The Conscience of Medicine
A story of Padma Shri Dr. Ranjit Roy Chaudhury

In Patna, on 4 November 1930, a boy named Ranjit Roy Chaudhury was born into a cultured family that valued learning and service. He studied medicine at the Prince of Wales Medical College and later won a Rhodes Scholarship—one of the first Indian doctors to do so—earning his DPhil at Oxford.

When he returned to India he carried a quiet but firm belief: medicines must heal, never harm, and must reach those who need them most. At the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh he became the first Head of the Department of Pharmacology and later its Dean. There, in 1978, he established India’s (and Asia’s) first DM course in Clinical Pharmacology, training a new generation of doctors to think carefully about how drugs work in real patients.

One evening a young colleague asked him, “Sir, why spend so much time on guidelines and ethics when research is moving so fast?”

Ranjit answered gently, “Because speed without conscience can injure the very people we promise to protect. A good medicine is not only effective—it is also fair, safe, and available.”

He served with the World Health Organization, championed the rational use of drugs, and later chaired the National Expert Committee that reformed India’s drug regulation and clinical trial policies. Twenty-four of the twenty-five recommendations his committee made were accepted and implemented, restoring confidence in a system that had nearly collapsed.

In 1998 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri. He also received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award and the Dr. B. C. Roy Award. When people called him “the conscience of the medical profession,” he only smiled and said, “Conscience is not an award. It is a daily choice.”

On 27 October 2015, at the age of eighty-four, Dr. Ranjit Roy Chaudhury passed away. Yet the guidelines he shaped, the students he trained, and the principle he lived by continue to guide Indian medicine:

“Treat the patient with knowledge, and treat knowledge with responsibility.”