Dr Kallipatti Ramasamy Palaniswamy
Padma Shri, 2007 · Padma Bhushan, 2026 — Gastroenterology
The boy from Kallipatti who built North Chennai a stomach department — then spent forty years teaching the country how to look inside it without cutting it open.

15 March 1949, Kallipatti, Erode — an agricultural house, a remote village. MBBS from Mysore University (JJM Davangere), 1972. MD Internal Medicine, 1977. DM Gastroenterology, Madras Medical College, 1981. In 1986 he was sent to Stanley Medical College to invent a department that did not yet exist. He stayed as Professor and Head until 2000 and served the poor of North Chennai while he built one of the most advanced gastroenterology units in the public system. After government service he became Senior Consultant and Head at Apollo Hospitals, Chennai, and raised a National Board training programme that still feeds the specialty.

He presided over the Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy of India and wrote the first national rules for how an endoscope should be cleaned so that the instrument itself would not become a disease. As President of the Indian Society of Gastroenterology he argued that Hepatitis B belonged in the universal vaccine schedule of developing countries. In 2008, as chairman of Chennai Digestive Diseases Week, he brought to India the first hands-on endoscopic ultrasound workshop on a live anaesthetised pig — so that a young doctor could learn the feel of a needle before a human liver paid the tuition. The World Gastroenterology Organisation later gave him its Masters award, the highest it confers. He remains, the citation says, committed to the underprivileged.

Two Padmas, nineteen years apart. The first for founding a public department. The second for not leaving the work when the department could have been enough.

A trainee once asked him why a farmer’s son from Erode had chosen a specialty that lives in the dark.

“Because the gut does not advertise,” he is said to have answered. “It only fails. Someone has to go in with a light and come back with an answer the patient can afford.”

Married to Padmini. Lives in Chennai. Still at the table.