In the years after Independence, leprosy still carried a heavy stigma. Patients were often isolated, their deformities untreated, their dignity eroded. Jal Mehta saw beyond the disease to the human being. Inspired by figures such as the socialist leader Aruna Asaf Ali and the renowned leprologist Dr. Robert Cochrane, and guided by his father-in-law Dr. N. J. Bandorawalla, he took charge of a neglected leprosy home in Kondhwa near Pune and transformed it into a place of healing and hope.

He specialised in reconstructive surgery that restored function to hands and feet damaged by the disease. Yet surgery alone was never enough. He believed patients needed the chance to earn a living and return to ordinary society. Under his leadership the centre developed vocational training programmes—workshops where cured patients learned skills, manufactured goods, and regained both income and self-respect.

One afternoon a patient who had undergone surgery sat with him after physiotherapy.

“Doctor sahib,” the man said quietly, “my hands can work again. But will people still turn away when they see me?”

Jal Mehta placed a steady hand on his shoulder. “We will teach them not to turn away. And we will give you the means to stand among them as an equal. That is the real cure.”

He served as president of the Pune District Leprosy Committee, organised self-help groups, and used documentaries to challenge public fear and ignorance. His wife, Dr. Mehru Jal Mehta, herself a distinguished cancer surgeon and the first woman to earn a Master’s in Surgery from Pune University, stood beside him through the long years of work. Their only son, Minoo, later lost his life in a Himalayan avalanche—a private grief that Jal Mehta carried with characteristic quiet dignity.

In 1982 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan for his contributions to medical science and social service. When colleagues congratulated him, he characteristically shifted the credit elsewhere.

“The honour belongs to the patients who trusted us,” he said, “to the workers who stayed through the difficult years, and to the memory of those who first showed us that leprosy need not mean exclusion.”

He continued his work into later life, also serving as chairman of the Serum Institute of India and advising on pharmaceutical and medical matters. On 13 October 2001 he died in Pune after a cerebral haemorrhage, leaving behind his wife and a legacy that still lives in the centres he built and the lives he restored.

In the long story of Indian medicine, Jal Minocher Mehta stands as a surgeon who understood that healing the body is incomplete unless the spirit and the place of a person in society are also restored. Through patient reconstructive surgery, through vocational training, and through the quiet insistence that every human being deserves dignity, he helped change the meaning of leprosy care in his time.