The Lucknow Epiphany

A Hospital That Looked Like Tomorrow

In 1999, I travelled to Lucknow to see the Hospital Information System at SGPGI—designed by C-DAC.

I went as a curious doctor and returned as a restless one.

SGPGI was not just bigger than MGIMS. It operated with a different rhythm. It felt as if the hospital had a spine, an internal structure that held information in place. In Sevagram, we were used to files that moved like wandering cattle—sometimes present, sometimes missing, often found only after a long search and a few raised voices.

In Lucknow, information sat quietly where it belonged.

A doctor could pull up patient history on a screen without calling for a file. Lab reports appeared without someone running across the campus with bundles of paper. The system reduced the shouting, the searching, and the daily small humiliations that a paper-based hospital forces on both staff and patients.

I watched doctors order investigations, view results, and retrieve records with a calm efficiency that felt almost luxurious. It wasn’t luxury, of course. It was simply good design.

For someone used to Sevagram’s daily struggles, it looked like tomorrow had arrived early in Lucknow.

The Question That Wouldn’t Leave

I came back with a question that refused to leave me.

If Lucknow can do it, why not Sevagram?

It wasn’t a question of pride. I wasn’t trying to prove that we could match a big institute. The question came from something simpler: fairness. Our patients were poor, but that did not mean they deserved a chaotic system. In fact, it meant they deserved a system that wasted less of their time and money.

We had patients. We had volume. We had work ethic. We had clinical seriousness. What we lacked was infrastructure, expertise, and money. And perhaps the courage to attempt something that sounded too ambitious for a rural teaching hospital.

In a place like Sevagram, ambition is often treated as arrogance. People tolerate big dreams only if they come with guaranteed success, and no dream comes with that guarantee.

Still, the question remained.

The Two Men Who Made the Dream Survive

Big projects don’t survive on enthusiasm alone. They survive on backing—especially when things go wrong.

In Sevagram, two men mattered deeply to this story: Mr. S.R. Halbe and Mr. Dhirubhai Mehta.

Halbe arrived in the mid-1990s and quickly became a presence you couldn’t ignore. Tall, broad, and blunt, he had the air of a man who had seen too much inefficiency to tolerate it quietly. A chartered accountant by training, he carried the discipline of corporate India but wore khadi like it belonged to him.

He was not sentimental about systems. He wanted results. He also had a sharp sense of what institutions hide behind routine. He could smell delay the way a doctor smells infection.

When I spoke about the HIS dream, I expected questions about cost.

Instead, he asked about impact.

Would it reduce waiting time? Would it cut leakage? Would it bring transparency? Would it stop patients from being pushed around for files and reports? Would it stop a villager from being told to repeat a test simply because a report had been misplaced?

He saw the moral side of technology. Not the glamour.

He didn’t promise ease. He promised support. And in a project like this, that difference matters.

Dhirubhai, in his own style, provided the quieter kind of strength. He was less dramatic than Halbe, but steady in the way good institutions need. Dreams require energy, but they also require people who keep showing up when the dream becomes inconvenient.

I began to understand that if we were to attempt something like an HIS, we would need more than software. We would need protection—from cynicism, from fatigue, and from the inevitable chorus of “this will never work here.”

The Shape of the Dream

By the time the idea matured, it had stopped being about computers and started being about the hospital’s nervous system.

Registration, billing, laboratory reports, pharmacy inventory, ward notes, discharge summaries—these were not separate islands. They were one organism. In a paper system, the organism survives by improvisation. In a digital system, it survives by structure.

I could also sense, even then, that the greatest challenge would not be the code. It would be the culture.

Hospitals have muscle memory. They run on habits that have been reinforced for decades. Paper has its own comfort. You can hold it. You can hide it. You can blame it. A computer record is unforgiving. It exposes delays. It exposes errors. It exposes leakage.

And nothing frightens an institution more than exposure.

Still, I could not let the idea go.

Lucknow had shown me what was possible. Sevagram demanded that we try.

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