But nobody called him that. From the time he was old enough to remember, friends, neighbours, and the girls in the lane outside his home in Wardha had called him Girishbhai — as is the custom in Gujarati households, where affection attaches itself to a name before the name has quite settled on a person. His father’s close friend had begun using it casually, early on, and it stuck with the particular permanence of nicknames given in childhood, before anyone thinks to object.
The surname came later, and carried a different weight. His grandfather had migrated from Surendranagar in Gujarat to a small town called Mule in what is now Gadchiroli district — arriving, as many migrants do, with almost nothing and with everything still to prove. In his memory, and as a tribute to the land that had received him, the family renamed themselves Mulkar. It was not an erasure but a declaration: this is where we belong now; this place made us.
So Pravin Shah became Girish Mulkar — officially, gradually, without drama. By the time he reached Sevagram in 1969, the old name had been so thoroughly replaced that even he rarely thought of it. He was Girishbhai, and then he was Dr. Mulkar, and those two names between them contain the whole story: the Gujarati boy from Wardha who became a village doctor who became an industrial physician who became, over thirty-two years in a cement plant in Chhattisgarh, something harder to name and more important than any of those titles.
He was born on 1 March 1948, the son of Principal M.M. Shah — a scholar of economics with a PhD in labour and urban problems from Pune, who had come to Wardha to succeed Shriman Narayan as Principal of G.S. Commerce College. It was a household where learning was the furniture of daily life, where books were present before children were old enough to read them, and where the question of what you would become when you grew up was taken seriously from an early age.
Girish, for most of his school years, had a clear answer to that question. He would serve in the army.
He studied at Buniyadi Vidyalaya in Wardha until Class 4, then moved to Craddock High School for Class 5 through 11. Some of his schoolmates — Ullas Jajoo, Abhay Bang, Prasad Trivedi, Shyam Babhulkar — would later find their own ways into medicine. At the time, none of them were thinking about stethoscopes. Girish was thinking about parades.
From Parades to Physiology
He joined the NCC and took to it with the particular enthusiasm of a boy who finds, in drill and discipline, a shape for energy that has no other obvious outlet. By his early teens, he was commanding a troop of forty cadets on the dusty grounds of Wardha — Saavdhan! Vishram! — baton in hand, khaki shorts, the dry heat of Vidarbha pressing down from above. He earned the rank of battalion sergeant. He represented Wardha at the Republic Day celebrations in Delhi. He wanted to wear a uniform for the rest of his life.
Then his father began to speak.
He did not insist. He was not that kind of man. He spoke often, and patiently, in the quiet register of someone who has thought carefully about what he wants to say and has decided that the argument will work better if it never becomes an argument. “You want to serve the nation,” he said, more than once. “So do I. But there are many ways to serve. A doctor in a village cures not just illness but despair. That too is desh seva.”
The words took root slowly, the way his father probably knew they would. Girish did not abandon his ambitions so much as redirect them — from the uniform of a soldier to the khadi of a doctor in training, which was, at Sevagram, its own kind of discipline.
He had not scored high enough for Government Medical College, Nagpur, or Indira Gandhi Medical College. He enrolled at Janaki Devi Bajaj College of Science, completed his B.Sc., and waited. His father knew Dr. Sushila Nayar personally. When the advertisement for MGIMS appeared in 1969, he obtained the form, filled it in, and nudged his son toward Sevagram.
The interview lasted five minutes. Fifty-five years later, Girish could not recall a single question that was asked. What he remembered was the panel, the room, and the quality of attention in it — and then, the next day, his name on the merit list.
The Three-Way Room
He arrived in Sevagram and was given a room shared with Shyam Babhulkar and Shivaji Deshmukh — Bhau, as everyone already called him. It was a three-way arrangement that would produce, over the following months, the kind of friendship that forms when people are young and in a constrained space together and have no option but to become essential to one another. The three of them studied together, ate together, argued and reconciled and argued again. Two years later, when single-seater rooms became available in the new hostel block, the allocation of separate quarters felt, briefly, like a loss.
He wore khadi every day — not reluctantly, but without internal debate. His father would have accepted nothing else, and in any case the wearing of khadi at Sevagram was not the imposition it might have seemed to students arriving from more comfortable circumstances. For a boy raised in a household shaped by Gandhian Wardha, it was simply what clothing looked like.
The five years of MBBS at Sevagram were, as he understood later, less a medical education than a re-education in what medicine was for. The village postings, the health camps, the encounters with farmers who had walked three hours for a consultation — these were not supplements to the curriculum. They were the curriculum. The Physiology lectures and the Anatomy practicals gave him the science; the red-earthed lanes of Wardha district gave him the reason.
