In the heart of Madhya Pradesh, in the modest city of Jabalpur, a young Yogesh Kumar Chawla walked the corridors of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Medical College with quiet curiosity. Medicine was not just a subject to him—it was a calling. He completed his MBBS and then his MD in Gastroenterology from the same institution, absorbing every lesson from teachers he would later call “the best I ever had.”

“I feel proud to be from a small place like Jabalpur,” he would say years later with a smile. “It was a big challenge to reach where I am today. But the foundation was laid right there.”

After his postgraduate training he moved to AIIMS, Delhi, for his DM in Gastroenterology—discovering the world of super-specialty medicine for the first time. In October 1983 he joined the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh as a young lecturer in the Department of Hepatology. The department was still finding its feet. Yogesh saw possibility where others saw limitations.

“The liver is a silent organ,” he often told his students. “It suffers quietly until it can no longer hide the damage. Our job is to listen before it is too late.”

Over the next three decades he built the specialty almost from the ground up. He became Head of the Department of Hepatology in 1999. Under his leadership PGIMER established its first dedicated Liver ICU and started the first DM course in Hepatology in the country. He pushed hard for organ donation and transplantation—heart, liver, and combined kidney-pancreas transplants began taking place at the institute. He helped PGIMER earn the Kaya Kalp award as the cleanest government hospital in India. He started the Annual Research Day and Innovation Bazaar so that the scientific work happening inside the institute could be shared with the world.

Patients came from across North India with portal hypertension, hepatitis B, ectopic varices, and non-cirrhotic portal hypertension. Yogesh’s research earned him the Dr. B.C. Roy Award in 1999, multiple ICMR awards, and recognition from the Indian Society of Gastroenterology. He became an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences.

In October 2011 he was appointed Director of PGIMER. For five years he steered one of India’s premier medical institutions with the same steady focus he had shown in the wards. When colleagues congratulated him on the Padma Shri in 2015—conferred by President Pranab Mukherjee on 8 April—he simply said, “This belongs to the patients who trusted us and the team that never stopped working.”

After more than thirty-four years at PGIMER he retired, but the work did not stop. He moved to the Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences in Bhubaneswar as Chairman of Academics and Professor Emeritus, continuing to teach, guide, and speak about liver health—especially the silent epidemic of fatty liver disease.

From a young man in Jabalpur who once wore a Gandhi cap during college ragging to the director who built a world-class hepatology department, Dr. Yogesh Kumar Chawla’s journey has been one of quiet, relentless service. In the lives he healed and the doctors he trained, his legacy continues—one careful diagnosis, one saved liver, one hopeful patient at a time.