He arrived on 1 October 1978, still pale from a prolonged bout of viral hepatitis, three days after the rest of his batch had settled in. The orientation camp at Gandhi Ashram was almost over. Dussera was ten days away. He was eighteen years old, turning nineteen in two days — his first birthday away from home, in a place he had chosen largely because one woman had described it as somewhere that would shape not just his career but his character.

He lay on his hostel cot that first night, listening to the ceiling fan, and wondered — as young people do when they are far from home and slightly unwell — who would remember that his birthday was in two days.

What he did not know was that October, in the class of 1978, belonged to the batch. Vijendra Chouhan had celebrated his birthday the day before Gautam arrived. Puneet Sahgal, Sanjay Marwah, and Sanjay Potdar were all born on the 19th. Dilip Kasare followed on the 20th. Angeli Dhar rounded off the month on the 27th. October had conspired, without anyone organising it, to welcome him in its own way.

The loneliness he had been bracing for did not arrive. His batchmates had simply made room for him — in their routines, in their laughter, in the small topography of friendship that had already begun to form in the three weeks before his arrival. Someone said, grinning: You missed the Gandhian bootcamp. Welcome to Sevagram anyway.

He smiled, still catching his breath, and stayed.

The Father’s Lesson

He was born on 3 October 1959 in Mumbai, into a family where medicine was not merely a profession but a philosophy of action.

His father, Dr. Vinod G. Daftary, had begun as a professor of pathology at Grant Medical College. But the laboratory and the lecture hall were not, for him, the final form of what a doctor could do. In 1972, when most physicians measured achievement by the quality of their consulting rooms, Vinod Daftary stepped into pharmaceutical manufacturing and research, founding Bharat Serums and Vaccines Ltd. He was not a businessman who happened to know medicine. He was a scientist who believed that healing could happen on a scale that no individual clinician could reach — that if you could produce the right serum in sufficient quantity and at sufficient quality, you could change the health of a nation without ever meeting a patient.

Gautam grew up watching this. Not as doctrine — his father did not lecture — but as demonstration. The company, the work, the particular seriousness with which his father approached problems of access: these were the environment of his childhood, the way a family’s ethos always is, present before it is understood.

His brother Bharat joined their father early, taking charge of sales and marketing. Around the family table, medicine pulsed. There were twelve or fifteen Daftary doctors in the extended family. When the time came for Gautam to choose a direction, there was no real uncertainty. The only question was where to train.

The Application

He did not cast a wide net.

He applied only to MGIMS.

The nudge came from Sarlaben Parekh, a family friend and trustee of the Kasturba Health Society. She described Sevagram not as a medical college in the conventional sense but as a place of values — somewhere the curriculum included the community, the village, the patient who arrived on foot and could not afford most of what medicine had to offer. It will shape not just your career, she said, but your character. Gautam heard this, and something in him recognised it as the right kind of challenge.

He sat for the entrance examination at the Nagpur centre. The Gandhian paper required preparation, and he prepared — reading, thinking, taking it seriously in the way that the institution’s founders had intended. As it turned out, he was a Central Government nominee, which meant the formal interview was replaced by a brief conversation with Professor M.L. Sharma, the Dean. It was not a grilling; it was a conversation. An approving nod, and the door to a very different kind of medical education opened.

October’s Batch

South Bombay had not prepared him for Sevagram, and he knew it. The city he had grown up in moved at a pace and density that Sevagram simply was not. The air here smelled of earth and neem. The sounds were the sounds of a village settling into evening — mynas, ceiling fans, the distant punctuation of a bell.

And then there were the people. Raju Shah and Prithvi Ranglani became fast friends within the first weeks. Bindu Ballani, a year junior, tied a rakhi on his wrist and became his sister for the years that followed. The 1979 batch — Anil Ballani, Narayan Vinchurkar, Girish Muzumdar — also became part of the circle, the way circles expand in places where the physical space is small and the intensity of shared experience is large.

