Dr Hemant Kumar
Padma Shri, 2025 — Nephrology
Bihar’s first DM nephrologist, and the man who treated kidneys as if they belonged to family.

Jamalpur, Munger — a modest house. A schoolboy who went with his parents to hospitals and saw people waiting without hope. He decided then that medicine would be the way he served. MBBS from MGM Jamshedpur. MD from Patna Medical College. In 1998, DM in Nephrology from Banaras Hindu University — the first postgraduate from any Bihar medical college to take that degree and bring it home.

The early nineties in Patna: a handful of dialysis machines, a handful of shifts, more patients than hours. He headed nephrology at IGIMS and later at PMCH. At PMCH he pushed dialysis to run twenty-four hours. He introduced continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis to the state — treatment a patient could carry, in a sense, instead of being chained to a machine in the capital. He coined a phrase for deceased organ donation that people still repeat in Bihar: life beyond life.

Prevention became the larger war. Diabetes and blood pressure, he kept saying, were filling the dialysis wards. He adopted Kurkuri village on the edge of Patna. Teams from IGIMS went out talking about salt, sugar, pressure — not in lecture halls, in courtyards and slums and schoolrooms. He founded the Patliputra National Kidney Foundation and turned World Kidney Day into a travelling classroom across the state. His own model he called the 3Ps: paediatric, preventive, palliative. Newborns, pregnant women, cancer patients, the old, the poor — the citation for his Padma Shri names them one by one.

When the award was announced he did not speak of machines.

“I have done my work selflessly, and not to get any reward. From the beginning my endeavour has been to find ways to prevent kidney disease. I will continue.” He thanked both governments and went back to saying what he always says: school health check-ups should be mandatory; if you examine a hundred people you will find ten with sick kidneys; most kidney patients still die of the heart, not the filter.

In August 2025 he was named President of AIIMS Gorakhpur. The title sits on a man who still talks about Kurkuri.

A farmer from the village once asked him, after a camp, why a city doctor kept coming for blood pressure.

“Because the kidney does not know Patna from Kurkuri,” he said. “It only knows neglect. I am here so it learns something else.”