About the Author

SP Kalantri was born in Wardha in 1957 and trained at Government Medical College, Nagpur, where he completed his MBBS and MD in Medicine. In the summer of 1982, he arrived at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in Sevagram as a senior resident, expecting to stay a year or two. More than four decades later, he is still there — teaching students, seeing patients, and walking the same wards.

His association with MGIMS is, in effect, the institution’s own history as lived from within. He has known the founders, their successors, and several generations of students who passed through these corridors. Over the years he became Professor of Medicine and later Medical Superintendent of Kasturba Hospital — positions that placed him at the centre of the institution’s daily life and gave him an unusually broad vantage point on the people who built and sustained it.

This archive grew out of that vantage point. Architects of MGIMS records the lives and contributions of the men and women whose decisions, sacrifices, and quiet persistence gave this institution its character — many of whom Dr Kalantri knew personally, worked alongside, or learned of from those who did. The profiles gathered here are offered as a record for students, alumni, and historians of rural medical education in India, so that the institution’s founding generation is not lost to memory.

At forty-seven, when many doctors settle into habit and certainty, he left for the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue an MPH — an interlude that sharpened an instinct already well formed at MGIMS: to question easy answers and resist the seduction of certainty.

He lives in Sevagram with his wife, Bhavana, continuing to write about the institution, its people, and the place that has been his home for over forty years.