The Pandemic Years
The Siege of Sevagram
Frontline adaptation: A special outdoor OPD for patients with fever and respiratory symptoms, 2020.
In the long history of Sevagram, we have weathered our share of storms. We have seen monsoons turn wards into islands, cholera outbreaks test our hygiene, and the slow, grinding despair of rural poverty. We thought we understood crisis. We were wrong. Nothing in our collective memory prepared us for March 2020.
Covid-19 was not just a medical emergency; it was a siege. It arrived like a phantom, emptying the streets of India with a sudden, eerie silence while filling my staff with a fear that was primal and visceral. For MGIMS—an institution built on the Gandhian promise of open doors—the pandemic posed a cruel paradox: How do we serve the contagious without becoming victims ourselves?
As Medical Superintendent, I found myself in a war room with no maps. The old tools of my trade—negotiation, consensus-building, and the luxury of long, tea-fuelled meetings—were rendered obsolete overnight. They were replaced by a jagged new vocabulary: oxygen flow rates, tanker GPS coordinates, PPE procurement, and the cold arithmetic of mortality. The hospital, once a place of slow rural healing, had turned into a fortress.
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The Administrator’s Trial by Fire
This chapter is different from those that precede it. It is not a broad reflection on a career; it is a granular, day-by-day account of two harrowing years. It is the story of my Agni Pariksha—my trial by fire.
These pages document the sleepless nights spent tracking oxygen tankers on the Nagpur highway, the physical weight of the phone 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 wards they once commanded.
Yet, amidst the sirens and the plastic suffocation of PPE, I witnessed a courage no textbook describes. I saw residents refuse to leave the bedsides of the dying. I saw nurses work double shifts while their children lay feverish at home. I saw the quiet heroes—clerks, attendants, dieticians, lab technicians, pharamacists and drivers—who moved mountains to ensure the hospital didn’t run out of food or fuel or medicines when the world outside had shut down.
This is a story about how fragile life can be, and how stubborn hope is. It is the story of how Sevagram kept standing when the rest of the world went silent