing candy is plentiful, a staple of the Diwali festival in November. Yet many people still choose a short stick of neem wood over a conventional toothbrush to clean their teeth.


"If you eat hard foods," Mr. Singh said, "your teeth will be good. If you eat only soft foods, like Westerners, you won't have such good teeth."

Asked about his teeth, he smiled and, using the tip of his tongue, lifted a bridge of a half-dozen teeth from the lower jaw.

"I made the whole set myself," he said. "The mold, the teeth, everything." Mr. Singh is not only the owner of his small business, but a customer, as well.



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Many thanks to Ray McClure for suggesting and programming this target.