In the town of Tirunelveli in the old Madras Presidency, a boy named Ramaswami Ganapati was born in 1930 into a middle-class family. From those southern beginnings he would travel north to Mumbai and devote his entire professional life to one of medicine’s most stigmatised diseases—leprosy.

He began his career on 1 October 1963 as Assistant Medical Officer at the Acworth Leprosy Hospital in Wadala. Within a year he had become a Research Officer. The work was demanding and the social barriers surrounding the disease were high, yet he persisted. Along with a small group of like-minded colleagues he pioneered active school surveys and slum surveys in the dense urban landscape of Mumbai, taking detection and treatment into the very places where the disease continued to spread.

In September 1976 he founded the Bombay Leprosy Project. The project became a model of rational, field-based leprosy control in an urban setting. It combined clinical care, laboratory work, epidemiological study and, later, community-based rehabilitation for those left with deformities after the infection itself had been cured. Ganapati insisted that “care after cure” was as important as the drugs that halted the disease.

One younger worker once asked him why he spent so much time in the crowded lanes of the city instead of remaining in the hospital.

“Because that is where the disease lives,” he replied quietly. “If we wait for patients to come to us, we will always be too late. We must go to them.”

He published more than a hundred scientific papers and served on the National Leprosy Eradication Commission, the Maharashtra State Leprosy Council, and as a consultant to the World Health Organization. His advice helped shape training programmes and the practical application of multi-drug therapy across districts.

In 1983 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri. Other honours followed, including the JALMA Trust Fund Oration Award of the Indian Council of Medical Research. Colleagues came to regard him as a “Mahaguru” of leprosy workers—gentle in manner, determined in purpose, and unwavering in his focus on the patient rather than on institutional glory.

Dr. R. Ganapati continued his work until the very end. He died on 13 November 2011. In the long story of India’s fight against leprosy he stands as a pioneer who took control programmes out of the hospital and into the community, who insisted on both scientific rigour and human dignity, and who helped change the way an ancient disease was understood and managed in modern urban India.