Dr Palkonda Vijay Anand Reddy
Padma Shri, 2026 — Oncology
The Palamuru boy who turned down a London job, came home after his father died, and spent three decades telling parents that even the eye can grow a cancer — and that a white glow in a photograph can still be caught in time.

Born 20 October 1959. The family fields were in Palamuru, Mahbubnagar; the city that claimed him was Hyderabad. A hundred out of a hundred in Class 10 mathematics. MBBS, Osmania Medical College, 1982. First medical officer at Bhootpur PHC. The uncle — Dr P. Ananth Reddy, radiation oncologist at Mehdi Nawaz Jung Cancer Hospital — was the warning and the invitation. Seniors said oncology was a field of high mortality. He took the MD in radiation therapy at Osmania anyway, 1992; DNB after that; ESMO medical oncology board later. Fellowships: Meyerstein Institute, London; New York Hospital; Peter MacCallum, Melbourne; Wills Eye and Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia. London offered a job. His father died. He came home.

Director and senior consultant, Apollo Cancer Centres, Hyderabad, from 2002. Consultant ocular oncologist at L.V. Prasad Eye Institute from 1998. More than 15,000 cases since 1992. Head and neck. The eye — retinoblastoma in children; India carries a large share of the world’s burden; intra-arterial chemotherapy into the eye in well over a thousand children. India’s first perioperative brain interstitial implant, so the family did not have to fly. Hypofractionated, shorter radiation so the rural patient did not have to live in the city for weeks. President of the Association of Radiation Oncologists of India. Chairman, Indian College of Radiation Oncology. Nine hundred-plus CME lectures. A hundred-plus papers. The book: I Am a Survivor: 108 Stories of Triumph Over Cancer. CURE Foundation, 2003 — free and subsidised care, especially children, three decades. Board of Sparsh Hospice. Tobacco. Early detection. The white reflex in a flash photograph.

When the Padma Shri was announced he did not keep it.

“I accept this honour with great humility… I truly dedicate this to my patients, my family and to the teachers who have taught me and to the Apollo Hospitals for allowing me to take care of these patients, especially the children, free of cost for the last three decades.” And the line he gives interviewers: many people are surprised to learn that even the eye can develop cancer. Their happiness, he has said, gives him strength. Their recovery is the fulfilment.

A young resident once asked why a man with a London offer still sat with a toddler whose parent had come from a village with only a phone picture.

“Because the tumour does not know I had a job abroad,” he is said to have answered. “It only knows whether someone looked at the photograph in time. I came home for my father. I stayed for the children.”