In four decades at MGIMS, I served under most of the men and women who ran this place, and lived long enough in it to become a colleague, rather than a subordinate, to the last. Some I admired. Some I merely respected. A few I disagreed with loudly and publicly. All of them, in ways they probably did not intend, shaped the physician and administrator I became. This is not their official record — that exists in the files of the Kasturba Health Society. This is what I remember of them as people: their habits, their contradictions, their moments of grace and occasional failure.
When I arrived in Sevagram in 1982, MGIMS did not yet have a Dean. It had a Principal. The difference was not merely titular.
The man who made kheer — Dr. M.L. Sharma
Dr. M.L. Sharma was part of the original contingent from Nagpur that arrived when MGIMS was barely a year old. He joined in 1970, became Vice Principal in the same year, and Principal in 1974 when Dr. I.D. Singh departed. For the next decade, he was the trusted right hand of Dr. Sushila Nayar — attending her card sessions in the evenings, reciting the Sunderkand at her request, and walking with her in the evenings to keep her spirits steady.
He was not merely her administrator. He was her companion in the long project of building an institution from nothing. And he was her confidant — a man who sat close to power for twenty years and never once reached for it. In an institution where proximity to the founder was a currency many coveted, Sharma spent it on none of his own purposes. That, in my experience, is rarer than it sounds.
For twenty years, Sharma was my neighbour in Vivekanand Colony. A deeply religious Marwadi Brahmin, he performed puja every morning and made prasad with his own hands every fortnight — never failing to bring kheer for my family.
One Sunday, my mother was visiting from Wardha. We were talking in the backyard, in Marwadi, when Sharma overheard us from his kitchen window. He rushed out, his large eyes magnified behind thick spectacles. “Kalantri!” he exclaimed. “I thought you were Maharashtrian. But you are a Marwadi! And you speak it so well!” I laughed. “Sir, Marwadi is in my blood. How could I not?” He remained wide-eyed — shocked that he had mistaken a Marwadi for a Maharashtrian for so long.
He lived simply and without apology. Rented quarters all his life, no car, no scooter, no airplane journey. “I’ve never built a bungalow or boarded a plane,” he would say, with a quiet pride that was entirely genuine. “My students are my wealth.” In the lecture hall, he was a king — his pharmacology classes punctuated by perfectly timed jokes that students remembered decades later. His office was always open, grievances met with humour and empathy, mischief handled with the lightest possible hand.
He walked always a step behind Dr. Sushila Nayar, arms folded behind his back, matching her deliberate pace. It was not subservience. It was the most eloquent form of respect I have seen in an institution full of people performing respect.
The lone Sikh — Dr. K.S. Sachdeva
In 1983, Dr. Kharak Singh Sachdeva arrived in Sevagram not at the beginning of a career but well past its peak — fifty-eight years old, recently retired as Director of Medical Education and Research for Punjab, and expecting, one imagines, a quiet advisory role as Professor of Physiology. Sevagram had other plans.
Within months of his arrival, the management committee created the post of Dean — a position MGIMS had functioned without for fifteen years. On February 14, 1984, after appearing before a selection board that included Dr. Sushila Nayar and the Director General of Health Services, Sachdeva became the first Dean of MGIMS. He was the only candidate. Whether this was destiny or institutional convenience, I cannot say. Probably both.
He was a striking figure — tall, turbaned, salt-and-pepper beard, eyes large and piercing behind thick glasses. Anyone who entered his office would first meet that unwavering gaze, scanning them from head to toe. Then, in a quiet but firm voice: “Why have you come?” That question alone was enough to unsettle most visitors.
Where Sharma’s office had been warm and conversational, Sachdeva’s was formal and deliberate. He spoke little, kept his distance, and never indulged in gossip. He walked slowly, always alone, acknowledging those he passed with a graceful nod. Discipline was his religion — khadi was worn on campus, alcohol and non-vegetarian food remained absent, and the Friday all-religion prayer was attended without fail. He sat cross-legged on the floor and listened as Guru Nanak’s verses were recited. A request from Dr. Sushila Nayar, in his words, was never a request. It was an order.
