“I met the right people, at the right places and at the right time, and that has made all the difference.”
Sanjay Gadre chose Rajkot because it chose him back. He had trained in Nagpur, found his surgical footing in the villages of Gujarat’s Anand district, and acquired skills in Japan that most ophthalmologists in India had not yet heard of. When the time came to settle, friends told him to pick a city that had given him room to grow. He picked Rajkot, in Saurashtra — a place that embraced a man with what he admits is a difficult surname to pronounce — and he has been there ever since, building one of the region’s leading eye hospitals from the ground up, one saved retina at a time.
The Army Major’s Son
He was born in Nagpur into an army family, a world of transfers and new schools every few years. He attended Central School and Hadas High School, Nagpur — where Pratibha Amin, Maya Wanjari, Tara Bhat, Sanjeev Chandorkar, and Rajeev Laul were classmates — and then the Institute of Science before joining Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1973.
After graduation he completed his internship at a primary health centre in Deolapar, 67 kilometres northwest of Nagpur, alongside Sanjeev Chandorkar, Rajendra Phadke, Rajeev Biyani, Pradeep Desai, and Avinash Deshmukh. House jobs in gynaecology and ophthalmology followed at GMC. He enrolled in the Diploma in Ophthalmology, then moved to Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Sevagram, as a senior resident for six months. In 1981 he returned to GMC Nagpur to complete his MS (Ophthalmology), finishing in 1983 under the guidance of Dr. S.K. Dhawan.
The Making of an Eye Surgeon
His first posting after post-graduation was at Shri Ravishankar Maharaj Eye Hospital in Chikhodra, a village in Anand district, Gujarat. He was the only doctor. He had a free hand. He operated as many cases a day as the work demanded. It was the kind of training no residency can replicate — volume, variety, and the pressure of being the only person in the room who could fix what was broken.
His goal, through all of it, was vitreoretinal surgery. He secured a fellowship at Dr. Nagpal’s Retina Foundation and Eye Research Center in Ahmedabad. In 1990, he went to Japan, where he trained under Dr. Momosi and learned phacoemulsification techniques from Tokyo University and Kobe Kanagawa Eye Clinic. He returned to India with skills that barely existed in the country outside a handful of tertiary centres.
He moved to Rajkot in 1988, working initially at a trust hospital for a salary of Rs 2,500 a month. He saved. He borrowed from a bank. He bought a dilapidated old house and rebuilt it as a modern eye hospital. By 1994, Gadre Eye Care Hospital had opened its doors. He introduced phacoemulsification to Saurashtra. He raised the standard of eye care in the region by doing the surgery, year after year, to the standard he had been taught in Japan and refined on subsequent visits to the United States.
The Next Generation
His wife Madhuri — an MA in English Literature from Nagpur’s Lady Amritbai Daga College — has been, by his own account, the person who made all of it possible. While he built the practice, she held the household. Their daughters grew up in Rajkot and found their own directions: Devyani became a corneal surgeon who joined her father in practice, married to Dr. Dhruv Wohra, a vitreoretinal specialist — the two of them together now covering the full spectrum of surgical ophthalmology; Sae went into banking and is a product manager at ICICI Bank.
In recent years, Sanjay has taken up bird photography with the same absorption he brought to surgery. He spends weekends in jungle safaris across India and abroad, camera in hand, looking for birds that most people never see. His family, he says, has observed that he replaces one obsession with another. He considers this a reasonable description of a life well lived.
For more than two decades, he has attended the American Academy of Ophthalmology in the United States, keeping current with a field that changes faster than most of medicine. He was elected President of the Gujarat Ophthalmic Society — a recognition from peers in a state he adopted, and that adopted him.