The Guardian of Tiny Lives: The Story of Dr. Neelam Kler

In the beautiful valley of Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, a girl named Neelam grew up attending Presentation Convent School. She chose medicine, earned her MBBS from the University of Jammu and Kashmir, and went on to complete her MD in Paediatrics at the prestigious Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh. There she specialised further in neonatology—the care of the newborn, especially the tiniest and most vulnerable.

She trained under experts in Copenhagen, Denmark, and later worked as a fellow at Milwaukee Children’s Hospital in the United States and as a visiting consultant in Saudi Arabia. When she returned to India and joined Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi on 31 May 1988, neonatal intensive care was still a fledgling field. Many hospitals had few or no dedicated beds for critically ill newborns. Concepts of advanced ventilation were almost unheard of.

Dr. Neelam Kler set out to change that. Over the years she built the Department of Neonatology at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital into a state-of-the-art centre of excellence. Under her leadership the unit introduced high-frequency ventilation, nitric oxide delivery for babies with severe respiratory failure, bedside cerebral function monitoring, and later technologies such as ECMO and therapeutic brain cooling for asphyxiated infants. The results were remarkable: the survival rate of extremely preterm babies weighing less than 1,000 grams rose to around 90 percent, and infection rates fell dramatically to 9.8 per 1,000 admissions.

She also helped create the future of the specialty. She was instrumental in starting India’s first three-year post-doctoral programme in neonatology under the National Board of Examinations, training a new generation of specialists. She served as President of the National Neonatology Forum (2009–2010) and worked with national and international bodies, including WHO and UNICEF, to improve newborn health across the country and the region.

Married to the eminent cardiologist Dr. T.S. Kler (himself a Padma awardee), she balanced a demanding career while remaining deeply committed to the smallest patients—those who arrive too early or too fragile to fight alone.

In 2014 the Government of India conferred upon her the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian honour, for her pioneering services to medicine and neonatology.

One quiet evening in the NICU, after a long shift watching over a cluster of tiny incubators, a young resident asked her, “Ma’am, how do you keep going when some of these babies are so small and so sick?”

Dr. Neelam Kler looked at the monitors glowing softly in the dim light and smiled.

“Every baby who leaves this unit breathing on their own, going home in their mother’s arms, is a victory,” she said. “When I started, many of these children would not have survived. Now most of them do. That is why we work. The tiniest life is still a complete life—and it deserves every chance we can give it.”

And so the doctor from Srinagar who returned to India to build something that barely existed continues her quiet vigil—protecting the most fragile newcomers to the world and teaching others to do the same, one precious, determined breath at a time.