It was Sachdeva who made me a Reader in 1986. He signed the papers without ceremony. That was his way.
The quiet reformer — Dr. J.S. Mathur
After the brief and troubled tenure of Dr. Prabhakar—a period marred by favoritism and a mark-sheet scandal that shook our institutional confidence—stability returned to Sevagram in 1991. It arrived in the form of Dr. J.S. Mathur, a gentle soul who had honed his academic career on the medical faculties of Kanpur and Meerut.
Mathur’s most significant administrative contribution was deceptively simple: he introduced double-blind coding to the Pre-Medical Test, erasing the scope for manipulation that had quietly plagued the examination system. It sounds like a dry technical fix. In practice, it was a bold declaration that the institution would finally be honest about how it selected its students.
He was also, quietly, a leveler. Where previous deans treated out-of-town examination supervision in Nagpur and Delhi as a privilege of rank reserved for senior professors, Mathur chose the juniors. He took Reddy, Ramji Singh, Deepak Kumar, Tyagi, Mehendale, and me. He extended to us the exact same courtesy he showed his peers. For those of us accustomed to being managed rather than consulted, his approach felt like a small revolution.
In 1992, Mathur appointed me Incharge of Medical Education—a decision that ruffled more than a few feathers. Within a month, a senior colleague stood up in a faculty meeting and objected sharply, complaining that seniors were being bypassed. I rose, delivered what I believed was a fitting rebuttal, and then, in a moment of sheer dramatic foolishness, resigned the post on the spot. The room fell dead silent. I stuck to my resignation. Mathur, to his credit, said nothing publicly. He understood, I suspect, that some battles must be fought and lost before they can be won differently.
Beyond the administrative corridors, he was my neighbor. He was the man who taught Ashwini and Amrita to fold their hands in a respectful Namaste when greeting elders. A diabetic who required insulin injections three times a day, he harbored a helpless, unconquered love for sweets. His solution was pragmatic: he simply dialed up his insulin dose before a heavy dinner and considered the matter settled.
Yet, the friction of institutional politics eventually cost him more than he let on. Not long after, he lost the deanship itself. He never discussed the details with me. With the dean’s office went his claim to the headship of Community Medicine, a chair he had retained even while running the institute. Once the deanship was gone, the institutional machinery did not allow him to simply step back into his old department. The department passed instead to Dr. B.S. Garg, a faculty member who had arrived from Jhansi on deputation only months earlier. Quietly, and without fanfare, Mathur left Sevagram for good.
The scientist — Dr. B.C. Harinath
Dr. Bhaskar Chenappa Harinath was our first non-medical Dean — a PhD biochemist from a village near Tirupati who had built, over three decades, one of the finest research departments in rural medical education in India. He joined MGIMS in 1970 and spent the next forty years guiding nineteen students through their PhDs, with a focus on filariasis and tuberculosis diagnostics that earned international recognition.
He had spent time at Cincinnati and Philadelphia, and was not reluctant to mention this. “When I was in Cincinnati…” or “As I told John Morris in Philadelphia…” were phrases that punctuated his conversation with a regularity that his colleagues found, depending on their patience, either charming or wearing. He built his department with Telugu-speaking faculty recruited from Sri Venkateswara University, and the cultural distance between his laboratory world and the Punjabi-speaking senior faculty was never entirely bridged. He was, in the end, more comfortable with a research paper than a committee meeting — which is not the worst thing to say of a man in academic medicine.
