Dr (Prof.) Neerja Bhatla
Padma Shri, 2025 — Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Gynaecologic Oncology
The first Indian to chair FIGO’s gynaecologic oncology committee — and the woman who spent thirty-five years trying to make cervical cancer unnecessary.

Born 2 January 1959. MBBS from AIIMS Delhi in 1982, MD in 1985, faculty from 1989. She rose to Professor and Head of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at AIIMS, and Head of Gynaecologic Oncology at the National Cancer Institute, Jhajjar. The title that mattered more to her than any chair was simpler: a cancer that kills too many Indian women can be stopped before it starts.

Cervical cancer is slow, almost polite, and still lethal in places where screening never arrives. For three and a half decades she worked the unglamorous end of that sentence — low-resource screening, cheap HPV tests, vaccine trials, guidelines written not for Geneva but for a primary-health centre with one lamp and a long queue. She was on the team that tested Serum Institute’s indigenous HPV vaccine. She helped write resource-based rules for screening, treatment and vaccination so that “what the West does” was no longer the only map. Under her leadership FIGO revised the global staging of cervical cancer in 2018 and built a management map doctors could actually carry. She was the first from India to chair FIGO’s Committee for Gynecologic Oncology. Stanford has listed her among the world’s top two per cent of researchers since 2020.

After she retired as Head at AIIMS she did not retire from the disease. The projects continued: epidemiology, affordable testing, devices so that a health worker in a remote block could screen and treat without waiting for a city. When the Padma Shri was announced she was in New York. She told an interviewer the same thing she has told villages for thirty years: awareness is prevention.

A patient who had delivered her first child with Bhatla on Christmas Day in 1993 wrote, when the award came: “Your soft nature and smile was so soothing.” The public story is staging systems and vaccines. The private one is a labour room in 1993 and a woman who still remembers the voice.

A young intern once asked her why she stayed with one cancer for so long.

“Because it is the rare tumour that asks permission,” she is said to have answered. “If we listen early enough, it does not have to take the rest of a woman’s life.”