The Father of Laparoscopy in India

On 15 July 1934, in a middle-class Parsi family in Mumbai, a son was born to Erach Rustomji and Perin Erach. They named him Tehemton Erach Udwadia. From St. Mary’s School and Wilson College he moved to the Grant Medical College and Sir J.J. Group of Hospitals, where he earned his MBBS and MS in General Surgery. Fellowships of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and England followed, and a lifetime of precise, thoughtful surgery began.

In the early 1970s, while still a young consultant, he watched a gynaecological colleague perform a diagnostic laparoscopy. The idea took hold. In 1972 he travelled to Germany, met the instrument-maker Karl Storz, and brought back a basic laparoscopy set. For nearly twenty years he used it at J.J. Hospital—often creating pneumoperitoneum with a simple sigmoidoscope pump—helping thousands of patients with faster diagnoses long before modern imaging was widespread.

On 31 May 1990 he performed India’s first laparoscopic cholecystectomy at J.J. Hospital. Convinced that this minimal-access approach was as relevant to India as to the West, he demonstrated the technique across the country, trained surgeons, and in 1993 founded the Indian Association of Gastrointestinal Endo-Surgeons (IAGES). Today that association has thousands of members and has carried laparoscopic surgery into the remotest corners of the nation. He later became the first Indian to serve as President of both the Endoscopic and Laparoscopic Surgeons of Asia and the International Federation of Societies of Endoscopic Surgeons.

He worked for decades at Breach Candy Hospital and P.D. Hinduja National Hospital, edited the Journal of Minimal Access Surgery from its birth, and remained a generous teacher until the end. Honours arrived steadily: the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award, the SAGES Millennium Award, the IAGES Lifetime Achievement Award, the Padma Shri in 2006, the Padma Bhushan in 2017, and the Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Dr. Tehemton Erach Udwadia passed away in Mumbai on 7 January 2023. Yet every time a surgeon in India lifts a laparoscope and operates through tiny incisions, every time a patient recovers faster and with less pain, the quiet revolution he began continues. The father of laparoscopic surgery in India left behind not only instruments and associations, but a lasting standard of courage, humility, and care.