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7.2
The Guardians : Dr. Sushila Nayar
Iron Woman in Khadi
Before I could become Medical Superintendent, I had to understand something larger than my own appointment: Sevagram did not run only on rules, budgets, and files. For decades, it ran on the moral authority of one woman.
Dr. Sushila Nayar was not merely the founder of MGIMS. She was its conscience, its compass, and often its engine. Around campus we called her “Badi Behenji”—a name that carried affection, reverence, and a quiet warning. It suggested family, but it also reminded you that she was watching.
To the country, she was a colossus: Mahatma Gandhi’s personal physician, a freedom fighter, a former Union Health Minister, and a builder of institutions. To us in Sevagram, she was something more immediate and more unsettling. She was the person who could walk into a ward and make everyone straighten their backs without saying a word. She had that rare presence that does not need a microphone.
Even those who disagreed with her never doubted her intent. She was fiercely pro-poor, impatient with waste, and allergic to pretence. She did not admire grand speeches. She admired work.
A Different Kind of Authority
In a teaching hospital, authority usually comes with degrees, designations, and committees. Behenji’s authority came from a different source: moral certainty. She did not behave like a guest in her own institution. She behaved like a guardian who had built the house with her bare hands and now wanted to ensure it did not lose its purpose.
Her style could be blunt, even intimidating. She was capable of great warmth, but she did not waste it on people who wanted praise without effort. When she approved of you, you felt it like sunlight. When she disapproved, you felt it like a sudden drop in temperature.
She had little patience for laziness and even less for excuses. If a ward was unclean, she did not want a long explanation about staff shortages. She wanted a broom. If a patient suffered because of delay, she did not want a committee to “look into it.” She wanted action.
In many ways, she ran MGIMS the way Gandhi ran an ashram: with discipline, simplicity, and an uncompromising insistence that service must remain the centre of everything.
The Sevagram She Wanted
Behenji’s Sevagram was never meant to be a glamorous institution. It was meant to be a useful one.
She wanted students who could handle rural realities without complaining. She wanted doctors who would not treat poverty as an inconvenience. She wanted a hospital that did not frighten the poor with arrogance, unnecessary expense, or indifference. She believed that the best medicine in a village was not only antibiotics and oxygen—it was trust.
That trust did not come automatically. It had to be earned daily: by respectful communication, honest billing, rational prescribing, and the humility to accept that patients often arrived late not because they were careless, but because life in a village is complicated.
She understood something many administrators forget: a hospital is not a building. It is a promise.
Compassion With a Temper
People who write tributes often sandpaper away the rough edges. Sevagram never did that with Behenji. We admired her precisely because she was not polished.
She had compassion, yes, but she also had a temper—famous, feared, and sometimes necessary. Her anger was not theatrical. It was purposeful. It was the anger of someone who had seen injustice up close and refused to make peace with it.
If she shouted, it was usually because someone’s carelessness had the potential to hurt a patient. If she scolded, it was because she believed you could do better and were choosing not to. Her standards were high because her expectations of human beings were high.
Many of us, especially in our younger years, found her difficult. Later, we realized she was difficult for the same reason good teachers are difficult: they refuse to let you remain mediocre.
The Institution as Family
There was another side to her leadership—less visible, but deeply felt.
Behenji had a way of making the institute feel like a family, even when she was being stern. She knew people by name. She remembered old stories. She carried institutional memory in her head like a living archive. A new resident might see only her authority; an old employee could see her loyalty.
She could be unexpectedly personal. A staff member’s illness, a student’s hardship, a worker’s family crisis—she noticed these things. She might not express sympathy in soft words, but she would often act in ways that mattered more than words.
This mixture—strictness with responsibility, discipline with care—created a culture that shaped all of us, even those who resisted it.
When She Was Gone
When Dr. Sushila Nayar passed away, Sevagram felt different, as if the campus had lost a protective roof.
The routines continued—OPDs ran, ward rounds happened, surgeries went on—but a certain gravity disappeared. For years, her presence had been the invisible force that held the institution steady. Without her, we had to confront an uncomfortable truth: the hospital could no longer rely on one towering personality to keep it aligned.
Her death did not merely leave an emotional gap. It left a leadership vacuum.
It was then that the mantle passed to Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta, who stepped in as President of the Kasturba Health Society. He did not inherit an easy institution. He inherited an institution in mourning, an institution at a crossroads, and an institution that now had to learn how to stand upright without Behenji’s shadow.
And those of us who would later sit in the Superintendent’s chair—myself included—were walking into a hospital that had been shaped by her standards, her discipline, and her uncompromising idea of what Sevagram should remain.
In administration, people often talk about “systems.” In Sevagram, before we had systems, we had Behenji.