The man sat doubled over on his bed, his hands extended in a sort of praying mantis position.

On the glazed screen of Dr M R Rajagopal’s laptop, it’s hard to guess what he was thinking, but if he were indeed praying, he was probably praying for death. The pain from his cancer had left him in that position for three weeks. The next frame has the same man sitting. The cancer had left him shriveled but from the depths of his sunken eyes, he looked relieved as he sat with a mug of tea. “He sat up barely an hour after we gave him a dose of morphine. That was the first time he was drinking his tea in several weeks,” says Dr Rajagopal, a palliative care expert whose Pallium India helps fill in a crucial vacuum in India’s medical practice — that of dealing with pain.

More than 70 per cent of cancer sufferers in India have an incurable form of cancer, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch, and many of them are in severe pain. Also, India has more oral cancer patients than any other country. Then, there are people who die in pain from AIDS, burns and accidents. And more often than not, doctors in India don’t do anything about the pain. In 2008, India used an amount of morphine, the easiest and cheapest way to relieve crippling pain, that was sufficient to treat only about 40,0000 people. That’s about 4 per cent of the people who need pain relief.

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