Dr. Nandlal Lachmilal Bordia
(Padma Shri, 1973 – Medicine)

In the bustling medical wards of Indore’s Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College, long before air-conditioned corridors and digital records, a tall, soft-spoken professor moved among the iron-framed beds with the quiet authority of someone who had seen too many young lives fade under the weight of tuberculosis. Dr. Nandlal Lachmilal Bordia never raised his voice. He did not need to. Students straightened the moment he entered a room; patients looked up with the same mixture of fear and hope that had followed him for decades.

Born into a modest family in Madhya Pradesh, Nandlal grew up in an era when the word “TB” was spoken in whispers, as if naming the disease might summon it. He watched neighbours waste away, their coughs echoing through narrow lanes, and decided early that he would not stand helpless. Medical college was not an easy path—resources were scarce, laboratories rudimentary—but he studied with a stubborn focus that classmates still remembered years later.

“Why chest medicine, Bordia?” a senior once asked during a late-night discussion over weak tea.
Nandlal looked up from his notes. “Because the lungs are where a man first loses his breath for living. If I can give that breath back, even for a few more years, it is enough.”

He rose through the ranks at MGM Medical College, Indore, eventually becoming Emeritus Professor. In those years the college’s tuberculosis and chest department was a frontline against one of India’s most relentless killers. Beds were always full. Streptomycin and the newer drugs were still finding their place; resistance was poorly understood; many patients arrived too late. Dr. Bordia insisted on thorough histories, careful auscultation, and—above all—honesty.

One monsoon afternoon a young farmer from a nearby village sat on the edge of a bed, eyes fixed on the floor.
“Doctor Sahib,” he said, “my wife asks if I will live to see the harvest.”
Bordia sat beside him, not above him. “I cannot promise the harvest,” he answered gently. “But I can promise that every day you fight, we will fight with you. Take the medicines exactly as I say. Come back even when you feel better. And tell your wife that hope is also a kind of medicine.”

He trained generations of doctors with the same quiet insistence. In the lecture hall he would pause mid-sentence, chalk still in hand, and say, “A chest X-ray is not a picture of disease. It is a picture of a person’s struggle. Read both.” Internees who tried to rush through rounds learned quickly that Dr. Bordia noticed everything—the missed rales, the unfinished sentence from a worried relative, the student who looked away from suffering.

Colleagues recalled that he never sought the limelight. When the Padma Shri was announced in 1973, recognising his long service in medicine, he accepted it with the same understated grace he showed in the wards. “The award is not mine alone,” he told a small gathering of students and staff. “It belongs to every patient who trusted us when the night was longest, and to every young doctor who stayed past midnight because a fever would not break.”

Even after formal retirement, as Emeritus Professor, he continued to walk the corridors of MGM, offering advice, reviewing difficult cases, and reminding newer faculty that technology must never replace the hand on the shoulder or the patient explanation. In an age when tuberculosis still claimed far too many, Dr. Nandlal Bordia’s greatest contribution was not a single discovery but a sustained culture of careful, compassionate care that shaped the medical landscape of central India.

On quiet evenings he would sit in the college library, leafing through old case notes, and smile at the memory of a farmer who had returned years later, healthy, with a small bag of grain as thanks. “Doctor Sahib,” the man had said, “the harvest came. And so did I.”

That was the measure of his life—not the medal, but the ordinary victories that kept breath in countless chests across Madhya Pradesh.