In the quiet lanes of Delhi, a physician named K. P. S. Verma dedicated his life to the smallest patients. After earning his MBBS from G. R. Medical College, Gwalior, in 1958 and his MD in Pediatrics from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1961, he settled into a long career caring for […]

On 19 April 1939, in Saharanpur, a boy named Mool Chand Maheshwari was born. He joined King George’s Medical College in Lucknow in 1956, completed his MBBS, and earned his MD in 1963. After several years of residency he travelled abroad—first to Temple University in Philadelphia for work in neurophysiology and clinical neurology, then to […]

The City of Hearts Stories of the hospitals that Indian doctors built — and of the people who refused to let the country remain a waiting room for someone else’s medicine. This is written in the voice of a book about Indian doctors: long, human, with reconstructed rooms and conversations drawn from public interviews, memoirs […]

Chapter Two — Apollo: The Hospital That Had to Invent Its Own Permission How Dr Prathap C. Reddy planned a building the law did not recognise, opened it with a President’s scissors, and then taught a country to grow hospitals the way it grew factories. The scenes that follow are written as a book chapter: […]

Chapter Three — Narayana: The Hospital That Learned to Think Like a Factory and Feel Like a Prayer How Dr Devi Prasad Shetty left a London theatre, answered a telephone he should have ignored, and built a city of hearts on a Bengaluru marsh so that a farmer’s child would not be priced like a […]

Chapter Four — AIG: The Tube That Opened a City How Dr D. Nageshwar Reddy left government service because India would not take the stomach seriously, built Asia’s great house of gastroenterology from a day-care room in Hyderabad, and then raised a multi-specialty fortress in Gachibowli so that a liver, a pancreas and a heart […]

Chapter Five — Sankara Nethralaya: The Temple of the Eye How Dr Sengamedu Srinivasa Badrinath kept a promise to a Boston guru, woke his wife before dawn and cancelled America, sold a house on Chamiers Road, and built a not-for-profit hospital whose philosophy is still read like a prayer. People often write it Shankar Nethralaya. […]

Chapter Six — Aravind: The Hospital That Learned from McDonald’s and Answered to a Village God How Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy — Dr V — left the army with twisted fingers, retired at fifty-eight, mortgaged a house in Madurai, and built the world’s most productive eye-care system so that a cataract would no longer be a […]

Chapter Seven — Indira IVF: The House Named for a Wife, Built on a Taboo How Dr Ajay Murdia left a government job with five thousand rupees, opened a male-infertility room on the ground floor of his Udaipur house, named the work after his wife, and with two sons turned a whispered shame into India’s […]

Chapter Eight — Frontier Lifeline: The Hand That Came Home How Dr Kotturathu Mammen Cherian — Joji from the Munnar hills — dissected lizards at ten, learned the heart under Kirklin and Starr, performed India’s first bypass in a railway hospital, built Madras Medical Mission, and then, in 2004, opened a dedicated cardiac house in […]

Chapter Nine — Dr Lal PathLabs: The Twin Born on Hanuman Road How Major S.K. Lal fled Rawalpindi, opened North India’s first private pathology lab in a Delhi house in 1949, and how his son Arvind — born the same year as the lab — took over after a family killing, franchised the needle, and […]

Chapter Nine — Dr Lal PathLabs: The Twin Born on Hanuman Road How Major S.K. Lal fled Rawalpindi, opened North India’s first private pathology lab in a Delhi house in 1949, and how his son Arvind — born the same year as the lab — took over after a family killing, franchised the needle, and […]

Chapter Ten — Max: Air-Conditioning as a Diagnosis How Analjit Singh, youngest son after a Ranbaxy family split, sold a telecom fortune, wrote his own obituary on a consultant’s dare, opened a small centre in Panchsheel Park, and discovered that a man who can buy treatment for a dollar will still pay twenty if someone […]

Chapter Eleven — Sir Ganga Ram: The Hospital That Crossed a Border Twice How an engineer from Mangtanwala turned a desert green, built half of modern Lahore, opened a free hospital in 1921, died in London before Partition, and how his son-in-law — private secretary to Nehru — planted the same name on eleven acres […]

Chapter Twelve — AIIMS: The Princess, the Prime Minister, and a Bill Without Notes How the Bhore Committee asked for a Johns Hopkins in India, Bidhan Roy refused Calcutta, a Kapurthala princess who had been Gandhi’s secretary rose in the Lok Sabha with no prepared speech, New Zealand paid for a foundation stone, and Ansari […]

Chapter Thirteen — KGMC: The Taluqdars Who Bought a College for a Prince How the Maharaja of Vizianagaram’s three lakh was refused in 1870, how Raja Tassaduq Rasul Khan of Jahangirabad stood up at a reception committee in 1905 and proposed a medical college as a gift for the Prince of Wales, how Oudh’s landlords […]

Chapter Fourteen — BHU: The Temple of Learning That Grew a Hospital How Madan Mohan Malaviya, Annie Besant and the Maharaja of Darbhanga got a Viceroy to lay a stone on Basant Panchami 1916, how Gandhi gave his first public speech in India on that campus, how Kashi Naresh founded a 96-bed hospital in 1924 […]

Chapter Fifteen — Agra: The School That Graduated Doctors in the Year of the Revolt How Lieutenant-Governor James Thomason laid a medical school in 1854 to feed the Company’s army, how Surgeon John Murray’s first Indian batch walked out in 1857 while the country was on fire, how four women entered Lady Lyall in 1883, […]

