Twenty-Seven Doctorates

How many PhDs should a medical college produce across fifty-six batches? Two hundred? Fifty? None?

At the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in Sevagram, the answer is precisely twenty-seven.

That number is modest, but it is quietly intriguing. Since sixty young men and women arrived in August 1969 to inaugurate a bold experiment in rural medical education, nearly four thousand alumni have passed through Sevagram’s quiet campus. Among them, twenty-seven chose to augment the stethoscope with a research doctorate. Who were they? What drew them toward basic science, public health and biomedical engineering rather than the well-trodden avenues of clinical practice? And what does this small fraction reveal about the intellectual life of a medical college built on Gandhian ideals?

To understand the count, one must return to Sevagram’s origins.

Dr Sushila Nayar, once Gandhi’s personal physician, conceived MGIMS as a centenary project with a mandate as radical as it was simple: train doctors where most Indians lived, far from the polished teaching hospitals of Bombay and Delhi. It was an ambitious experiment, and its path was rarely smooth. When the question of introducing postgraduate education later brought disagreement, student unrest, and heated tempers outside the Dean’s office, Sushila Nayar eventually relented, and specialty training took root.

Decades later, these twenty-seven doctorates offer a revealing window into how far that experiment travelled. Some graduates stayed close to their roots; others carried a medical education forged in a small village in central India to laboratories across the globe — from Wardha to Oxford.

Mapping the journeys

MGIMS began with sixty students a year. A few years later, the intake rose to sixty-five and, in 2012, to a hundred. If we look only at batches up to 2010, we have a group of 2,654 graduates — doctors who have had at least fifteen years in which to pursue a PhD.

Twenty-seven of them did.

That works out to about 1.0 percent, or roughly one in every 98 graduates.

MGIMS, batches 1969–2010	Number
Graduates	2,654
PhD holders	27
Proportion	1.02% (about 1 in 98)
MBBS → PhD directly	6
Medical postgraduate degree → PhD	21

The number is small, but it is not in itself a criticism of MGIMS. Most doctors do not pursue a PhD. Medicine is, after all, largely about using knowledge rather than creating it, and few clinical careers require a doctor to spend several more years learning how to do independent research.

What makes these twenty-seven interesting is not simply that they earned doctorates, but the very different roads they took to get there.

Six did not complete a conventional MD, MS or DNB before beginning their PhD. Saranya Sridhar, from the 1997 batch, took the most unusual route. After his MBBS at Sevagram, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and completed a D.Phil in Medicine, without first doing a medical residency.

Punitee Garyali and Rishi Adhikary took a different road, leaving conventional clinical training for doctoral work in biomedical engineering. Ameet Chimote and Ram Prakash Narayanan entered research without a clinical postgraduate degree. Meena Jotwani is a slightly different case: she completed a diploma at MGIMS but did not obtain an MD or MS before her PhD.

The other eighteen followed the more familiar path: an MD, MS or DNB first, and the PhD later. Some moved into research soon after their postgraduate training. Others returned to study after years of clinical practice.

There was, in other words, no single road from the Sevagram stethoscope to the research laboratory.

Where did they go — and when?

Where these doctorates were earned tells its own story.

Eight alumni went abroad — to Oxford, Berkeley, Flinders, Umeå in Sweden, Indiana, Wright State, the Université Catholique de Louvain and, in Vijay Kumar Chattu’s case (1995), the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica.

Five stayed close to home, earning their PhDs at the Datta Meghe Institute of Higher Education and Research in Wardha, only a 20-minute drive from Sevagram.

Two never left Sevagram at all, though by different routes. Amit Kant Singh (1994) completed both his MD in Physiology and his PhD at MGIMS itself — the only alumnus on record to finish his entire postgraduate training without leaving the campus. Rahul Narang (1987) also did his doctoral research at MGIMS, though his degree was awarded by Nagpur University, to which the college was then affiliated.

The others went to institutions including AIIMS Delhi, IIT Bombay, Banaras Hindu University, a management institute in Mumbai, and Tripura University.

Two alumni went further than a single doctorate. Bajrangprasad Pandey, from MGIMS’s second batch, earned two PhDs from Banaras Hindu University — one in Pharmacology in 1989, studying the anti-asthmatic immunopharmacology of Picrorhiza kurroa, and a second in 1997 in Dravyaguna, the Ayurvedic discipline of materia medica, examining the history of ancient medical systems with a focus on neuromedicine. Avinash Shankar (1973) also earned two doctorates, one from AIIMS Delhi and the other from SRM Medical College, Chengalpattu.

Twenty-one of the twenty-seven also hold a conventional clinical postgraduate degree — MD, MS or DNB — earned separately from the PhD. MPH, MSc and other non-doctoral qualifications are not included here, though several alumni hold them in addition.

The distribution across the batches is even more striking.

The 1990s produced thirteen of the twenty-seven PhD holders — just under half — from admissions between 1992 and 1999. The batch sizes were no larger than those of the preceding decades. Yet something happened in those years that produced far more doctorates than before.

The 1970s and 1980s produced five apiece; add Shiwaji Deshmukh, from the college’s very first batch in 1969, and the first two decades together account for eleven.

And then comes the gap. Between Punitee Garyali’s 1999 batch and Rishi Adhikary’s 2006 batch, 388 students graduated from MGIMS, and except Vikash Keshri from the 2002 batch, not one appears in the present PhD record.

There is no obvious administrative explanation. It may simply be the uneven rhythm of individual lives. Research does not arrive on a timetable; sometimes an institution opens a door, and sometimes a person has to find one alone.

