The Light Through the Narrow Tunnel: The Story of Dr. Amit Prabhakar Maydeo

In the crowded lanes of Girgaon in southern Mumbai, where the air always carried the scent of sea salt and street food, a boy named Amit Prabhakar Maydeo grew up in a home where every rupee was counted twice. Money was scarce, but curiosity was abundant. Young Amit watched the world with quiet intensity, wondering how the body worked, how pain could be eased without the dramatic cuts of traditional surgery.

He studied hard, earned his MBBS from the University of Mumbai around 1980, and then completed his MS in General Surgery in 1984. Surgery seemed the natural path—open theatres, decisive hands, clear results. But fate had other plans.

During an internship at a hospital in Germany, Amit first held an endoscope. The thin, flexible tube with its tiny camera slid gently into the body, revealing the hidden world of the digestive tract without a single large incision.

He stared at the screen, mesmerised. A senior German doctor noticed and smiled. “This is the future, young man. Less pain, faster recovery, more precision.”

Amit’s eyes lit up. “You mean we can treat stones in the bile duct, stop bleeding, even reshape organs… from the inside?”

“Exactly,” the doctor replied. “If you are willing to master it.”

That moment changed everything. Amit returned to India determined to bring this gentle revolution home.

In those early days, endoscopy was almost unknown in the country. Sceptics shook their heads. “Open surgery is reliable. Why risk this new toy?”

Amit simply kept working. He performed path-breaking therapeutic endoscopy and ERCP procedures. He developed new protocols for treating difficult pancreatic and common bile duct stones. With scientists from the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, he helped create the first Indian Cyanoacrylate Glue—a life-saving substance that stopped catastrophic bleeding from oesophageal varices in patients with liver cirrhosis. He introduced Argon Plasma Coagulation and clip devices for bleeding ulcers. He pioneered endoscopic ultrasound and Spyglass cholangioscopy for early cancer detection.

In time he founded the Baldota Institute of Digestive Sciences—the first dedicated modern endoscopic centre in India—and became its Director. Later he established the Institute of Advanced Endoscopy and, as Chairman of the Institute of Gastrosciences at Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital, continued pushing boundaries. He also worked at Breach Candy, Jaslok and other leading Mumbai hospitals.

In 2012 he became the first in India to introduce third-space endoscopy—delicate procedures performed between the layers of the gut wall: POEM for achalasia (allowing patients who could barely swallow to eat normally again), STER for removing submucosal tumours, and ARMS for reflux. In 2018 he launched India’s first Bariatric Endoscopy Programme, offering non-surgical weight-loss options. A year later he brought GERDx for acid reflux.

Through it all he remained a teacher at heart. He founded the Indian College of Endoscopy, served as President of the Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy of India, and created Endoscopy Gurukul—a training centre where young doctors from India and abroad learned both basic and advanced techniques under his watchful eye. Over the years he conducted more than twenty live international workshops in Mumbai and served as visiting faculty at over two hundred workshops worldwide. He published more than ninety papers and contributed chapters to major textbooks. Journals repeatedly named him an outstanding reviewer.

When the Padma Shri was announced in 2013, the quiet boy from Girgaon stood a little stunned. “Suddenly, I feel a big burden on my shoulders,” he said. “But at the same time, I also feel that my responsibility towards those needing medical care has increased.”

Today, patients still wait to meet the doctor who prefers a slender scope over a large scar. Young endoscopists still crowd his workshops, listening carefully as he demonstrates one more precise manoeuvre.

One evening after a long live demonstration, a trainee asked him, “Sir, after all these years and all these firsts, what still excites you?”

Amit Maydeo looked at the glowing screen of the endoscope and smiled the same way he had in that German hospital decades earlier.

“Every time the light travels through that narrow tunnel and shows us a way to heal without cutting open a life,” he said softly, “I remember the boy from Girgaon who wondered if there could be a gentler path. That wonder never left. And neither did the responsibility.”

And so the light continues to travel—through scopes, through trained hands, through countless patients who walk out of hospitals sooner, freer of pain, because one determined doctor from a modest Mumbai home chose the narrow tunnel and turned it into a highway of hope.