Prof. (Dr) Saroj Mandal
Padma Shri, 2026 — Interventional Cardiology
The Kolkata unit head who put twenty-two pacemakers in in nine hours on an ordinary working day at SSKM — and spent the rest of the years taking the same urgency to the village by wire.

Born 15 September 1967. MBBS, University of Calcutta, 1994. MD Medicine. DM Cardiology. FRCP Edinburgh, FRCP Glasgow, FACC, FSCAI. Clinical tutor at IPGMER and SSKM Hospital from 2002; Professor and Unit Head of Cardiology there. Senior interventional cardiologist, Woodlands. Thirty-five years in the profession, twenty-five of them in the cath lab of eastern India. Six lakh OPD patients. Independently performed and supervised: some 50,000 coronary angiograms, 15,000 angioplasties, 15,000 pacemaker and device implants, 5,000 valve micro-procedures. On 3 February 2024, at SSKM, twenty-two devices in nine hours — fourteen dual-chamber, two ICDs, the rest single-chamber — a day that was not staged for cameras. About a hundred papers. Editorial work on five books. Protocols for hypertension and type 2 diabetes for the Government of West Bengal. Emergency cardiology guidelines. Mother Teresa International Award, Dubai, 2025. Decade’s Best Doctor, Krishnanagar. First Padma in interventional cardiology from West Bengal in half a century, the hospital said.

The other half of the work was distance. Tele-cardiology STEMI programme across the state — so a rural infarct did not wait for a city dawn. Hundreds of free camps. Krishnaya Institute of Cardiac and Fetal Sciences, Kolkata, 2022: subsidised care; his own remuneration given to the welfare trust. A community cardiovascular unit taking shape with Nepalgunj Pailan. Access and affordability, the President’s citation said. The heart that reaches SSKM at noon and the heart that only has a phone in a block town are the same muscle.

A registrar once asked why a man with those numbers still sat through a camp after a list of twenty-two.

“Because the infarct does not keep office hours,” he is said to have answered. “Nine hours is only a shift. The village is the rest of the week. Put the wire where the patient is. Keep the fee where the trust can spend it.”