Dr Ramchandra Godbole and Smt Suneeta Godbole
Padma Shri, 2026 — Medicine (joint award)
Seven days after the wedding they left Maharashtra for Barsur. The forest called him Doctor Bhaiya. She learned Gondi and Halbi so the women would not have to speak through a stranger.

He is a BAMS graduate from Satara. She took her MSW in Pune. Twelve years with Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram among tribals in Nashik. Marriage, 1990. Then Bastar — Dantewada, the edge of Abujhmad, a clinic where people walked out of the trees because there was no road worth the name. He treated the critically ill who had come that far. In the first twelve years, more than three thousand such patients. Over fifteen years, more than a hundred camps in the forest with visiting specialists; some nine thousand examined; the gravest sent on to Dantewada and Raipur, often with the Krutadnyata Trust in Pune carrying the bill. A lakh treated across the decades, medicines given free. Hygiene, nutrition, the living body as well as the fever. Banphool, their later work, for the health of tribal children. Seva Gaurav, Pune, 2001. Vivekananda award. A certificate from the Dantewada administration.

She did the other half of the same day. Women and children. Pregnancy, food, the girl who should stay in school. Sickle cell — named, explained, not left as a family curse. Self-reliance without a lecture. They lived where they worked. The state called the medal a pride for Chhattisgarh because the work had been done in the places that rarely send a doctor home at dusk.

A joint Padma Shri is rare. The citation treats them as one service: forty years of tribal healthcare, twelve in Maharashtra, thirty in Chhattisgarh, side by side.

A visitor once asked why a Satara Ayurvedic graduate and a Pune social worker needed the forest.

“Because the wedding was not the destination,” they are said to have answered. “Seven days later the clinic was. He takes the pulse. She takes the language. The child who lives is the only certificate that mattered until Delhi sent another.”