Every Dussera, Bhavana and I, with our children, would visit the Harinaths at home to pay our respects — a small Maharashtrian custom of the season. We carried leaves plucked from a local shami tree; my daughter Amrita, still a schoolgirl then, would paint them before we presented them to the couple, who accepted the offering with real courtesy every year. We would sit for half an hour, and for most of it Harinath and his wife would debate some entirely mundane household matter between themselves, both in the same Telugu-accented English, back and forth, until it felt less like conversation than a rally in a table-tennis match — the ball crossing the net, swift and unbroken, from one side to the other.
Our one real friction came later, when he introduced an immunological test for diagnosing tuberculosis that the evidence did not support — a test the Government of India eventually banned. I criticised it openly. He took it personally, convinced I was against him and his department, when in truth I had nothing against either; only the test. The friendship survived it. Years afterward, when he traded his laboratory for a stretch of land around Sevagram and began planting trees, I told him — and I meant it as pure affection — that having retired from Biochemistry, he had left Biochem behind and adopted Tree.
The physician’s physician — Dr. O.P. Gupta
Dr. O.P. Gupta came from Jhansi in 1971, rose through the Department of Medicine, served as Medical Superintendent, and eventually Dean. We worked alongside each other for years without a single disagreement — a record I cannot claim with anyone else in this list.
He was soft-spoken and concise. He never projected authority; he simply exercised it, quietly and without theatre. His most lasting reform was replacing long essay examinations in the Pre-Medical Test with Multiple Choice Questions — a change that introduced objectivity into a system that had previously left too much room for the examiner’s preferences. He was not a man who spoke of his contributions. He simply made them and moved on.
His self-effacing quality was genuine, not performed. In an institution full of people carefully managing their reputations, Gupta was the rare administrator who seemed genuinely indifferent to his own. I respected him more than I told him.
The Doon School microbiologist — Dr. P. Narang
Dr. P. Narang — who would later write me the letter appointing me Medical Superintendent — was a Microbiology professor of considerable polish and poise. Her father had taught in Dehradun; she had been educated at the Doon School, whose alumni included politicians, industrialists, and senior bureaucrats. Her English was impeccable. Her confidence, even when it did not quite show on her face, was never in doubt.
She had navigated her own early career as a young woman with children in an institution that did not always make that easy. She remembered it. As Dean, she took a quiet but firm position: that a young woman with small children should not be judged by her publication count in her first years of appointment. Let her settle. Let her find her footing. The papers will come. It was not policy. It was decency — and in an institution accustomed to measuring everything, it was not nothing.
She was not a risk-taker administratively, and she knew it. She worked within tradition, avoided radical departures, and maintained a warmth with students and faculty that made her genuinely beloved. In a list of leaders who were often distant or difficult, she was accessible. That is not a small thing in an institution as complex as ours.
Shakuntala Chhabra: The Obstetrician in Motion
For nearly three and a half decades, Dr. Shakuntala Chhabra and I shared a profound, often turbulent professional partnership. We marched together through the demanding trenches of academic medicine at Kasturba Hospital, navigating the exhausting rhythms of ward rounds, administrative crises, and institutional growth. She served with fierce dedication—stepping up as head of her department, medical superintendent, and eventually dean of the institute.
Yet, institutions have a peculiar way of testing human bonds. When she later took charge of a remote rural health initiative in the rugged Melghat region of Vidarbha—an ambitious fifty-bed hospital project backed by institutional ambition—friction took root. As medical superintendent, the harsh realities of geography landed squarely on my desk: young residents and faculty members balked at being deputed to a distant outpost lacking basic clinical stimulation.
Dr. Chhabra suspected obstruction. Our emails grew stiff and impersonal; administrative friction strained our decades-long camaraderie. It was a classic administrative crucible. Years later, when she moved to a short-lived corporate hospital project in Shirpur and subsequently to a medical college in Amravati, and as the burdens of our respective offices lifted, the bitterness evaporated. It was a quiet reminder that institutional chairs often test friendships, but once the titles fade, the underlying human connection mends itself.
