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7.4
Parmanand Tapdiya: The Balance Sheet of Loyalty
Numbers, memory, and quiet stewardshipa white coat
Nature abhors a vacuum. Institutions do too.
When Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta passed away, a hush settled over the administrative block. For nearly a quarter of a century, his voice had filled those corridors—sometimes booming, sometimes teasing, often decisive. Suddenly, the familiar rhythm was gone. The institute needed someone who could step in without drama, take charge without swagger, and steady the ship without turning it into a spectacle.
The mantle fell on Mr. Parmanand Tapdiya.
To the outside world, he is a seasoned Chartered Accountant who climbed the Kasturba Health Society ladder the old-fashioned way—from member to trustee, to Vice-President, and then President. People describe him as a man of numbers, a leader who watches details closely because he knows that in hospitals, small errors have large consequences. A missed payment can stall a project. A delayed tender can create a drug shortage. A casual signature can trigger an audit query that lingers for months.
To me, however, he is something more personal.
He is the man who called my father Mamaji.
That single word holds half a century of history.
A Debt That Became a Bond
Our relationship is not built on official meetings or committee rooms. It is built on gratitude.
My father had been his mentor in his younger days, during the years when struggle teaches you more than success ever can. Mr. Tapdiya never forgot that. In a world where people repay debts with words, he repaid his with constancy.
Since 1986, he has filed my income tax returns every year—quietly, efficiently, without ever accepting a single paisa. It is a small act on paper, but a large one in life. Year after year, without reminders, without fuss, he did it as naturally as one does a family duty. When my daughter got married, when I left for Berkeley for my MPH, and at several other turning points, he was present in the background—not demanding attention, not offering advice unless asked, simply ensuring that things did not fall apart.
In a place like Sevagram, that kind of loyalty is rarer than brilliance. Brilliance shines. Loyalty sustains.
The Man and the Method
There was once a Tata advertisement that said, “We also make steel.” Mr. Tapdiya seems to operate with a similar spirit: We also make policy.
Finance may be his forte, but he has refused to remain confined to the ledger. During the last two years of Dhirubhai’s life—when age began to blur the older man’s sharpness—Mr. Tapdiya emerged as the natural successor. He moved beyond balance sheets into the harder territory of decisions: construction, equipment procurement, staff appointments, campus expansion, and the countless negotiations that keep a teaching hospital functional.
His style is different from the two giants before him.
Dr. Sushila Nayar led with moral authority. Dhirubhai led with instinct and speed. Mr. Tapdiya leads with discipline—careful, methodical, sometimes stern, and always alert to the economics that decide whether an institution survives or collapses.
In today’s India, that kind of leadership is not optional. It is essential.
Taking the Helm in a Storm
Mr. Tapdiya has inherited not just an office, but a storm.
The MGIMS of today faces pressures that Dr. Sushila Nayar could not have imagined, and even Dhirubhai might have found exhausting. Medical education has changed shape. Regulations have tightened. Expectations have risen. Competition has multiplied. Costs have ballooned. Patience has thinned.
The loss of autonomy after NEET changed the character of admissions. We could no longer choose students aligned with the Gandhian ethos in the way we once did. The staff quota—an incentive that kept families rooted in Sevagram for generations—also disappeared. The ripple effects were slow but real: a shift in institutional culture, and a new kind of uncertainty.
At the same time, new competitors arrived close to home. AIIMS Nagpur, less than an hour away, altered the map. New medical colleges—private and state-run—sprang up across Vidarbha like saplings after the rains. Faculty retention became harder. Senior teachers began to retire. Younger doctors, under pressure to clear postgraduate entrance examinations, often leaned toward “skills” and shortcuts rather than the slow, patient art of bedside medicine.
And hovering above everything was the modern hospital’s eternal dilemma: how to remain pro-poor without becoming professionally obsolete.
Realism Over Romance
So, can Mr. Tapdiya steer MGIMS through this phase?
That question is whispered in corridors the way cricket fans whisper during a tense chase: Will he, won’t he?
Skepticism is natural. Every successor is compared to the predecessor, and every institution tends to mourn what it has lost before it learns to trust what it has gained. But I choose optimism—not because optimism is comforting, but because Sevagram’s history has earned it.
MGIMS began with students sweeping floors under trees. It grew because it adapted. It survived because it learned to bend without breaking.
Mr. Tapdiya is not a romantic. He does not speak in slogans. He calls a spade a spade. He does not mince words. In calmer times, that bluntness might have felt abrasive. In difficult times, it becomes a strength. When the winds are strong, you don’t need poetry. You need a firm hand on the tiller.
In that sense, he reminds me of Mike Brearley—the cricketer who was not the most flamboyant batsman, but who read the game better than most and turned England into a formidable side through intelligence, calm, and strategy. MGIMS does not need theatrics now. It needs clarity, discipline, and financial prudence.
If anyone can do that, it is the man who understands that ideals require accounting.
A Sanctuary of Friendship
When I look back at these three guardians of Sevagram—Dr. Sushila Nayar, Dhirubhai Mehta, and Mr. Parmanand Tapdiya—I feel an emotion I did not fully recognize while living through those years: gratitude.
In the rigid, hierarchical world of Indian academia, “The President” is usually a distant figure behind a polished desk. In Sevagram, my experience was different. My bosses were not merely administrators. They were mentors. They were sometimes patients I cared for. They were friends who walked a little ahead, and occasionally turned back to make sure I was still coming along.
Watching Mr. Tapdiya lead the Society now feels less like a corporate succession and more like the next page of a family chronicle—written in quieter ink, but with steady hands.
The balance sheet of Sevagram, for the moment, rests in safe custody.