Dr Guduru Venkat Rao
Padma Shri, 2026 — Surgical Gastroenterology
The Hyderabad boy who almost became a vet — then took an appendix out through the mouth, and taught a generation that a scar is not the price of a life.

Born 15 June 1960, middle-class Hyderabad, one sister, three brothers. Hyderabad Public School, Ramanthapur, class of 1976. At sixteen he was too young for medical college; he went to court, sat a month in veterinary school so the year would not be wasted, and won. Osmania, then Bangalore Medical College. GI surgery under Prof. Rangabhashyam in Chennai — the man who made the specialty exist in India — then the UK and Hong Kong. Home again. He followed Dr D. Nageshwar Reddy into endoscopy, morning and evening clinics at Medinova, and then AIG — the Asian Institute of Gastroenterology — where he is Director and Chief of Surgical Gastroenterology, GI oncology, minimally invasive, robotic and transplant services. More than a hundred and fifty surgeons have trained under him.

More than twelve thousand complex GI operations. Nearly sixteen thousand advanced endoscopies. In 2003–04, the years he still calls the most dramatic of his life, he co-pioneered NOTES — Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery, the “no-scar” idea — and performed the world’s first transoral endoscopic appendectomy: the appendix leaving through the mouth, the skin left untouched. He has worked on a macro-encapsulation device for diabetes. B. C. Roy National Award. Parliament Gold Medal. Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Glasgow. Patients used to wait in line at AIG as if for a god; he has never liked the word.

When the Padma Shri came he wrote that it was not his alone.

“It belongs to every patient who trusted me, every trainee I’ve learned from, every colleague who stood shoulder to shoulder in long nights… This award is a reminder that the work matters — not for recognition, but for the lives we are privileged to care for.” Other prizes had measured skill. This one, he said, measured intent. It also increased the debt. “Padma Shri is not only happiness. It is more responsibility.”

A young surgeon once asked him why anyone would take an appendix out through the throat.

“Because the first person who asked us whether we could operate without an incision was not a journal,” he is said to have answered. “It was a patient who did not want to carry the cut home. The mouth was already open. We only had to listen.”