Babulal’s canteen was the gathering point of the quotidian — tea, shared conversation, the small relief of something warm and familiar in an otherwise unfamiliar day. Long walks to the Adhyayan Mandir. Power cuts, when the campus went dark and conversation filled the space that electricity had vacated. The village of Kutki, six kilometres from Sevagram, which the batch had adopted: mud pathways, no street lights, a primary school that stopped at the seventh grade, not a single latrine in the whole settlement. He walked its lanes with a stethoscope around his neck and questions forming in his mind that lectures had not yet answered.

The questions were: why here, why this, why these people and not others? Why did access to the most basic elements of health — clean water, sanitation, immunisation — remain rationed by geography and poverty? He did not have the answers yet. But the questions had taken root.

What the Villages Taught

The immersion into community medicine at MGIMS was not supplementary. It was structural, woven into the MBBS in a way that prevented the student from treating the village as backdrop. Kutki was curriculum.

He went door to door. He sat under neem trees and took histories from women who explained their symptoms in Marathi he was still learning. He saw how tuberculosis moved through a family because the house was too small and the ventilation was too poor and no one had explained contagion. He saw how a child’s weight could be read as a graph of its household’s fortunes over the preceding months. He saw how far a woman would walk, with a sick child on her back, because the nearest health worker was too far and too infrequent.

He was, as his father had been before him, a man being shown that the scale of medicine’s obligation was larger than any individual could address from a consulting room. The lesson was not delivered as a lecture. It arrived through his feet and his eyes and the conversations that took place in huts with low doorways, in the particular light of a Vidarbha afternoon.

The Career That Followed

After MBBS, the path that had been forming for two decades became explicit. He joined Bharat Serums and Vaccines Ltd., the company his father had built, and spent the decades that followed asking, in industrial form, the same questions Kutki had raised.

The company focused where help was needed most, not where profit was most reliable. Anti-rabies immunoglobulin, at sufficient scale and quality to make prevention genuinely possible. Anti-snake venom tailored to the snakes of India, not the snakes of Europe. Anti-Thymocyte Globulin — India’s first indigenous version, reducing transplant costs to a fraction of what imported product had required. Liposomal Amphotericin, which became a lifeline during the mucormycosis crisis. Therapies for Kala Azar, for aplastic anaemia, for sepsis — not because these conditions attracted research investment, but because they killed people who deserved the same attention as people whose diseases attracted research investment.

SIRO Clinpharm, the clinical research organisation he helped build, set new standards for ethical, rigorous trials in India. Harvard took notice. The work was described as a model of frugal innovation — doing more with less, for more people, in more places.

His father had once said, watching the lab team: You may not meet the patient, but your work must meet their needs. Gautam had spent his career trying to honour that.

The Circle

Over four decades after the October batch settled into Sevagram, they still meet. On WhatsApp, in person when they can manage it, in the particular ease of people whose shared history is long enough that they do not need to explain themselves to each other.

He thinks of the first night on the hostel cot, the ceiling fan, the quiet worry about who would remember his birthday. He thinks of Raju Shah grinning, Bindu tying a thread around his wrist, the long walks to Adhyayan Mandir, the power cuts when the dark brought conversations that the light had not.

He thinks of Kutki. The low doorways and the questions that walked in with him and did not leave.

The orientation camp he missed did not, in the end, matter. The shaping that Sarlaben Parekh had promised happened anyway — in the wards, in the village, in the decades of work that followed, in the quiet insistence that medicine meant meeting the needs of the patient even when you would never meet the patient.

Sevagram gave him his grounding. He spent the rest of his life building on it.

Dr. Gautam Daftary completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the class of 1978. He went on to lead Bharat Serums and Vaccines Ltd., developing life-saving biologics including anti-rabies immunoglobulin, anti-snake venom, and India’s first indigenous Anti-Thymocyte Globulin. He also founded SIRO Clinpharm, a clinical research organisation. He lives in Mumbai.