Prof. (Dr) Ashok Kumar Mahapatra
Padma Shri, 2025 — Neurosurgery
The village boy from Puri who separated two heads that the world said could not be parted.

Biranarasinghpur, Puri district. Four uncles were engineers. His father, Nabakishore, wanted the same for the boy. Then an uncle in a white coat walked into the house, and the boy saw something else: a profession that could take pain out of a body the way an engineer takes a fault out of a machine.

“I convinced my father,” he later told a reporter. “A doctor can serve humanity.” He entered MKCG Medical College, Berhampur, in 1970. MBBS in 1975. Then AIIMS Delhi — MS, MCh Neurosurgery, DNB — and he stayed nearly forty-two years. Head of Neurosurgery. Chief of the Neurosciences Centre. Dean of Research. Director of SGPGIMS Lucknow. Founding Director of AIIMS Bhubaneswar. Vice-Chancellor of SOA. Hundreds of papers. Thousands of citations. The numbers stacked like vertebrae. The work that people remember is two small boys from Kandhamal.

Jaga and Kalia — also called Balia in some reports — were craniopagus twins, joined at the head. Between 1986 and 2017 only a dozen such separations had been attempted in the world. In August 2017 a team of about thirty specialists at AIIMS Delhi began. The first sitting lasted more than twenty-one hours. In October they finished the separation in another marathon of more than eleven hours. India had its first successful craniopagus separation. The Limca Book of Records took note. Mahapatra called it the icing on a long cake. He also said the harder decisions of his life were never the length of the night. They were whether to operate at all.

“I always preferred surgery if there was a chance for the patient’s survival.”

When the Padma Shri was announced he thanked the Centre, the state, the people of Odisha, and Lord Jagannath. “For me, patients are God,” he said. “Without patience our value is zero.” Forty-two years in Delhi, he added, were years of service, not of monuments.

A young neurosurgeon once asked him what he thought about during those twenty-one hours.

“Not about history,” he is said to have answered. “About two children who should be able to turn their heads separately and look at their mother.”

He is now Principal Advisor (Health Sciences) at Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan in Bhubaneswar, and has been named President of AIIMS Bhopal. The village school in Puri is a long way behind him. The twins are farther still — two lives that once shared a skull and now do not.