To understand Dr. Chhabra, one must return to July 1975. She arrived in Sevagram mere days after the declaration of the National Emergency, half-expecting to find students in khadi dhotis studying under banyan trees. The rumors proved false. What she found instead was a rigorous, demanding rural medical mission.
Physically, she was thin and frail yet wire-drawn and intensely agile—a relentless bundle of energy whose spoken words invariably outpaced her organized thoughts. She was always full of ideas, some entirely impractical, and once an idea took hold, she would go to any length to implement it. Remaining unmarried despite her family’s wishes and living a stone’s throw from the hospital, she devoted her entire life to the institution. Unburdened by domestic responsibilities, she worked around the clock and expected her residents and faculty to match her unrelenting pace. She was a skilled surgeon and an astute diagnostician, earning renown across the region as an obstetrician and gynecologist one could implicitly trust.
To her residents, however, working under her was a masterclass in surgical precision shadowed by sheer terror. She demanded absolute perfection, and her residents often emerged from her grueling training exhausted, yet profoundly grateful for the rigorous clinical mastery they acquired. Her presence in our lives extended deeply into personal milestones. Both of my children, Ashwini and Amrita, were delivered by her. I am particularly indebted to her for Ashwini’s birth: when Bhavana endured prolonged labor, Dr. Chhabra stood vigil for thirty-six agonizing hours, guiding her through a normal delivery—a feat rarely attempted in today’s era of routine Caesarean sections.
Years later, when Amrita was a medical student caught up in a minor hostel ragging controversy, the disciplinary committee weighed severe penalties that threatened her academic standing. It was Dr. Chhabra, serving as dean, who intervened with balanced judgment, commuting the penalty to a token fine and two weeks of voluntary shramdan in the girls’ hostel.
Her legendary resilience faced its ultimate test on May 13, 2001. Awakened in the dead of night by an unknown creature bite at her residence, she insisted it was nothing, feeling no pain or swelling. I rushed to her home, bundled her into my car, and soon recognized the classical signs of a krait envenomation: ptosis, dysphagia, and progressive respiratory distress. Ten days of intensive anti-snake venom therapy and critical nursing care at Kasturba Hospital pulled her back from the brink—an episode she remembered with enduring gratitude.
Long before Sevagram, however, her life pivoted on a single decisive moment at Government Medical College, Nagpur. As an undergraduate in 1966, her sharp intellect and command over Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine had captivated Dr. G.S. Sainani, the legendary head of medicine, who appointed her batch monitor. He anticipated she would naturally choose internal medicine for her postgraduate studies. In 1972, standing outside the selection committee room, Dr. Sainani spoke for her when the Dean posed the opening question. “Medicine,” Dr. Sainani declared. “Block that seat.” She hesitated, drew a breath, and quietly altered the trajectory of her life. “No, Sir. I want Obstetrics and Gynaecology.” Medicine lost a brilliant diagnostician that day; the delivery suites gained an unmatched clinician.
Beyond her surgical skill, Dr. Chhabra cared deeply about building quiet places of safety. She started Aakaksha, a home that gives shelter to children of unwed mothers and helps place them with loving families. When her official duties ended, she did not retire to rest. Instead, she went to work on maternal health in remote tribal areas. Dr. Chhabra is a rare builder of institutions that history rarely repeats. Sevagram carries the lasting marks of her strict discipline, her sleepless nights, and her deep dedication to human life.
The outsider who stayed — Dr. B.S. Garg
Dr. B.S. Garg is a Jhansi man, and takes evident pride in the coincidence: his alma mater was founded the same year as MGIMS, and it too was a brainchild of Dr. Sushila Nayar. After his MD, he spent a year in Liverpool doing malaria research — a detail he still works into conversation with visitors, decades later — before returning to a post in Meerut.
In 1992, his teacher Dr. Mathur brought him to Sevagram for a workshop, as a participant. Garg liked what he saw, arranged a deputation from his own institute, and joined the Department of Community Medicine as faculty. Within months, Mathur was gone from the department’s helm — stripped of the deanship, and with it, unable to reclaim the headship he had also held. Garg inherited the department, and Mathur left the institute for good.