The Surgeon Who Gave Faces and Hope for FreeA story of Padma Shri Dr. Sharad Kumar Dixit On 13 December 1930, in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, a boy named Sharad Kumar Dixit was born into a modest postmaster’s family. He studied medicine, specialised in plastic surgery, and eventually settled in the United States, working at hospitals including […]

The Cardiologist Who Built Affordable Heart CareA story of Padma Shri Dr. Bhupathiraju Somaraju Born on 25 September 1948 (some records note 1946) in Akividu, Andhra Pradesh, Bhupathiraju Somaraju grew up with a quiet determination to heal the heart. He completed his MBBS and MD at Guntur Medical College, then earned his DM in Cardiology […]

The Steady Guide Through Women’s HealthA story of Dr. Gauri Sen In the busy clinics of Delhi, a dedicated physician named Gauri Sen devoted her career to the care of women across every stage of life. After completing her medical training, she specialised in obstetrics and gynaecology, building decades of experience in reproductive medicine, infertility […]

The Quiet Warrior Against HIVA story of Padma Shri Dr. Alaka Keshav Deshpande In the wards of Mumbai’s J.J. Hospital, a physician named Alaka Keshav Deshpande saw a new and frightening illness arrive in the late 1980s. While many turned away, she stepped forward. In 1990 she opened the city’s first dedicated HIV outpatient department, […]

In the quiet lanes of Sagolband Khanam Leirak in Manipur, where the air carried the scent of monsoon earth and wild herbs, a boy named Laishram Nabakishore Singh grew up watching his parents, Gouramani and Dhani, return home each evening with aching backs and empty pockets. They were daily wage labourers. Food was scarce, dreams […]

In the bustling heart of Madras (now Chennai), where the humid air carried the scent of filter coffee and temple flowers, a young Natesan Rangabashyam once gazed at the sky and dreamed of flying. Born on 5 November 1933 to Dr. Natesan, a gentle general practitioner, and Vittobai, he grew up watching his father tend […]

In the sun-baked villages of Andhra Pradesh, where children ran barefoot across dusty courtyards and smiled with gaps where teeth should have been, a quiet revolution began with a dentist’s bag and an unshakable sense of duty. Atluri Sriman Narayana—known simply as A.S. Narayana—was a professor of dental surgery at the Government Dental College in […]

In the coastal city of Visakhapatnam, where the Bay of Bengal whispered against the shore, a restless boy named Duvvur Nageshwar Reddy once failed Class X and nearly convinced his family he was destined for the garage rather than the operating theatre. Born on 18 March 1956 into a third-generation medical family—his grandfather a pathologist, […]

In a quiet village in Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, a boy named Gullapalli Nageswara Rao grew up watching the world through clear eyes and wondering why so many around him could not. Born on 21 September 1945 in Chodavaram to G. Venkateswara Rao and Venkata Lakshmi Narasamma, he completed his MBBS at Guntur Medical […]

In the bustling medical corridors of New Delhi, a young doctor named Harsh Mahajan once looked at an ordinary X-ray film and imagined something far more powerful—images that could peer deep into the living body without a single incision. Born in New Delhi, he completed his MBBS at Maulana Azad Medical College and earned his […]

In the operating theatres of Wisconsin, where precision is measured in millimetres and hope is restored one careful incision at a time, Dr. Kamaljit Singh Paul has spent decades giving patients back control of their lives. Born in India, he graduated from King George’s Medical College in Lucknow in 1968 and later earned advanced training […]

In the crowded wards of Chennai’s government hospitals, where the air often carried the sharp scent of antiseptic and the quiet courage of those who had survived fire, a determined young doctor named Karimpat Mathangi Ramakrishnan decided that burn victims deserved more than temporary relief—they deserved a chance to reclaim their lives. Born in 1934, […]

In the early 1990s, when most Indian surgeons still relied on large open incisions, a determined young doctor named Pradeep Kumar Chowbey stood in an operating theatre and quietly decided that surgery could be gentler. Born and trained in Jabalpur, he earned his MBBS and MS in General Surgery from Government Medical College (now Netaji […]

India has more than 800 medical colleges and tens of thousands of hospitals. A complete census of every facility is not practical in one list, but the institutions below are the ones most consistently treated as “famous” and “big”: Institutes of National Importance, the largest teaching hospitals by bed strength, historic medical colleges, leading private […]

In the quiet consulting rooms of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi, where patients arrive with trembling hands, sudden silences, or the lingering shadow of a stroke, Dr. (Col.) Prahlad Kumar Sethi has spent more than five decades listening carefully to the stories the brain tells. Born on 14 October 1939, he graduated with […]

In the bustling corridors of Mumbai’s King Edward Memorial Hospital, where conversations about the body often stopped short of its most private functions, a quiet pioneer named Prakash Nanalal Kothari decided that sexual health deserved the same dignity and scientific attention as any other branch of medicine. A graduate of Mumbai University, he completed his […]

In a Mumbai hospital corridor, a young man in a wheelchair once looked up at the medical college gates and refused to accept the word “no.” Born on 1 August 1947 in Karachi, just days before Partition, Suresh Hariram Advani’s family fled to India and eventually settled in Mumbai. At the age of eight, polio […]