In a small village in Moga district of Punjab, the son of a bicycle mechanic once watched his father mend cycles with patient hands and decided that he, too, would mend broken things—only the things he chose to mend were human hearts. Born in 1954, Purshotam Lal studied medicine at Government Medical College, Amritsar, topped his class, and then trained in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. He returned to India determined to bring the newest cardiac techniques within reach of ordinary patients.

Over the next decades he introduced more than twenty interventional procedures to the country for the first time—slow rotational angioplasty, coronary atherectomy, diamond drilling of arteries (rotablator), stenting, non-surgical closure of heart holes, and non-surgical aortic valve replacement. In 1992 he performed the world’s first non-surgical ASD closure using a monodisc device. In 2004 he carried out the world’s first transcatheter aortic valve implantation with a CoreValve. He developed his own technique of left atrio-femoral bypass support—sometimes called a partial artificial heart—for high-risk cases, and performed the largest number of angioplasties and stentings by a single operator in India. His name appears multiple times in the Limca Book of Records.

In 1997 he founded the Metro Group of Hospitals, which grew into a network of multi-specialty centres focused on advanced yet affordable cardiac care. “Technology must serve the patient, not the other way around,” he often told his teams. “A procedure is successful only when the poorest person can also benefit from it.”

The Government of India recognised his pioneering work with the Padma Bhushan in 2003, the Dr B.C. Roy National Award in 2004, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2009. From a bicycle-repair shop to the operating theatres where hearts are healed without major surgery, Purshotam Lal’s journey remains a quiet testament to ingenuity, persistence and a deep sense of service.