The Delhi Library

A Summons to Delhi

In the winter of 2003, Mr. Halbe called me to Delhi.

His words were short and definite. “We are meeting Arun Shourie.”

Arun Shourie was not an ordinary minister. He was already a public figure in my mind—an intellectual, a journalist who had written fearlessly, and now a minister in Vajpayee’s government handling information technology. The very idea that we might meet him felt slightly unreal, like being invited to speak to a man who lived inside newspapers.

I travelled to Delhi with a folder of notes and a mind full of questions. Would he even listen? Would this be one of those meetings where you speak for five minutes and are dismissed with a polite smile? Would he treat Sevagram like a quaint rural project, useful only for photographs?

Halbe did not allow such doubts to grow. He carried certainty the way some men carry authority—naturally, without effort.

We reached Shourie’s residence on a cold evening. The house had the quiet dignity of a place where thinking is taken seriously. We were taken into his library.

It was vast, lined with books that looked used rather than displayed. The room itself felt like an argument against noise. You could almost hear silence settling between the shelves.

Shourie was in the middle of a meeting. Yet he paused, greeted us, and listened.

That, in itself, was a small sign. People who are too busy often pretend to listen. Shourie listened without pretending.

The Pitch That Became a Confession

I had rehearsed what I wanted to say, but once I began speaking, it stopped feeling like a pitch and started feeling like a confession.

I told him about MGIMS—its Gandhian roots, its rural mandate, its refusal to chase money the way many institutions did. I told him we didn’t want computers for status. We wanted them because paper was failing us.

Paper delays care. Paper hides leakage. Paper makes the poor pay for inefficiency. It forces patients to repeat tests because reports are lost. It forces relatives to run from one counter to another, holding files like passports, begging for stamps and signatures.

I told him what I had seen in Lucknow. I told him we wanted that same clarity in Sevagram—not because we were trying to compete with big institutes, but because our patients deserved it.

I expected interruptions. I expected him to ask for a feasibility report. I expected him to point out that rural hospitals don’t have the infrastructure for such dreams.

Instead, he listened.

No glances at the clock. No impatience. No polite dismissal.

When I finished, he said he would support the project.

I walked out feeling something rare in public life: a door had opened without bargaining.

The File That Changed Everything

On 12 February 2004, Mr. P. Soreng, Deputy Director in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, tasked C-DAC Noida with designing and implementing a Hospital Information System for MGIMS, Sevagram.

On paper, it looked like an administrative order.

In reality, it was the beginning of upheaval.

We didn’t fully understand it then, but we were about to ask a rural hospital to change its muscle memory—registration, billing, labs, pharmacy, wards, everything. We were about to ask clerks who had lived inside registers for twenty years to trust a screen. We were about to ask residents, already exhausted by clinical duties, to do extra work in the name of “testing.” We were about to ask departments to give up their private systems and accept a shared one.

The technology would come later.

First would come resistance. Then fatigue. Then the slow, stubborn work of persuasion.

And as always in Sevagram, the work would fall not on the people who sat in meetings, but on the people who stood at counters.

Somewhere inside me, there was excitement. But it was tempered by a quiet awareness: we had just invited a storm into the hospital, and once it arrived, we would have to live through it.

The file had moved.

Now the real work would begin.

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