Sasti, Akola, and the First Doctor from the Village
Kisan Rajaram Patond was born on February 26, 1956, in Sasti, a village thirty-five kilometres south of Akola. His father was a small farmer with four years of schooling. His mother had no formal education. He completed his primary education in Marathi at Shri S.L. Shinde Vidyalaya in Sarsi, moved to RLT College, Akola, and in 1974 secured admission to Government Medical College, Nagpur.
He is not entirely sure, looking back, why he chose medicine. “I chose science on my own, scored well, applied to medical college, and got in. My parents had no clue about the process or what it meant.” The honest uncertainty of that answer is more revealing than a polished narrative would be — a village boy who applied the same methodical effort to each step that presented itself, without the guidance or the social capital that shaped the choices of those who came from medical families or urban professional households.
He graduated MBBS in 1978, winning the Shri D.V. Bhiwapurkar Prize for top rank in the Final MBBS Examination at Nagpur University. He pursued his MS in Orthopaedics at GMC Nagpur under Dr. N.K. Saxena — whose dissection techniques he would describe decades later with the reverence of someone describing a formative aesthetic experience: “Precise, detailed, like an artist carefully sculpting a masterpiece.” His MS thesis examined how electrical stimulation could accelerate bone healing. He completed the degree in March 1983 and moved progressively through Lecturer and Reader posts at GMC and IGMC Nagpur before Dr. Vikram Marwah’s advice at a conference changed the trajectory.
The Advice, the Forfeited Salary, and the Arrival
Badi Behenji made up her mind within minutes. Dr. Patond had arrived at Prerna Kutir with a letter of recommendation and a solid track record. He was shy and reserved — not the kind of person who could walk into a room and promote himself with confident ease. The conversation was brief. Dr. Sushila Nayar saw what she needed to see and told him she wanted him to join the next day.
He had to serve a month’s notice at IGMC Nagpur or lose a month’s salary. He thought about it briefly, then made a decision uncharacteristic for someone usually cautious: he forfeited the month’s salary, packed his bags, and came to Sevagram. He arrived on February 19, 1988, into a department that had been without a permanent head since Dr. Kush Kumar’s departure the previous year. He was appointed Professor in April 1990 — two years after joining, considerably faster than the government college trajectory would have allowed.
When he arrived, he went through the old departmental records as a way of understanding what he had inherited. Dr. Ahuja’s legacy emerged from those records: the hand clinic and polio clinic, the leprosy surgical clinic at the Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation, the fortnightly outreach to Deoli and Pulgaon, the postgraduate programme launched in 1980. “I couldn’t help but feel inspired,” Dr. Patond said. “I saw the incredible impact Dr. Ahuja had made and felt a surge of motivation to carry the torch forward.”
The Department He Led
His discipline was expressed most visibly in the OPD, which opened at 8 a.m. without exception. He mentored thirty-eight MS students between 1989 and 2016, and twenty-five diploma students. His first postgraduate student, Dr. Sudhir Srivastava, went on to lead the Orthopaedic Surgery department at KEM, Mumbai.
His clinical focus shifted over time toward joint replacement — hip, knee, shoulder, elbow replacements became his primary work, the particular reward of watching patients who had lived with chronic pain and limited mobility walk out restored. “That feeling of making a difference never fades.” His reconstructive surgery expertise in leprosy earned him a fellowship from the National Academy of Medical Sciences of India.
A paper presented at a conference in Hong Kong caught the attention of an expert who would sit years later on an interview panel for a UAE position. The expert remembered the work, remembered the name. “Sometimes,” Dr. Patond reflected, “hard work pays off in ways you least expect.”
The Administration and the Marathi Rule
He served as Medical Superintendent from October 2007 to August 2009, and as Dean from August 2009 to June 2014. He was not the figure who strode into a room and commanded it. He was the figure who arrived, watched, understood, and then acted — decoding bureaucratic language, reading what official documents said and what they did not, understanding the unspoken rules before applying the formal ones.
His one non-negotiable was Marathi. In the OPD, the wards, the operating theatre — conversations happened in Marathi. It was not a statement of regional identity. It was a clinical conviction: doctors working in rural Vidarbha needed to speak the language their patients thought in, not the language their degrees were written in. From August 2009 to 2012, he worked at Gulf Medical College in Ajman, UAE — broadening his perspective and putting his work in front of people he had not previously met.
The Bicycle and the Continuing Presence
His wife retired as headmistress of New English High School in Wardha. Their son Swapnil, a 2002 MGIMS alumnus, completed his MD in Forensic Medicine from the same institution and serves as Professor and Head of Department at Rajendra Gode Medical College, Amravati — the first doctor from Sasti’s son producing the next generation of the medical line.
Dr. Patond continues to see patients, take ward rounds, and perform joint replacements. He cycles through Sevagram each morning with a walking stick in hand to ward off stray dogs — a detail that captures, with the precision of a good X-ray, the quality of a man who combines dedication with pragmatism and has never needed the life to be grander than it is to find it worth living.
He was told by Badi Behenji to come the next day. He forfeited a month’s salary to do so. That was 1988. The village boy who did not know why he chose medicine has spent more than thirty-five years demonstrating that the choice was the right one.