He did not arrive easily. Sevagram’s faculty spoke Marathi and Punjabi; Garg spoke neither, and made no early effort to. He was blunt, a little rude, entirely unconcerned with how his UP directness landed on other ears — an outsider by his own design as much as anyone else’s.
What changed his standing was a project called CLICKs, built with two residents from the 1993 batch he trusted completely — Anchita Khatri and Sherin Vareky. National and international grants followed, and the department Dr. Sushila Nayar had founded — already known for its focus on community health and rural care — grew larger under him than it had been under anyone since her. In 2007, Garg became Dean, a post he held for five years, arriving after Dr. Narang and leaving before Dr. K.R. Patond. He went on to become Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society, a post he still holds.
To be fair to him, I worked closely with him for five years, when he served as Dean and later as Secretary of the Society. Unlike the other Deans and Medical Superintendents who followed — whom he often treated like residents, sometimes with contempt, overriding their decisions and presenting them with a fait accompli — he never did that with me. I do not recall a single decision of mine that he overturned. He treated me with respect and courtesy throughout, and he still comes to me for his own health checkups, invariably following my advice.
He is nearing seventy-five now, tall and heavy-built, still carrying the same bluntness that unsettled Sevagram’s faculty forty years ago — only now it comes from the man at the top of the institution, not the newcomer at the bottom of it. Malaria in Liverpool is still, all these years later, the first story he tells a visitor.
The Marathi insistence — Dr. K.R. Patond
Dr. K.R. Patond and I go back further than his deanship. At GMC Nagpur, he was an intern in Medicine while I was a resident — a year my junior, learning the ward as I was leaving it. We enjoyed a good relationship then, and that ease survived his elevation.
He was quiet, introverted, and spoke almost exclusively in Marathi — not out of regional pride but out of a conviction that doctors working in rural Maharashtra must communicate in the language of their patients. The result was that faculty from Punjab, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu learned, gradually and sometimes reluctantly, to conduct their conversations with him in Marathi. He was also famously unable to maintain eye contact in conversation — a shyness so pronounced it became, among those who knew him, a kind of affectionate legend.
He had come from a small farming village near Akola, the son of a father who had studied only to the fourth standard. The distance between that village and the Dean’s office at MGIMS is not measured in kilometres.
It was a MUHS regulation — that one person could not hold two administrative posts simultaneously — that eventually moved the superintendency from Patond to me. He chose his surgical department over the superintendency. The superintendency, as I have described elsewhere in this memoir, landed on my table.
The boy from the remand home — Dr. Nitin Gangane
The last Dean I worked under was the first I had taught. Nitin Gangane was my student before he was my colleague, and my colleague for many years before he was my Dean. He was born at Kasturba Hospital in 1961 — in the very institution he would one day lead — delivered by a woman who later became Secretary of the Kasturba Health Society. Even his birth, it seems, was plotted by Sevagram.
His father was a freedom fighter from the Hyderabad Liberation Movement who had abandoned his education at sixteen to go underground, eventually settling in Sevagram as a follower of Vinoba Bhave and Baba Amte. The son inherited the stubbornness.
On June 26, 1976 — the first anniversary of the Emergency — a seventeen-year-old Nitin attended a resistance meeting in Wardha. The police raided it. He was arrested and sent to a remand home under the Juvenile Act, where he remained until October 1977, completing his eleventh and twelfth standards while in detention, attending college during the day and returning each night. The Emergency was lifted in March 1977. Nitin stayed in the remand home for six months after it ended, because the wheels of the Juvenile Act grind independently of political events.
That experience produced a man who was constitutionally incapable of accepting authority he considered illegitimate. He was a leftist, an anti-establishment activist, and — on the occasions we disagreed, which were not infrequent — a formidable opponent. During the worst months of Covid-19, our arguments were sharp and sometimes public. But he gave me a free hand to run the hospital, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt when I could.
