The Heart Specialist Who Opened Blocked Arteries for Tens of Thousands: The Story of Dr. Ashok Seth

Born on 12 October 1954, Ashok Seth grew up with a clear sense of purpose that would take him from the classrooms of Aligarh to the cardiac catheterisation laboratories of India and the world. He graduated in medicine from Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College at Aligarh Muslim University in 1978, then moved to the United Kingdom for advanced training, working as a cardiologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital of Birmingham University until 1988. When he returned to India, he brought with him not only skill but a determination to make the newest techniques of interventional cardiology available to Indian patients.

Over more than three decades he has performed tens of thousands of angiograms and angioplasties—figures recorded in the Limca Book of Records—and pioneered numerous procedures for India and the Asia-Pacific region. These include the early use of stents, drug-eluting stents, bioabsorbable scaffolds, thrombectomy devices, the Impella heart-support system, and transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). As Chairman of Fortis Escorts Heart Institute in New Delhi and Chairman of the Cardiology Council of Fortis Healthcare, he has led one of the country’s premier cardiac centres while training more than five hundred cardiologists from India and abroad in advanced angioplasty techniques.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of London, Edinburgh and Ireland, as well as of the American College of Cardiology, the European Society of Cardiology and the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions. His research and teaching have produced hundreds of publications and chapters in major textbooks. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri in 2003 and the Padma Bhushan in 2015. In 2017 he received the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award as the most eminent medical person of the year. Spain conferred upon him the Order of Isabella the Catholic, and international bodies have recognised him with lifetime achievement awards and the title of Master Interventionalist.

One evening, after a long day of complex procedures and teaching, a young cardiologist asked him, “Sir, after so many thousands of cases, what still drives you into the cath lab every day?”

Dr. Ashok Seth answered with the quiet focus of a man who had spent a lifetime restoring blood flow to struggling hearts.

“Every blocked artery is a life waiting to be saved or improved,” he said. “The tools change, the techniques advance, but the need remains the same—to give a patient more years, more strength, more time with their family. If we can open that path with skill and care, then the work is never finished. That is why we keep learning and keep operating.”

And so the interventional cardiologist from Aligarh who returned from Britain to pioneer modern angioplasty in India, who has treated tens of thousands of hearts, and who continues to train the next generation at Fortis Escorts, remains a steady presence in the fight against coronary disease—one precise procedure at a time.