In the quiet Gandhian atmosphere of Sevagram Ashram in Wardha, Maharashtra, a boy named Abhay Bang grew up watching the ideals of service take living form. Born in 1950, he absorbed the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi so deeply that by the age of thirteen he had already decided: he would become a doctor and serve the poorest villages of India.

In Chandrapur, around the same time, a girl named Rani Chari was born in 1951 into a family of freedom fighters and public servants. She too carried a quiet resolve to heal. The two met as medical students at Government Medical College, Nagpur. Both shone brightly—Abhay topping the university, Rani winning the gold medal in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. They married in 1977, completed their postgraduate degrees, and later earned Master’s degrees in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

They could have chosen comfortable careers anywhere in the world. Instead, in the mid-1980s, they deliberately chose Gadchiroli—one of the most remote, tribal and underdeveloped districts of Maharashtra. “We deliberately chose to go where the problems are,” they would later say. In 1985–86 they founded SEARCH—Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health—and settled in a simple campus they named Shodhgram.

What they found shocked them. Infant mortality stood at 121 deaths for every thousand live births. Women suffered a silent epidemic of gynaecological diseases that no one had bothered to measure. Rani performed the first caesarean section in the district. Together they trained ordinary village women—Arogya Doots—to count a newborn’s breaths, recognise the seven signs of sepsis, resuscitate a baby who would not breathe, and give life-saving antibiotics at home.

Their Home-Based Newborn Care model, published in The Lancet, reduced neonatal mortality by more than sixty per cent. The infant mortality rate in their villages fell from 121 to around 30—matching the rates of India’s best cities. The model was adopted by the Government of India under the National Rural Health Mission, trained hundreds of thousands of ASHA workers, and was endorsed by WHO and UNICEF for use in many developing countries.

One evening, after a long day in the villages, a young health worker asked them, “Doctor, how do you keep going when the problems seem endless?”

Abhay smiled and Rani answered softly, “Because every baby we save teaches us the same truth: the solutions are already in the people’s hands. We only help them find those hands.”

In 2018 the President of India conferred the Padma Shri upon both Abhay and Rani Bang for their extraordinary contribution to medicine and community health. They had already been named Global Health Heroes by TIME magazine and Public Health Champions by the WHO.

From two idealistic medical students who refused city comforts to the quiet couple who taught the world that newborn lives can be saved in mud houses by village women, Drs. Abhay and Rani Bang’s journey remains one of the purest expressions of medicine as service.