He became Dean in 2018 after pursuing the position with the same tenacious legal persistence he had applied to everything since the remand home. He was the first MGIMS alumnus to hold the post — leading the institution where his life had literally begun.
We both resigned our administrative posts within a fortnight of each other in January 2023. Neither of us, I think, was entirely sorry.
The reluctant conscience — Dr. A.K. Shukla
Dr. A.K. Shukla, who followed Gangane, belongs to this chapter differently than the rest. I never served under him — by the time he became Dean, I was no longer Medical Superintendent, and our years overlapping at MGIMS were as colleagues, not as officer and subordinate. But four decades under the same roof leave their own record.
Dr. A.K. Shukla trained in ophthalmology in Delhi and arrived at MGIMS in 1992, and has not left since. His real calling turned out to be a stretch of rural Wardha rather than a hospital eye ward: for more than a decade, his team has driven into remote villages, screened old men and women going blind from cataracts, and driven them back to Kasturba Hospital and home again once the surgery was done. The visual impairment linked to cataracts around Wardha district has measurably fallen because of it.
He married soon after arriving — Dr. Smita Singh, his junior from Delhi — in a wedding organised by a handful of friends from the staff club, with none of the excess a big Delhi wedding would have demanded.
What I remember more than the wedding is the night Abhinav was born. It was August 1996. Smita, full term, was rushed in at midnight from a house barely three hundred metres away, just as the sky broke open. The power went with it. Dr. Chhabra decided on a caesarean, which meant crossing the open corridor between the labour room and the operation theatre — a hundred metres of driving rain. Ramji Singh and I walked her across ourselves, torches raised, in the years before anyone carried a phone. Inside the theatre, even the torches gave out. The section was finished by candlelight, thunder overhead, all of Sevagram dark around us. Three decades later, whenever the Shuklas and I meet as neighbours, that night is still what we return to.
He is intelligent, well read, and was, for most of his career, difficult to categorise. I first understood this in the early nineties, not long after Dean Mathur made me teacher-in-charge of students — a decision the senior faculty resented openly. Dr. V.N. Chaturvedi, the ENT head, stood up at a faculty meeting and said as much: seniority, in his view, was being bypassed. I rose, said I would resign on the spot, and did, right there on the stage. Shukla — a man I barely knew, and no particular friend of mine — got up next, walked to the podium, and defended me in front of everyone.
For years after that, he was Sevagram’s resident leftist: a trade union man who fought management on behalf of the faculty and the Class II and Class IV staff, and never once, in four decades, owned a scooter or a car. He walked everywhere, a stocky man in thick spectacles with a bundle of files wedged under one arm, and we called him — not unkindly — Shukla Baboo.
Age has softened that edge. On the other side of the table now, he has become the kind of Dean who persuades rather than confronts — which is just as well, since he inherited the deanship at a hard moment, with NEET upending admissions, Dhirubhai gone, and MLAs and journalists taking turns attacking the institute, sometimes from the floor of the legislative assembly itself.
He has a few days left before retirement. What comes after — and what several decades of insulin, three times a day, will make of the years beyond it — is something the rest of us are watching, the way you watch anyone you have known too long to simply wave off.
Looking back across four decades, what strikes me is less the variety of administrative styles than the consistency of the underlying challenge: running a complex institution in a resource-scarce setting, keeping it honest, and maintaining its connection to the patients it was built to serve. Some of my Deans did this with warmth, some with discipline, some with quiet stubbornness, and at least one with a combativeness that never entirely left him.
They were my neighbours, my mentors, my occasional adversaries, my colleague at the end of it all — and, in ways none of us planned, the people who made me whoever it is I became at MGIMS.
The names on the Dean’s door change. The spirit of Sevagram, built from rural service and academic rigour and the particular idiosyncrasies of the people drawn to this place, does not.