A Russian physician who built his country’s first free clinic for the homeless has traveled to the Indian state of Bihar to help establish a similar facility for the poor — marking the first international expansion of his eight-year project.
Dr. Yevgeny Kosovskikh, founder of the Chelyabinsk-based charity clinic Drugaya Meditsina — Russian for “Different Medicine” — visited Patna, the state capital, in March to tour potential construction sites alongside local partners. The exact location will be determined by an engineering survey.
Kosovskikh, known locally as “Doctor Zhenya,” launched his project in 2017 when he began treating homeless people at heating pipelines on the streets of Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia’s Ural region. What started as solo outreach has grown into a full-service clinic offering free consultations with general practitioners, surgeons, dentists, cardiologists and more than a dozen other specialists, as well as mobile medical teams staffed by volunteer doctors. Roughly 1,000 patients passed through the clinic last year. The model has since been adopted by medical volunteers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Kazan and some 50 other Russian cities.
The India partnership began taking shape in the summer of 2025, when Kosovskikh met the founder of Geneai Digital Healthcare Services Pvt Ltd — a Bihar-based company developing artificial intelligence tools for healthcare — at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. The two signed a formal cooperation agreement in September at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. Under the deal, a medical office with a mobile volunteer unit will be established in Bihar, and Russian medical students will be able to complete internships at the future facility.
During the March visit, the team conducted patient consultations and delivered a lecture on the Chelyabinsk model to doctors and students at a local medical college. The chief physician of one of Patna’s hospitals — who studied in Leningrad as part of a Soviet-era exchange program — presented Kosovskikh with an award for community service. Foreign doctors drew particular interest from local families: parents repeatedly asked that their children be examined specifically by the visiting Russian specialists, viewing the consultation as an additional assurance of quality care.
The clinic operates on government grants and donations. Russia’s Presidential Grants Fund has awarded the project approximately 11 million rubles (around $137,000) across two active grants running through 2026. Construction in Patna is still seeking private sponsors.
