Dr Duvvur Nageshwar Reddy
Padma Shri, 2002 · Padma Bhushan, 2016 · Padma Vibhushan, 2025 — Gastroenterology
The first Indian doctor to receive all three Padma awards.

Visakhapatnam, late 1950s. A boy from a house of pathologists wanted to know how petrol made a car move. He poured a little into a tin in the family garage, struck a match, and watched the night catch fire. His grandfather, a professor of pathology, later looked at a school report that said he had failed Class X and muttered that the boy would, at best, become a mechanic.

Years later, in Hyderabad, when reporters asked him about that night, he would laugh the same soft laugh. “Curiosity is not a crime. Only the garage paid the price.”

He was sent away to boarding school. He put his infant brother in the refrigerator once, he has said, to “protect him from the heat.” The family of doctors waited for the wildness to settle. It never quite did. It only changed its address — from petrol to the inside of the human gut.

At Madras Medical College he met Carol Ann, a house surgeon who refused to be intimidated by a young doctor who, colleagues whispered, preferred working with men. She stayed. They married. She became a dermatologist; he became a man who could thread a tube through a bile duct the way others thread a needle.

“Endoscopy is not surgery,” a senior European gastroenterologist once told him at a conference. “If you pursue this, you will be a technician.”

Reddy came home and told his father, a distinguished pathologist who had become vice-chancellor of Kurnool Medical College.

His father did not congratulate him on the money or the fame that later arrived. He asked the harder questions: “What have you done for society? Have you trained anyone? Have you published? Have you built something that will outlast you?”

That conversation, Reddy has said, changed the direction of his life.

He left government service after years at Nizam’s Institute and Guntur Medical College. Gastroenterology, he felt, was treated as a poor cousin. Nearly a third of people, he argued, lived with ulcers, stones, cancers, failing livers — and still the speciality had no temple of its own. In 1994 he began building one: the Asian Institute of Gastroenterology in Hyderabad. It grew into what is now called the world’s largest gastroenterology hospital.

One night he was summoned across a state line. A chief minister’s wife lay in septic shock; a stone sat in her bile duct. An emergency ERCP — a procedure he had spent years refining — removed the stone. Gratitude later helped secure a building. From that first 200-bed hospital came a thousand beds, a research block, fellows from across Asia, and mobile endoscopy vans that rolled into towns where a gastroscope had never been seen.

A farmer once asked him, after a free screening camp, “Doctor, why come so far for a stomach pain?”

“Because the stomach does not know if you live in Gachibowli or in a village,” he answered. “Pain is democratic. Treatment should be too.”

He invented the NAGI stent — named, colleagues say, with the same dry humour that survived the garage fire — so that blocked pancreatic and bile ducts could be opened without a large incision. He introduced POEM in India. He published more than a thousand papers. He became president of the World Endoscopy Organization. In 2021 the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy gave him the Rudolf V. Schindler Award, named for the father of gastroscopy; only a handful of non-Americans have ever received it.

When the Padma Vibhushan was announced in 2025, completing the rare trinity of Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan, he did not speak of himself first.

“This is not just a personal milestone,” he said. “It is a celebration of Indian medicine’s spirit and potential.” He dedicated it to patients and to the team at AIG.

Carol and their daughter Sanjana — who chose engineering and lives in the United States — have heard him admit the cost. Eighteen-hour days, Sundays included, for four decades. “Family sacrifice,” he has said, “is the biggest sacrifice I had to make.” His father had asked him to build something that would outlast him. The hospital, the vans, the fellows, the stent — those are the answer. The empty chair at dinner is the invoice.

In his office at Gachibowli he still sees patients between procedures. A young doctor once asked if artificial intelligence would replace the endoscopist’s hand.

“AI can guide,” Reddy said. “It cannot sit with a frightened man at two in the morning and tell him, in his own language, that the stone is out and he will eat rice tomorrow.”

The boy who burned a garage now spends his days looking into darkness with a light. The mechanic his grandfather predicted never arrived. The builder did.