Watch: Pregnant Woman Carried Like This For 8 km In Madhya Pradesh

Bundling her into a bedsheet tied to a bamboo pole on their shoulders, villagers carried her because there is no road to their village in Madhya Pradesh's Barwani district.

Carried on a makeshift cloth stretcher for 8 km with villagers using shovels and spades to level out muddy patches - a 20-year-old woman's experience of giving birth in rural Madhya Pradesh this week appeared to have changed little from an ordeal 200 years ago. When Sunita, a resident of Rajpura village in Barwani district, went into labour on Thursday her family and neighbours were left with no other option but to carry her themselves to a nearby village since her forest hamlet has no road connecting it with a hospital. Bundling her into a bedsheet tied to a bamboo pole on their shoulders, they carried her for 8 km to the Rani Kajal village that has a dirt track. An ambulance waiting at the village then took her to a hospital another 20 km away. The Community Health Centre at Pansemal where she gave birth, 28 km away, is the nearest hospital to her village and yet there is no way to get there except by foot, locals say, in an egregious indictment of health services and connectivity in the farthest corners of the country.