Mitraniketan is a social service society and clinic up in the Vagamon mountains of Kottayam district, Kerala.

It was started by Dr. Elizabeth Baker and renowned architect Mr. Laurie Baker in 1963 to meet the needs of the tea plantation workers and rural poor of the surroundings.

The idea was to render care to people who otherwise had no access to medical facilities and to make them at home while being treated. Hence the hospital was very simple and homely and made use of nursing services rendered by dedicated young women who were also trained by Dr. Baker.

Over the years this little clinic grew into a 60-bed hospital and was taken over in 1968 by Dr. Hildgard Sina and Ms. Alina Cattani, a nurse cum hospital administrator, who had earlier helped in founding what is today the Pushpagiri Medical College, Thiruvalla.

They established the Mitraniketan Social Service Society to officially run the hospital and to extend its outreach to the community around with extension clinics and other work mainly with women and children.

Alina Cattani passed away in 1997 and then Dr. Sina passed away in 2007. Since the end of the 1990s, it became increasingly difficult to get doctors to work in this hospital. While some junior doctors came to do their rural placements in the early years, this became increasingly difficult latterly as younger doctors were unused to work in simple conditions.

The hospital was run almost single-handed by Dr. Sina in her last few years. The teams of nurses were her support and since treatment remained affordable it was still the best bet for the local poor.

But as Kerala developed the expectations of people also changed and the government also began to develop its rural health services while at the same time making hospital regulations more stringent as costs of medicines also increased.

From 2009 to 2014 Dr. Mercy Murikan served as the medical officer but she and the hospital went back to the status of a clinic, hence the inpatients reduced substantially and this department was finally also closed in October 2013