For nearly half a minute, Gita Karmarkar could not speak.
The retired health supervisor from Belakoba Rural Hospital in West Bengal had just been told that she had been selected for the National Florence Nightingale Award for Nurses 2026 — one of the country’s highest honours for nursing professionals.
She thought it was a prank.
The official laughed and reassured her that the news was genuine. President Droupadi Murmu would present the award at Rashtrapati Bhavan on 12 May, International Nurses Day. After the call, Gita received an email confirming the same.
The happiness, however, was short-lived.
The following day, her mother died.
Less than three weeks later, carrying grief alongside gratitude, Gita travelled to Delhi to receive the honour she had never expected.
On 12 May 2026, the President of India presented the National Florence Nightingale Awards at Rashtrapati Bhavan to nurses recognised for exceptional service to public health.
For Gita, the ceremony felt surreal.
“I never imagined I would receive this award,” she said. “I believe it was my mother’s blessing.”
The honour marked the culmination of more than four decades spent serving some of the most underserved communities in northern West Bengal.
Four decades in the tea gardens
Gita’s career began in 1983, when she joined the health department after completing her nursing training in Jalpaiguri.
Her first posting as an auxiliary nurse midwife was at Belakoba Rural Hospital. Within days, she was transferred to Danguajhar Tea Garden, a predominantly tribal region with limited access to healthcare facilities and almost no awareness of institutional healthcare.
The challenges were immediate.
In her service days, Gita was assigned to manage a tea garden in Jalpaiguri.
There was no health centre in the area, and plans to establish one had only just begun to emerge. For her first two years, Gita conducted clinics from a marketplace veranda with nothing more than a chair and a table.
Most childbirths took place at home. Vaccination rates were extremely low. Malnutrition among children was common, and many families depended on traditional healers for illnesses ranging from fevers to tuberculosis.
Healthcare workers often had to build trust before they could begin discussing treatment, immunisation or maternal care.
Every day, Gita cycled between 12 and 14 kilometres across the tea garden settlements, visiting homes, maintaining records and persuading families to seek medical care.
Over time, residents began referring to her affectionately as “Polio Didimoni” and, for many, simply “Maa”.
The tea garden was officially believed to have a population of around 3,000 people. But after conducting detailed household surveys covering pregnancies, births, vaccinations and family planning, Gita discovered that more than 5,500 people were living in the area.
“Our relationship with Polio Didimoni spans three generations,” says 30-year-old tea garden worker Reshma Chhetri. “I became pregnant in my teens, and she guided me through both my deliveries in 2013 and 2020. Years earlier, in 1995, she had also helped my mother-in-law deliver my husband. Today, she has cared for three generations of our family.”
Reshma says Gita’s warmth never changed, even after retirement. “People working in the tea gardens often ignored their health problems in those days. Whenever we visited the health centre, she guided us patiently and ensured we received free medicines whenever possible.”
Changing attitudes towards childbirth
One of Gita’s biggest challenges was encouraging mothers to move away from home deliveries and seek institutional care.
Working alongside block authorities and local health workers, she spent years visiting families, addressing fears and explaining the benefits of delivering babies in hospitals.
The process was slow. Many expectant mothers were tribal teenagers who had grown up believing childbirth belonged at home, assisted by traditional birth attendants, or daimaas. Hospital deliveries felt unfamiliar and, in many cases, frightening.
Gita takes note of the vaccination being administered while seated at a medical camp for tribal children.
“Home deliveries were highly prone to infection,” Gita explains. “The women didn’t realise how many complications could arise after childbirth, including puerperal sepsis. Maintaining hygiene was almost impossible at home. They often used old, unclean cloth as bandages, and the umbilical cord was cut using a sickle or even a sharpened piece of bamboo.”
Rather than dismissing these long-held practices, Gita chose patience.
She first spoke privately with pregnant women, listening to their concerns before explaining how hospitals could offer clean delivery rooms, medicines, injections and emergency care if complications arose. Once she gained their confidence, she met their husbands. Finally, she sat down with elders and in-laws, whose approval often determined where a woman would give birth.
“I never tried to frighten them,” she says. “Instead, I asked them to think about the baby they had carried for months. If the newborn struggled to breathe after birth, would they want the child to suffer? At the hospital, we could provide oxygen, medicines and immediate care.”
To help families understand, she sometimes held her own breath to demonstrate what breathing difficulties could feel like for a newborn. She encouraged expectant mothers to eat nutritious food such as rice, rice water and vegetables so their babies would be born healthy and strong.
Winning trust required far more than medical advice.
The work also demanded extraordinary commitment.
Government working hours were from 9 am to 3 pm, but the women she needed to reach worked in the tea gardens from 7 am to 3 pm. To meet them, Gita routinely stayed in the field until 5 or 6 in the evening after obtaining written permission from the department to work beyond official hours.
Travelling alone through remote tea garden settlements also raised safety concerns. “I informed the department that if anything happened while I was working beyond duty hours, they should support me,” she says.
She made sure every visit counted.
She carefully recorded each family’s details in a register and read every entry aloud before asking for a thumb impression, ensuring even those who could not read understood what had been documented. The register became proof that Polio Didimoni had visited their home and followed up on their care.
Vaccination posed another challenge.
Wednesday was officially designated as vaccination day, but many mothers could not leave work to attend the health centre. So Gita sought permission to travel to them instead, carrying DPT vaccines into the tea gardens so children would not miss their immunisation schedule.
