Dr H. V. Hande
Padma Shri, 2026 — Medicine
Ninety-eight years old, three hours a day in Shenoy Nagar, still treating whoever walks in — and still covering the bus fare home.

28 November 1927, Coimbatore. One of ten children of a government surgeon under the Raj; ancestral roots in Kota Handattu, near Udupi, and Mangalore. School in Nellore, Penukonda, Mangalore. As an Intermediate student he joined the Quit India movement and met the British lathi. Kilpauk College of Integrated Medicine — modern and Ayurved together — class of 1950. He opened a clinic in Shenoy Nagar that June and never closed it. Half a rupee for a child, a rupee for an adult. Married Shanthi in 1954. Both sons became doctors. Hande Hospital rose in the same neighbourhood in 1984. Even as MLC, MLA and Health Minister he came back to the chair. Even now he sits three hours a day. Whoever cannot pay, does not pay.

Five times a legislator. Close to Rajaji, then to M.G.R. Health Minister of Tamil Nadu, 1980–86. Infant and maternal deaths fell until the state sat first in the country three years running. Leprosy, once among the worst in India, was hunted by mass screening; a multidrug pilot emptied the homes. With Rotary and CMC Vellore he built the mass-immunisation model that became Pulse Polio — drops on a Sunday, still going. In 1986 he announced India’s first HIV/AIDS case. The Medical Council of India gave him the B.C. Roy Award in 1985 — almost never given to a minister. He kept MGR’s 1984 medical files for thirty-five years. He translated the whole of Kamba Ramayanam into English prose, and wrote on Rajaji and Ambedkar. In 1946, a medical student, he cast his first vote. In 2026, at ninety-nine, he cast another and said voting is not only a right. It is a duty to the future you leave behind.

Receiving the Padma Shri he wrote the sentence he has lived.

“This honour is not mine alone. It belongs to every patient who placed their trust in me… From the days of the freedom movement to serving in healthcare and public life, my journey has always been guided by one belief — service to humanity is service to the nation.” And, more plainly, to a reporter: seventy-six years of practice, minister or not, “mainly treat whoever came there, irrespective of their capacity to pay. That particular thing is still going on.”

A young intern once asked why a former minister still sat for the slum patients of Bharathipuram.

“Because the ministry ended,” he is said to have answered. “The clinic did not. A man who has taken a lathi for the country can still take a pulse for it.”