The first season of the Prime Video series Gram Chikitsalay in 2025 seemed like Panchayat redux – a different village with a cute name and a different profession for the protagonist but a similar template about a well-meaning city man clueless in rural India. This theme is a speciality of producer The Viral Fever, whose shows about the “real India” hide the grime under layers of humour.
Prabhat (Amol Parashar) is the son of a wealthy doctor in Delhi and has a hospital waiting for him to manage. Instead, Prabhat chooses a low-paying job as the medical officer at a gram chikitsalay, or a primary health centre, in Bhatkandi village in Jharkhand. Prabhat believes that this is where he is needed and can make a difference.
The problem is that Bhatkandi doesn’t really care about yet another medical officer. They are quite happy with the phony “jholawala”, Chetak (Vinay Pathak), who makes up for the lack of a degree with an understanding of the rural pulse. Like the administrative office in Panchayat, the gram chikitsalay is non-functional.
In the first season, Prabhat had to first evict the farmer who had usurped the health centre’s land and then teach professionalism and honesty to his staff of three – compounder Phutani (Anandeshwar Dwivedi), ward boy Govind (Akash Makhija) and cleaner Dhelu (Kartikay Raj).
In the second season, Prabhat has straightened things out a bit and befriended Dr Gargi (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor). A few patients have started trickling in, mostly eccentric types, such as a man who brings a stool sample in a mithai box.
Prabhat still hasn’t shed his idealism or his uptight schoolmasterish manner. He insists on cycling around while prissily wearing a helmet.
The five-episode season tackles Prabhat’s wish to win the Adarsh Chikitsalay prize so that he won’t always have to rely on Gargi’s centre, and Govind’s struggle to make his temporary job permanent, for which he has to pay a bribe in cash or kind – the latter giving the show some interesting social messaging. Prabhat and Govind are up against a corrupt chief medical officer (Dinesh Lal Yadav).
Directed by Lalitam Tiwari, written by Vaibhav Suman and Shreya Srivastava and created by Deepak Kumar Mishra and Arunabh Kumar, the new season has better developed characters and snappier humour.
The dramatic turns make viewers care for the characters – the woman shunned as a witch, a pregnant woman who reposes her faith in Prabhat. Two characters from Panchayat wander into Gram Chikitsalay, possibly marking the beginning of a TVF Rural Universe.
In the previous season, Chetak taught Prabhat the importance of the right mode of communication with the villagers. This time, Gargi sets Prabhat right when he starts whinging about sacrifice and compromise.
Prabhat grows up in season 2. If there’s a third season, he won’t be such a stick in the mud. The troika of Parashar, Dwivedi and Makhija carries the show. They form a cohesive unit along with the nurse (Garima Vikrant Singh).
It helps that the new season has come out soon after the first one. The characters haven’t yet faded from memory. There is a sense of triumph this time round, of hope and hard-won experience , which is probably the result of a series knowing that it could go the distance.
