The Bilga General Hospital traces its origins back to a meeting in the village held on 28 December 1997, when Dr Jagjit Sanghera, a native of Bilga, but by now a Birmingham General Practitioner, called a meeting to discuss the possibilities of building and opening a hospital to serve the village’s needs. There was already a very poor public hospital in the village, built by the Indian Medical Service of the British Raj in the 1930s, but it had long outlived its usefulness and a modern and clean hospital was desperately needed.
The vision for BGH is to provide primary and secondary level care for Bilga and forty-four villages and small towns in the surrounding area on the north bank the River Sutlej. It started out providing a twenty-four hour accident and emergency service, a diagnostic centre, operating theatres, an eye department, maternity and childcare facilities, a mortuary service, as well as access to tertiary care in Jalandhar and Ludhiana. Over the years, the hospital has grown to provide better healthcare facilities.
The mission, from the moment of its foundation, is to establish effective primary and secondary care for the people of Bilga and its surrounding area and to develop other areas of activity which included health education, preventative medicine, based on need and not on gender, creed, race, nationality of political conviction. The hospital remains a great success and a beacon of healthcare in the area.