A Date with the Missile Man

The President Comes to Sevagram

By 2007, the Hospital Information System was no longer a pilot project. It had survived the sceptics, the slow servers, the training sessions, the endless phone calls, and the small humiliations that come with introducing something new in a place that already runs at full capacity. The system was still imperfect, still temperamental on some days, but it had begun to feel inevitable. People no longer asked, “Why are we doing this?” They asked, “Why is it not working faster?”

And then we received news that made the entire campus sit up straight.

Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the President of India, was coming to Sevagram on June 15, 2007.

For a rural teaching hospital, a presidential visit is not just an honour. It is a storm warning. The Special Protection Group arrived with their walkie-talkies and their measured faces. Routes were checked, corridors inspected, doors sealed, and schedules tightened. The institute’s quiet routine, so familiar and forgiving, suddenly turned rigid. Every movement was planned. Every minute had a price.

Somewhere in this tightening of the campus, I was given a task that sounded simple but felt terrifying.

I had to demonstrate the HIS to the President.
And I had five minutes.

Five Minutes of Truth

Five minutes is nothing when you are trying to explain the nervous system of a hospital.

In those days, the HIS was already doing many things at once. It was registering patients and issuing UHIDs. It was generating bills. It was beginning to knit the laboratories into the wards. It was allowing residents to order tests without running behind peons and paper bundles. It was also, on bad days, freezing mid-transaction and provoking the kind of anger that only a tired resident can produce at 2 a.m.

I knew Dr. Kalam would not be impressed by jargon. He was not the sort of visitor who smiled politely at buzzwords. He was a scientist. He would want to see whether the machine worked, whether the logic held, and whether it mattered.

And I also knew what would happen if the system stalled in front of him.
The hospital would not forget it for years.

A Corridor, Not a Conference Hall

Security decided that the demonstration could not happen in the OPD or wards. Too crowded. Too unpredictable. Too many moving parts. We were asked to set up the display in the Radiotherapy department corridor, a narrow space that could be controlled.

A corridor is an odd place to showcase a digital revolution. A laptop would be too small. A projector would wash out in the harsh tube light. We needed something big enough for a small crowd to see clearly, and reliable enough not to embarrass us.

So the hospital bought a 36-inch high-resolution colour screen for ₹85,000.

Even writing that figure today makes me pause. In 2007, it was not a casual purchase. It was the kind of money that made you ask yourself if you were being foolish. But the decision was made quickly, because once the President is coming, hesitation becomes a luxury.

The Rehearsal

In the days before the visit, my mind ran on two parallel tracks.

One track was clinical. The hospital had to run as usual. Patients would not stop falling ill because the President was coming. The wards would not become quieter because a VIP convoy was scheduled.

The other track was digital. We had to make the HIS behave.

I rehearsed my five-minute script repeatedly. I did not want to be clever. I wanted to be clear. I wanted to show a patient’s journey in a way that made sense even to someone seeing our system for the first time.

Registration.
Hospital Insurance.
OPD entry.
Lab order.
Report retrieval.
Discharge Summary

I timed myself. I cut sentences. I removed anything that sounded like self-congratulation. The HIS was not a trophy; it was a tool. I wanted the President to see that.

Mr. S.R. Halbe and Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta watched the preparations closely. Their presence itself was reassuring. They had backed this dream when it was still fragile. They had defended it when people called it wasteful. They had stood by us through failures that would have killed a weaker project.

Mr. Halbe, in his imposing way, asked the question that mattered.

“What if it crashes?”

It was not a threat. It was the voice of someone who had seen enough projects fail to respect the possibility of failure.

I said what I could honestly say.
“We will keep it ready. We will keep backups. We will pray.”

Technology, I had learned, is like medicine. You can prepare, you can anticipate, you can reduce risk, but you cannot guarantee outcomes. There is always a small space where fate sits quietly.

The People Who Carried the Change

What visitors rarely see during such demonstrations is the invisible labour behind the screen.

For months, residents had lived through the most exhausting phase of any digital transformation: the dual-entry period. Paper plus digital. Old world plus new world.

The postgraduates from the 1998 batch became our unwilling test pilots. In Medicine, residents like Udit Narang and Namita Jajoo did what residents always do: they complained, they laughed, they rolled their eyes at the “green button” that moved at a tortoise pace, and then they still did the work. They had patients to care for, notes to write, emergencies to handle, and on top of that, a system that demanded extra clicks and extra patience.

If the HIS survived those months, it was not because the software was perfect. It survived because the juniors absorbed the inconvenience and kept the hospital moving.

There was also the quieter heroism of technicians, attendants, and clerks. The same people who had never touched a keyboard were now expected to type names, villages, ages, and spellings that even educated people struggled with. They made mistakes, got scolded, learned again, and slowly began to take pride in their new competence.

Somewhere in that struggle, the HIS stopped being “the doctors’ project” and became “our system.”

The Day Arrives

On the evening of June 15, Sevagram felt different. The air was heavy with humidity and anticipation. The campus looked cleaner than usual, as if it had dressed up. People walked with purpose. Voices softened in corridors. Even the usual chaos of a hospital seemed, for a few hours, to hold itself in check.

Then Dr. Kalam arrived.

He walked with that springy energy people always spoke about, the kind that makes you forget his age. His face carried curiosity more than authority. He looked around as if he genuinely wanted to understand what he was seeing.

When he came to the corridor, the space suddenly felt smaller. Not because he demanded attention, but because everyone around him became alert.

I stood near the screen. My mouth went dry. I began.

I showed him the registration module. I explained how the UHID prevented duplication. I clicked through the patient record. I moved to lab orders. I pulled up a report. I showed how a system-generated report could be valid without a signature, because the integrity came from the process, not the ink.

And then, the moment I feared most did not happen.

The server did not crawl. The screen did not freeze. The hourglass did not appear.

Pages loaded smoothly. The data came up cleanly. The system behaved like it had been waiting for this moment.

Dr. Kalam watched closely. He asked questions, not as a formality, but with genuine interest. He did not treat it like a ceremonial display. He treated it like a working model.

When I finished, he smiled.

It was not the smile of a politician who has to be polite. It was the smile of a scientist who has seen something useful.

That smile travelled through the corridor like a quiet blessing. I felt my shoulders loosen for the first time in days.

A Quiet Win

After the President left, the campus exhaled. People began speaking again at normal volume. The tension dissolved into the usual hospital noise.

But for me, the real satisfaction did not come from the successful demonstration. It came from what it meant for the people who had carried the system through its awkward childhood.

Somewhere that night, a clerk at registration must have smiled to himself.
Somewhere a resident must have felt less cynical.
Somewhere Bhavana must have felt that the years of effort had not been foolish.

Because in a hospital, the most fragile thing is not a server.
It is morale.

And that evening, morale rose quietly, without slogans.

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