Dr Suresh Hanagavadi
Padma Shri, 2026 — Medicine (Haemophilia care)
The Class 9 boy outside a Harihar OPD whose uncle said, This is why you must become a doctor — and who spent the first internship salary registering a society so no family would lose someone for lack of care.

Severe haemophilia B from childhood. Mother a carrier. Bleeding spots, missed school, a house that treated every knock as danger. Karnataka then had neither a proper laboratory nor treatment. In Harihar the maternal uncle felt a bleed in the brain, was dismissed from the district hospital, was paralysed within days, and died. The boy heard the last instruction. He had wanted to fly. He took medicine instead. SSLC at St John’s, Ballari. PUC at Wardlaw. MBBS, JJM Medical College, Davangere, 1982–88. MD Pathology, KIMS Hubballi. Professor of Pathology at the same JJM where he had been a student. He calls fellow patients blood brothers.

Karnataka Hemophilia Society — registered with that first stipend, founded around 1989–91. Diagnosis, counselling, free and subsidised factor, education of government doctors who had never seen the disease. Lobbying until free medicine moved into district hospitals. Haemophilia recognised under the Disability Act in 2016. A comprehensive treatment centre in Davangere for inherited bleeding disorders under one roof — meals for the family as well as the patient — built with public money, philanthropists, and the state. S.P. Balasubrahmanyam gave concerts for the cause. National Award for Disability Empowerment. Karnataka Rajyotsava. Forty years from nothing, he has said, to this stage. The silent pain acknowledged. Newly developed systems, he still insists, must reach the rare-disease patient, not stop at the paper.

“I chose medicine so no family would lose a loved one due to ignorance or lack of care.” The Padma Shri was a surprise phone call. “I never expected this award… This honour gives me greater responsibility.”

A young intern once asked why a pathologist who himself bleeds still walks the ward.

“Because my uncle was told he was imagining it,” he is said to have answered. “I registered the society with the first money I earned so the next boy would not sit outside an OPD and watch a man die of a disease the hospital did not believe in. Blood brothers do not leave each other at the door.”