In pictures: Inside India’s only polio ward

Dr Varghese’s patients were infected before a massive polio eradication drive reduced the number of new polio cases in India from half of the world’s total in 2009 to zero by 2012. In a single day last February, for instance, 170 million children under the age of five were administered oral polio drops.

The polio ward at St Stephen’s Hospital in New Delhi was started 27 years ago, four years before Dr Varghese arrived here, when another physician, Balu Sankaran, returned from a stint at the WHO with the aim of starting polio outreach campaigns in poor communities.

General Nursing and Midwifery Interns Julia, 20, left, and Leena 21, right, talk to 20-year-old polio victim Lata Sagar. The orthopaedic team at the hospital straightens deformed limbs and sometimes lengthens one leg to balance the other. Flailing joints are fused for stability. Calipers, braces and artificial limbs are made at the hospital, and physiotherapists spend months taking patients through exercises and training them to use their calipers.

“Once paralysed, always paralysed,” Dr Varghese says. “A lot of people think I cure polio here. I don’t. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

Ward sister Prem Wati attends as Dr Varghese examines Mustareen Khan.

Patients, visitors and student nurses on the polio ward at St Stephen’s Hospital. “One day,” says Dr Varghese, “I hope to see all these beds empty.”

As India becomes eligible to be declared polio-free by the World Health Organisation (WHO), having completed three consecutive years without registering a single new case of the disease, The National visits the fourth floor of St Stephen's Hospital in New Delhi, where two rooms make up India's only polio ward.

Words by Samanth Subramanian / The National. All photos by Simon De Trey-White for The National