View the complete PhD alumni list and source data in Google Sheets

MGIMS alumni who earned PhDs

Batch	Alumnus	PhD institution	Country	Year
1969	Shiwaji Deshmukh	NITIE (now IIM Mumbai)	India	1985
1970	Bajrangprasad Pandey	Institute of Medical Sciences, Banaras Hindu University (BHU) (Pharmacology); Faculty of Ayurveda, Banaras Hindu University (BHU) (Dravyaguna) — two PhDs	India	1989; 1997
1971	Dilip Gode	Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha	India	Not recorded
1973	Avinash Shankar	All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi; SRM Medical College, Chengalpattu — two PhDs	India	Not recorded
1978	Ajaykumar Sahni	All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi	India	1993
1978	Nitin Gangane	Umeå University	Sweden	2018
1980	Aruna Vishwanath Vanikar	King George’s Medical University, Lucknow	India	2015
1985	Meena Jotwani	Datta Meghe University, Wardha	India	Not recorded
1987	Rahul Narang	Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram (research at MGIMS)	India	2007
1988	Anant Mohan	All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi	India	2018
1988	Shalini Singh	Not recorded	—	Not recorded
1992	Mihir Wechalekar	Flinders University	Australia	2016
1992	Rajnish Joshi	University of California, Berkeley — School of Public Health	United States	2009
1993	Ameet Chimote	Wright State University	United States	2009
1993	Shweta Chawla	Swami Vivekanand Subharti University, Meerut	India	2023
1993	Swanand Pathak	Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha	India	Not recorded
1994	Amit Kant Singh	Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram	India	2009
1994	Monika Lamba Saini	Université catholique de Louvain	Belgium	2016
1995	Vijay Kumar Chattu	University for Peace (UPEACE)	Costa Rica	Not recorded
1997	Arpita Jaiswal Singam	Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha	India	2018
1997	Ram Prakash Narayanan	The University of Manchester	United Kingdom	2013
1997	Saranya Sridhar	University of Oxford	United Kingdom	2007
1998	Shib Sekhar Datta	Tripura University / Agartala Government Medical College	India	2023
1999	Punitee Garyali	Indiana University	United States	2014
2002	Vikash Ranjan Keshri	University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney)	Australia	2023
2006	Rishi Adhikary	Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay)	India	2017
2008	Preetam Salunkhe Roy	Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha	India	2025

Beyond the ledger

The numbers tell us where the twenty-seven PhDs came from. They do not tell us why these doctors chose research, or how they found their way into it.

India has no close equivalent of the American MD-PhD pathway, in which medical students enter a funded, structured programme designed from the beginning to train both doctors and researchers. At India’s leading medical institutions, including AIIMS, PGIMER, CMC Vellore and JIPMER, there are strong research programmes and doctoral opportunities, but no comparable national pathway routinely takes a medical student from the MBBS into a combined clinical and research career.

The usual Indian route is less tidy: complete an MD or MS, spend some years in practice or teaching, and then decide to pursue a PhD. Sometimes there is a mentor to open the way; sometimes a fellowship provides the opportunity; sometimes the doctor has to build the path almost alone. Programmes such as the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, established in 2008, have helped make that journey easier by supporting clinicians who want to develop independent research careers after postgraduate medical training.

Which MGIMS alumni have advanced their global health training through prestigious Fogarty Fellowships?

And this brings us to the harder question: what does a PhD actually tell us?

A PhD tells us that a person has spent several years pursuing a defined research question under supervision, and has completed the work required for a doctoral degree. That is no small achievement. But the degree is not a certificate of lifelong curiosity, continuing productivity, or influence on a field.

Our spreadsheet counts qualifications, not contributions. It cannot tell us which of these twenty-seven continued to publish for decades, obtained research funding, changed clinical practice, or mentored the next generation of researchers. Nor can it tell us who completed a doctorate and then returned to full-time clinical work. Both are possible. The ledger cannot distinguish between them.

We live in an era when scores of private, for-profit medical colleges compete to produce PhDs by the hundred. Some now require every faculty member to earn one within a fixed number of years. The reason is rarely knowledge. It is image, accreditation scores, and a better-looking prospectus. The research question is often an afterthought. Data are collected carelessly. Ethical review is a formality. Faculty and institution alike are content, so long as a long line of graduates crosses the convocation stage each year in doctoral gowns.

MGIMS’s twenty-seven stand in deliberate contrast to that arithmetic.

The spark in Sevagram

Twenty-seven doctorates in fifty-six years do not amount to a research culture. Nor should they. A medical school’s first obligation is to produce doctors who can apply what is already known, safely and well. That was the promise with which MGIMS began, and it remains at the heart of Sevagram.

But the twenty-seven tell us something quieter.

Despite the pull of clinical practice, and without a formal pathway designed to lead them into research, a small but persistent curiosity kept resurfacing on this rural campus in Maharashtra. Every few years, one or two graduates stepped away from the familiar path and asked a question for which there was no ready answer. Some travelled to Oxford or Berkeley; others found their way to laboratories closer to home. A few began their research journey almost immediately after MBBS.

Twenty-seven doctorates do not prove that MGIMS has built a research culture. They suggest something more modest, and perhaps more interesting: the spark was there. It appeared only occasionally, and often without much institutional help. But it kept appearing. A handful of graduates at a time decided that knowing what was already known was not quite enough — and went looking for something new.

Just last night, three separate WhatsApp messages popped up on my phone. Nalin Chaudhary (1980 batch), Amol Dongre (1993 batch), and Aparna Govil (1996 batch) wrote to share that they had either submitted or were preparing to defend their doctoral dissertations. The ledger, it seems, is never truly closed—I will gladly open it again the moment their PhDs are conferred.