The Father of Primary Healthcare in India: The Story of Dr. Krishnaswami Srinivas Sanjivi

On 27 December 1903, in the princely town of Pudukkottai in present-day Tamil Nadu, a boy named Krishnaswami Srinivas Sanjivi was born to P. S. Krishnaswami Iyer and Dharmambal. His father had once acted as guardian to the pioneering woman physician Muthulakshmi Reddi during her student days—an early sign of the family’s quiet commitment to service and learning.

Sanjivi studied at P.S. High School and Presidency College before entering Madras Medical College. He graduated MBBS in 1927 and earned his MD in General Medicine in 1932—one of the earliest in the region to do so. He joined the Madras Medical Service and rose steadily: serving at Erskine Hospital in Madurai, directing tuberculosis work across the Presidency, heading the TB Research Centre at Chetput and the Sanatorium at Tambaram, and later becoming Professor of Medicine at Stanley Medical College and then at Madras Medical College. He also served as First Physician at the Government General Hospital.

In 1947 he trained further in chest diseases at the Brompton Hospital in London. Back in India he continued his distinguished government career until 1957. When he felt his legitimate claim to higher administrative office was overlooked, he chose voluntary retirement—not in bitterness, but with a clear purpose.

He believed that good medicine must reach the lower and middle classes who fell between free government care and expensive private treatment. Gathering like-minded doctors, philanthropists and civic leaders—including Kasturi Srinivasan of The Hindu—he founded the Voluntary Health Services (VHS) in 1958. Land was acquired in Adyar (then a desolate, flooded stretch), Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation stone in 1961, and the hospital began admitting patients in 1963.

Sanjivi’s model was revolutionary for its time: a sliding-scale membership based on income, family health cards, strong emphasis on prevention (especially tuberculosis screening), and the principle that specialists would give their time voluntarily so that the majority of patients could receive free or highly subsidised care, including food and medicines. Over the decades VHS grew into a large multi-specialty tertiary hospital that still serves the underprivileged while training doctors and pioneering community health ideas.

A true Gandhian in spirit, Sanjivi lived simply, treated every patient with equal dignity, and continued teaching and guiding even after strokes left him bedridden and nearly blind in later years. He published scientific papers and wrote books in both English and Tamil to spread medical knowledge.

The nation recognised his work with the Padma Shri in 1971, the Padma Bhushan in 1976, and the Dr. B. C. Roy National Award for socio-medical relief in the same year. Yet those who knew him say the awards mattered less to him than the daily reality of the hospital he had built.

Dr. K. S. Sanjivi passed away on 1 October 1994 at the very institution he had created. Today a statue stands on the VHS campus, and an annual endowment lecture keeps his name alive. In the history of Indian medicine he is remembered not only as an outstanding physician and teacher, but as the quiet visionary who showed that compassionate, affordable, community-centred healthcare was both possible and necessary.