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Agni Pariksha
The Administrator’s Pandemic Trial
Sevagram’s Longest Winter
In the long, storied history of Sevagram, we have weathered many storms. We have seen monsoons that turned our wards into islands, epidemics of cholera that tested our hygiene, and the slow, daily grind of providing healthcare in the shadow of poverty. We thought we understood crisis. But nothing in our collective experience had prepared us for March 2020.
The Covid-19 pandemic was not merely a medical emergency; it was a civilizational disruption. It arrived like a phantom, emptying the streets of India with a sudden, eerie silence, while simultaneously filling the hearts of my staff with a primal, visceral fear. For MGIMS—a teaching hospital rooted in the Gandhian tradition of community service and open doors—the pandemic posed an existential paradox: How do we serve the contagious without becoming victims ourselves?
As the Medical Superintendent, I suddenly found myself in a war room without a map. The old tools of my trade—negotiation, consensus-building, and the luxury of long, deliberative meetings—were rendered obsolete overnight. They were replaced by a new, urgent vocabulary: oxygen flow rates, “LMO” tanker GPS coordinates, PPE procurement, and the cold finality of mortality statistics. The hospital, once a place of slow-paced rural healing, had become a high-stakes fortress.
The Administrator’s Agni Pariksha
This section of my memoir is different from those that precede it. It is not a broad reflection on a career spanning decades; it is a granular, day-by-day account of two harrowing years. It is the story of my Agni Pariksha as an administrator.
These chapters document the sleepless nights spent tracking oxygen tankers on the Nagpur highway like a hawk, the physical weight of the phone in my hand when I had to tell a friend there were no ICU beds left, and the peculiar heartbreak of watching my own colleagues gasp for breath in the very wards they once commanded.
Yet, amidst the unrelenting wail of sirens and the suffocating embrace of PPE suits, I witnessed a profound courage that no textbook could describe. I saw residents who refused to leave the bedsides of the dying, even as their own masks fogged with exhaustion. I saw nurses who worked double shifts while their children were feverish at home. I saw administrative staff who moved mountains to ensure the hospital didn’t run out of food or fuel when the world outside had simply shut down.
The following chapters are a chronicle of that time. They are a testimony to the terrifying fragility of life and the stubborn, beautiful resilience of the human spirit. Most of all, they are the stories of how Sevagram stood its ground when the rest of the world fell silent.