Dr Budhendra Kumar Jain
Padma Shri, 2025 — Ophthalmology
5 December 1948 – 27 February 2026
The man who turned a twelve-bed clinic in a jungle into a factory of light.

Satna, a business household. A child watching Saint Ranchhoddasji Maharaj’s eye camps — hundreds of cataracts cut in a week, in a place with no electricity, no running water, and a road that was only a rumour. The boy remembered the ones who came blind in both eyes and went home still waiting. “There was no awareness, no access, no service,” he said later. “That is how we became interested.”

MBBS from Shyam Shah Medical College, Rewa. MS Ophthalmology from Sion Hospital, Mumbai. Then, instead of the city, Chitrakoot — still half jungle, snakes, wild animals, a one-room house without an attached toilet for him and his wife. With his mentor Dr Vishnu Jobanputra he rose at four in the morning and operated until night. Three hundred, sometimes four hundred cases in a day. A twelve-bed clinic grew into Sadguru Netra Chikitsalaya. Over five decades: more than a lakh and a half surgeries by his own hands; the hospital, under his direction, more than a lakh and a half operations a year and two million patients walking through its gates. Five districts declared free of cataract backlog. Outreach camps in the thousands. Schools and vocational training for thousands more. The trust’s old motto still hung in the air: food for the hungry, cloth for the destitute, sight for the blind.

In 2006 President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam visited and asked how they told the poor from the rich.

Jain answered with the railways. “The train does not ask caste or purse before it moves. Patients here choose according to their capacity. Unlike the railways, we also have a free bogie.”

In 2011 a near-fatal accident left him quadriplegic. Within two months he was back at work. Colleagues called it faith. He called it Gurudev.

When the Padma Shri was conferred in May 2025 he refused ownership. “This recognition is not mine alone. It belongs to the entire team. It is a tribute to the divine vision of our Founder Gurudev and to the millions of patients who trusted me.” The Indian Journal of Ophthalmology had already named him a Living Legend and given him its cover. He had also been appointed President of AIIMS Raipur. The titles sat lightly. The waiting hall in Chitrakoot did not.

A village woman whose cataract had been taken out at a camp once asked him, after the bandage came off, whether God had sent him.

He is said to have smiled. “Gurudev sent a twelve-bed clinic. The rest was only work.”

He died in February 2026, seventy-seven years old. The hospital did not close. The free bogie still runs. The light he spent fifty-two years returning to other people’s eyes is now the only biography that matters.