In the vast tapestry of India’s healthcare story—woven through the lives of the doctors who founded great institutions and received the nation’s highest civilian honours—there walks a quieter sisterhood. The nurses. They do not always stand in the bright lights of operating theatres named after Padma-decorated pioneers. Yet without them, those theatres would fall silent. Their hands steady the trembling, their voices soothe the dying, their feet carry medicine into forests and islands where no ambulance can go. And once in a while, the Republic itself pauses to pin a Padma medal upon one of them, acknowledging that the healing of a nation rests as much on the quiet as on the celebrated.
Picture the Andaman Sea after the 2004 tsunami. The waves had swallowed entire settlements of the Onge people, one of India’s most vulnerable tribal communities. Into that shattered world stepped a young nurse named Shanti Teresa Lakra. Born in 1972 in Rangat, Middle Andaman, she had chosen nursing because her elder sister Scholastica had chosen it before her. “If she can heal,” the younger sister once told herself, “so can I.” Posted to the remote sub-centre at Dugong Creek, she found a people who spoke a language she did not know, who fled at the sight of outsiders, whose numbers had dwindled to fewer than eighty souls.
“They will not come to us,” an older health worker warned her. “You will have to go to them.”
And so she went. She lived among them in tents after the tsunami. She learned to fish as they fished, to walk the forest paths they walked. When her own infant son needed safety, she sent him away to her in-laws in Port Blair, her heart breaking with every boat that left the shore. “Lakra Yumma”—Mother Lakra—the Onge began to call her. Under her care the population slowly rose. Babies who once died in the jungle now lived. Women who once hid their pregnancies now trusted her to deliver them. In 2010 the nation gave her the Florence Nightingale Award, the highest honour reserved for nurses. The next year, in 2011, President Pratibha Patil placed the Padma Shri around her neck—the first time a nurse in pure nursing service had received that civilian distinction.
“I never worked for an award,” she would later say, her voice soft but firm. “I worked so that a people would not vanish.” Years later, when COVID threatened the Jarawa and other tribes, she again braved cyclonic seas in a small boat to vaccinate them. From fifty-two thousand nurses across two hundred and two countries she was named among the global top ten for the Aster Guardians Global Nursing Award. The medal from the President still hangs in her modest home, but the greater prize is the Onge children who now run and laugh where once there was only silence.
Yet Shanti Teresa Lakra is not alone in the long corridor of recognition. The Padma awards have occasionally found other nurses whose service crossed into the realm of legend. Sister Mary Nirmala Joshi, who succeeded Mother Teresa as Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, received the Padma Vibhushan for a lifetime of tending the poorest of the poor. In military hospitals and remote primary health centres, in the wards of great institutions founded by Padma-decorated doctors—Apollo, Narayana, Sankara Nethralaya, Aravind—nurses have stood as the living pulse of care. Some have later been recognised under the broader categories of medicine or social work, their nursing roots still visible in every citation.
The government itself has long understood that the Padma is rare for nurses, and so it created a parallel river of honour: the National Florence Nightingale Awards. Every year on International Nurses Day, the President of India places medals and cash prizes into the hands of fifteen or more nurses, midwives, and auxiliary nurse-midwives from every corner of the country—from remote islands to high mountain valleys, from the army’s field hospitals to the smallest tribal sub-centres. In 2024 the list included Major General Ignatius Delos Flora and Prem Rose Suri of Delhi, Dr Tabasum Irshad Handoo of Jammu & Kashmir, Dr Nagarajaiah of Karnataka, Asha Womanrao Bawane of Maharashtra, H. Mankimi of Mizoram, Sanjunta Sethi of Odisha, Radhey Lal Sharma of Rajasthan, Shamshad Beegum A of Lakshadweep, and ANMs such as Sheela Mondal of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Iken Lollen of Arunachal Pradesh, Vidjeyacoumary V of Puducherry, Januka Pandey of Sikkim, and Anindita Pramanik of West Bengal, along with Lady Health Visitor Brahmacharimayum Amusana Devi of Manipur. These awards are the nation’s annual thank-you note to the profession that never sleeps.
Still, when a Padma does come to a nurse, it carries a special weight. It is the Republic saying: we see you. We see the nights you stayed awake while the doctor slept for an hour. We see the forests you entered when others turned back. We see the children you saved who never knew your name.
In the great book of Indian doctors—the volume that tells of Prathap Reddy building Apollo, of Devi Shetty making heart surgery affordable, of Venkataswamy and Badrinath restoring sight to millions—there must always be a chapter for the nurses. For every institution those doctors founded rests upon the quiet strength of women and men in white who never sought the stage yet held the stage together. Shanti Teresa Lakra’s Padma Shri is not merely one nurse’s honour. It is a lantern held high for every nurse who has ever whispered, in a language of touch and patience, “I am here. You are not alone.”
And as long as that lantern burns, the story of Indian healthcare remains incomplete without their names.
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