The Decision to Hold the Line

As the fires of the second wave eventually began to dim, I found myself walking those same corridors that had been so eerily silent in March 2020. The hospital had physically changed, but the most significant changes were not made of brick and mortar; they were etched into the spirit of the institution.

Looking back on these two harrowing years as Medical Superintendent, I am forced to ask: What did we actually learn? Beyond the flow rates of oxygen and the nuances of steroid dosing, what is the enduring legacy of Sevagram’s struggle?

For me, the defining battle was not against the virus itself, but against the “panic prescribing” that accompanied it. In the face of a terrifying, unknown pathogen, the instinct of the medical community was to “do something”—anything—even if it meant throwing the kitchen sink at the patient. At MGIMS, we made the harder choice: we chose to do only what was right.

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The Fragility of the Public Square

The pandemic taught us that a hospital is only as strong as the trust the community places in it. During the height of the crisis, that trust was under constant siege. We lived in an era where a 30-second WhatsApp video, stripped of context, could undo months of hard work. We saw images of tired residents or crowded wards shared as “proof” of negligence, ignoring the moral burden and physical exhaustion of those in the PPE suits.

We realized that transparency was our only shield. We had to communicate relentlessly—not just with the state administration, but with the families waiting outside the gates. We had to explain why we couldn’t use “miracle” drugs, why we couldn’t hand over bodies, and why we were making the difficult choices we made. Trust, once shaken, is earned back slowly—one honest conversation, one consistent decision, and one patient at a time. We learned that in a climate of fear, efficiency matters, but integrity matters more.

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The Politics of the Pandemic

Those were the days of interminable meetings. Thrice a week, either face-to-face in the Collectorate or on Zoom screens that froze at critical moments, I sat with the District Collector, the Civil Surgeon, and the political leadership of Wardha to coordinate the district’s response. These gatherings were often a strange mix of genuine administrative problem-solving and political posturing.

In one such meeting, attended by all four MLAs of the district, the Member of Parliament, and senior administrators, the tension snapped. A local MLA launched into a tirade, criticizing our nurses, residents, and attendants for “not caring properly and compassionately” for the patients. He spoke with the indignation of a man who had never worn a PPE kit in a non-AC ward.

I could not let it pass. I interrupted him, not as a subordinate, but as a shield for my staff.

“Sir,” I said, my voice cutting through the hum of the air conditioner, “let me remind you of the reality. These nurses and residents work under pressure you cannot imagine. When they go home after a twelve-hour shift, they are terrified. They have old parents and young children waiting for them, and their greatest fear is not the virus itself, but that they might carry it home like a silent assassin. To question their compassion while they risk their families for your constituents is unjust.”

I didn’t stop there. I addressed the elephant in the room—the political pressure to prescribe unproven drugs. “Furthermore,” I added, “the decision to administer medicines must remain inside the hospital. When politicians dictate that we must inject Remdesivir or infuse plasma—treatments that have no proven life-saving benefit—you are not helping; you are interfering. Medicine is not a democracy, and it is certainly not a constituency service.”

I spoke for fifteen minutes. The room, usually filled with the rustle of papers and whispered aides, went silent. Everybody listened with rapt attention. When I finished, there was no rebuttal. The MLA nodded, perhaps realizing he had overstepped the boundary between governance and expertise. From that day on, the criticism stopped.

Later that evening, the District Collector called me. “Dr. Kalantri,” he said, his voice relieved, “congratulations on that speech. It was bold and blunt. As an administrator, I could never have said that to an elected official, but you did. You have greatly eased the situation for all of us.”

It was a small victory in a long war, but it affirmed a crucial truth: sometimes, the most compassionate thing a doctor can do is to be rude to a politician.

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The Sweat Beneath the PPE

The crisis also forced us to recognize the remarkable contributions of those who are often invisible in times of calm. When we talk about “frontline heroes,” we often think of the senior consultant giving an interview. But the pandemic belonged to the residents and nurses who lived inside the “Red Zones.”

I remember seeing a second-year resident, Dr. Navneeth Rathod, slumped in a chair after a 36-hour shift. His face was marked with deep red grooves from the N95 mask, wounds that didn’t have time to heal before the next shift began. In the sweltering heat of Wardha, inside impermeable plastic suits, our residents worked in conditions that bordered on the inhumane. They drew blood with fogged goggles; they inserted central lines while sweating profusely; they held phones to the ears of dying patients so families could say goodbye.

These young doctors absorbed the trauma of a generation. They saw more death in two months than I had seen in my first decade of practice. Yet, they showed up, shift after shift. As an administrator, my greatest lesson was that resilience doesn’t come from the top down; it is carried on the shoulders of the youngest members of the team.

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The Price of Abandoning Science

Perhaps the most somber lesson of this era was the cost of abandoning scientific temper. While other hospitals succumbed to the pressure to prescribe expensive cocktails of antivirals and antibiotics, we held the line.

We saved our patients from financial ruin and medical toxicity by saying ‘No’ to the noise. This decision was not without cost; we faced anger from families who demanded the ‘expensive injections’ they saw on TV. But we stood firm. We knew that the consequences of irrational prescribing would be far deadlier than the anger—a truth that would tragically unfold in the epidemic within .

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The Long Road Ahead

As I write these final words on the pandemic years, the “War Room” has been dismantled, and the lecture halls are once again filled with the voices of students. But the silence of 2020 still echoes in my mind. We are a more sober institution now. We have seen the fragility of life and the stubborn resilience of the human spirit in equal measure.

Had Dr. Sushila Nayar been alive, I believe she would have walked these wards with a quiet nod of approval. She founded this college on the idea that healthcare is a form of social service, a Gandhian “Sadhana.” In the pandemic, we were asked to prove it. We did not falter. We learned, we stumbled, we corrected course, and we kept going. In the end, it was not the protocols alone that sustained us, but an unspoken understanding that while perfection was impossible, abandonment was unthinkable.

In the end, it was not the protocols alone that sustained us, but an unspoken understanding that while perfection was impossible, abandonment was unthinkable. Sevagram stood tall when the world fell silent. And that, more than any statistic, is the story I wanted to tell.