He completed his MBBS and did short stints in surgery and paediatrics. He spent a year in private practice in Raipur. It did not suit him. The transactional texture of a private clinic — the arithmetic of consultation fees, the managed distance between doctor and patient — was at odds with something in him that Sevagram had either placed or uncovered. He was not certain which.
Then came Baikunth.
Basant Kumar Birla’s cement factory at Baikunth — then called Century Cement, later renamed as Ultratech Cement Limited, Baikunth Cement Works — was looking for doctors. Both Girish and his wife, a graduate of Indira Gandhi Medical College, Nagpur, were offered positions: she as Medical Superintendent, he as Chief Medical Officer.
Neither of them knew industrial medicine. Sevagram had not taught occupational health or labour law or the particular epidemiology of a cement plant, where silicosis and pneumoconiosis move through a workforce the way any communicable disease moves through a community, invisibly and with long incubation. They would have to learn it from the work itself.
What they arrived to find in Baikunth was a settlement in active conflict. The factory had its share of unrest — strikes, labour disputes, the sedimented mistrust of workers who had reason to believe that management did not see them clearly. The unions and management were permanently at odds, each side treating the other as an obstacle. The medical staff, in this arrangement, could easily have become management’s instrument.
Girish had a different idea.
He proposed health camps in the surrounding villages. “Let us screen people,” he said, “talk to them, treat them. Let them know we care.” Management was sceptical. The villagers were hostile, they said; one mistake and it could backfire; the factory had enough problems without creating new ones in the surrounding landscape.
He asked for one chance.
The first camp was tentative. Villagers came hesitantly, watching the doctors the way people watch anyone who arrives with something to offer when experience has taught them that offers carry conditions. Blood pressures were checked, medicines distributed, questions about nutrition answered without condescension. His wife spoke to women about immunisation and family health — conversations that most medical visits in those villages had never made room for.
The camp worked. Word moved through the surrounding area in the way that trust, once established, travels faster than distrust. More camps followed. Ten villages were eventually adopted, with the sarpanch informed in advance, health care made regular and reliable rather than occasional and contingent. Radio talks went out — Girish’s voice over the airwaves, discussing silicosis, hygiene, pneumoconiosis, the invisible dangers of the work the men around him did every day.
The labour unrest did not end overnight. But something changed in the register of the conflict. A doctor who comes into the village and sits with the farmer’s wife and weighs the children and returns next month is not management’s instrument. He is something else — something that labour unions do not quite know how to oppose, because opposition requires an argument, and generosity does not give you one.
Over thirty-two years at Baikunth, Girish Mulkar learned more about humanity, he said, than any textbook had managed to teach him. He completed a diploma in Personnel Management. He counselled workers, negotiated between factions, sat at tables where the conversation was about wages and safety and dignity, and brought to those tables the particular quality of attention that Sevagram had trained him in: the willingness to hear what was actually being said, rather than what the situation suggested he should hear.
There are four brothers and a sister in the Mulkar family. The eldest brother became the principal of an agricultural college. Another became a professor at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi. The third rose to prominence in the corporate world. The sister settled in Washington, D.C. Girish was the only doctor among them — the one who took his father’s argument about the village and the stethoscope and spent a working life proving that it held.
When he thinks of Sevagram now, he does not think first of the lecture halls or the examination results. He thinks of the bhajans sung in the evening, cross-legged in the Ashram. The village cleaning drives. The professors who treated students not as an audience for their knowledge but as people in formation. The insistence, woven into every aspect of life in that place, that medicine without service is merely technique.
He had arrived in Sevagram wanting to command parades. He left understanding that the harder discipline — the one that requires more patience, more attention, more willingness to be changed by what you encounter — is the work of sitting with a person who is ill and making yourself genuinely useful to them.
His father had been right, as fathers sometimes are when they speak quietly and wait.
Desh seva took many forms. In Baikunth, it took the form of a health camp on a hostile frontier, and a doctor who showed up again the following month, and the month after that, until the hostility had nothing left to sustain it.
Dr. Girish Mulkar completed his MBBS from MGIMS, Sevagram, with the inaugural batch of 1969. He and his wife — both doctors — served for thirty-two years as medical officers at Century Cement (later Ultratech Cement Limited, Baikunth Cement Works) in Chhattisgarh, where he established community health programmes across ten surrounding villages and held the position of Chief Medical Officer. He lives in retirement, carrying, as he has always said, Sevagram not as a memory but as a way of life.