“They never knew my official name,” she recalls with a smile. “Everyone simply called me ‘Polio Didi’.”
Her strategy gradually created a ripple effect.
Whenever a mother returned home safely after delivering her baby at a hospital, Gita encouraged her to share her experience with other pregnant women in the village. Hearing positive stories from neighbours proved far more convincing than hearing them from a health worker alone.
Slowly, attitudes began to change.
Women who had once delivered their children at home started arriving at dispensaries and hospitals instead. Institutional deliveries increased steadily, while home births became increasingly rare.
For Gita, every safe delivery represented a personal milestone.
“I never counted the number of babies born under my watch,” she said. “But on average, around 100 institutional deliveries took place every year.”
Gita and other awardees with the President of India at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
By 2014, according to local health workers, home deliveries within her service area had virtually disappeared.
Among those who remember her efforts is Kalista Munda, a mother of four.
“We depend on daily wages,” she said. “My husband was often away for work, and life was difficult. Polio Didimoni supported me throughout my pregnancy and after my children were born. She and the ASHA workers helped us with food, clothes and medicines whenever we needed them.”
Community health assistant Marjina Begum, who worked in the area, says Gita’s support extended well beyond medical care. “She helped countless tribal families living across the 23,000-acre Danguajhar Tea Garden. She donated clothes for children, distributed essential items to families in need, and even provided regular financial assistance to an elderly woman until the end of her life.”
ASHA worker Nilima Xaxa, who worked with Gita for six years, remembers the respect she commanded in the community.
Leadership and Recognition
In January 2021, Gita was promoted to health supervisor at Belakoba Rural Hospital, where she oversaw four health centres serving a rural population of more than 35,000 people.
Supported by 33 ASHA workers, she continued focusing on maternal and child health until her retirement on 31 January 2026.
By then, she had completed 42 years in public health service.
The patient she never forgot
Among thousands of patients, one case remains etched in her memory.
In the early 2000s, blood pressure monitoring equipment was still not widely available in rural areas. Once she gained access to a BP machine, Gita began checking the blood pressure of every pregnant woman she visited.
During one such visit, she encountered an undernourished expectant mother named Teeto whose blood pressure reading indicated a potentially life-threatening emergency.
Recognising the danger immediately, Gita remained calm.
Rather than alarming the woman, she casually asked what she had eaten that morning and whether anyone was available to accompany her to hospital.
The family had no telephone.
A message was sent through a tea garden guard while Gita arranged transport with the help of the local doctor. Teeto was rushed to the district hospital, where she later delivered a healthy baby boy.
Both mother and child survived.
For Gita, the incident reinforced a lesson she had learnt repeatedly over four decades in healthcare: sometimes, saving lives depends as much on trust and persistence as it does on medicine.
A childhood shaped by hardship
Long before she became a nurse, Gita understood struggle.
Her father, Joychandra Rajbangshi, worked as a fish seller but suffered from chronic illness. Money was scarce, and the family often struggled to make ends meet.
When Gita was in Class VII, her father died.
Unable to support her education, her mother entrusted her to a family friend, Rina Dutta, whom Gita affectionately called her grandmother.
A tribal lady holds a newborn baby on her lap while Gita Karmakar stands by in Jalpaiguri.
It was a turning point in her life.
Rina provided food, shelter and encouragement, while Gita contributed by helping with household work.
“I cooked, cleaned, washed clothes and did whatever was needed,” she recalled. “But she always encouraged me to continue studying.”
Poverty remained a constant companion.
To support the household, Gita sold milk door to door, made cow dung cakes for fuel and occasionally washed dishes for neighbours to earn extra money.
One memory has stayed with her for decades.
She and her mother owned just one pair of plastic slippers between them.
On her first day at college, she wore the sandals despite the strap having been repaired with nylon thread. As she walked, the damaged footwear made a squeaking sound that attracted the attention of her classmates.
Some laughed.
Gita carried on regardless.
Service despite disability
In 1985, Gita married fellow health worker Jugal Kishore Karmakar. Together they built a life centred around service and community work.
Then, in 2008, everything changed.
While returning home on her husband’s scooter after work, the couple swerved to avoid a young cyclist and crashed.
Both were injured, but Gita’s injuries were severe.
She suffered a serious fracture to her fibula and underwent multiple surgeries over the following years. Complications led to infection and a long recovery process.
Between 2008 and 2015, she underwent nine major operations.
The injuries ultimately left her with a 40 per cent physical disability.
Yet colleagues say she rarely allowed it to interfere with her work.
Apart from periods spent in hospital, she continued reporting for duty and often volunteered for additional responsibilities.
Even while recovering from multiple surgeries, Gita refused to lose touch with the communities she served.
When she was finally discharged, cycling through the tea gardens was no longer possible. Instead, she hired a cycle rickshaw for Rs 200 a day so she could continue visiting expectant mothers.
Although walking remained painful, she continued visiting villages, counselling mothers, reviewing records and supporting frontline health workers whenever her health allowed.
“She never looked for excuses to avoid work,” recalled Dr Pritam Bose, Block Medical Officer of Health, Jalpaiguri Sadar.
“Her communication skills earned the trust of the communities she served, and her contribution to maternal and child health programmes was exceptional.”
Today, although she has retired from government service, the communities she served for more than four decades continue to remember her not by her designation, but by the name they gave her years ago:
Polio Didimoni.
For Gita, that may be the greatest award of all.
