There is a moment Vijay Thakre has not forgotten. He was sitting in a classroom at Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya, Amravati, during his pre-medical year, struggling with everything the city demanded of a boy from a village school. English was opaque. The pace was disorienting. He felt, he says, utterly unnerved. The only thing he knew how to do was work. So he worked. He wrote his botany examination paper with a thoroughness that his teacher, apparently startled, read aloud to the class.
“That was the turning point of my career,” Vijay says. “I never looked back.”
He has not. Since 15 August 1983, when he opened a five-bed nursing home in Yavatmal, he has built one of the more successful internal medicine practices in the city, expanding eventually to 20 beds and affiliating with an 80-bed multispecialty hospital that has relieved him of much of the operational burden. He has watched the number of MD physicians in Yavatmal grow from two to fifteen. He has seen the doctor-patient relationship transform from something warm and hierarchical to something cooler and more transactional. He has watched, with “understandable anguish,” as the physician-patient model gave way to what he calls the provider-client model.
He keeps working.
The Village and the City
Vijay was born in Chausala, a village near Anjangaon Surji in Amravati district, to a father who served as a revenue patwari and eventually retired as a revenue inspector. Government service at that level in rural Maharashtra was modest but stable — it paid school fees and kept the family above the subsistence threshold that many of their neighbours could not clear.
He completed his entire school education at Shevantabai Kalmegh High School in Chausala — a village school, Marathi medium, with the limitations and virtues of its kind. Then came Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya in Amravati, and the difficult adjustment he describes: a Marathi-medium student in a city college, surrounded by classmates who had been through convent schools and spoken English since childhood.
The botany paper changed something. He understood, perhaps for the first time, that the gap between himself and those classmates was not intelligence — it was preparation. Preparation could be closed. In 1973, he entered Government Medical College, Nagpur.
The Making of a Physician
Vijay did his rural internship at Samudrapur in Hinganghat, Wardha district, alongside Prabhakar Patil and Pramod Bhise. He returned to GMC Nagpur to enrol in the MD (Medicine) program, working under Dr. A.M. Jiwne. His thesis examined the efficacy of gum acacia — a dietary fibre supplement derived from the Acacia tree — in improving blood lipids. The question was practical: in a country where cardiovascular disease was beginning its long expansion, any dietary intervention that could modify lipid profiles without medication cost mattered. He earned his MD in 1982.
He then spent a year and a half in Mumbai, working at Nanavati Hospital — one of the established private hospitals of the city — honing his cardiac skills. The exposure to an urban tertiary care environment, with its echocardiography machines and catheterisation laboratories, gave him a picture of where medicine was heading, even as he planned to return to Yavatmal and practice in conditions considerably less well-equipped.
He went back on 15 August 1983 — Independence Day, which the date shares with Ganesh Ramteke’s birthday — and opened his nursing home. The city had two MD physicians at the time. Within a few years, he had established himself as one of the leading internists in the region.
Forty Years in Yavatmal
The practice of internal medicine in a city like Yavatmal involves managing what arrives — and in central Maharashtra in the 1980s and 1990s, that meant a full range of acute and chronic illness. Heart failure, respiratory infections, complications of diabetes, snake bites, organophosphate poisoning from the agricultural chemicals that saturated the cotton-farming belt, and the late presentations of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases that public health systems had not yet reached. Vijay managed all of it.
Over time, the practice shifted. Acute emergencies gave way to chronic disease management as the population aged and diagnostic technology improved. His nursing home grew from five beds to twenty. More recently, the opening of an 80-bed multispecialty hospital in Yavatmal — in which Vijay has been involved — has provided a referral base and a critical care infrastructure that did not exist when he started.
His son Pallav followed him into medicine, completing his MBBS at DY Patil Medical College, Pune, his MD in Medicine at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, Wardha, and now practices at Medanta — The Medicity in Gurgaon, Haryana. The trajectory from Chausala village to a tertiary care hospital in the National Capital Region, across two generations, is one that many GMC 1973 families have replicated: the first-generation doctor practicing in the mofussil town, the second going further.
Vijay watches this with the mix of satisfaction and rueful observation that his generation often brings to the changing profession. The young physicians at Medanta practice a medicine of protocols and imaging and subspecialty referral. Vijay’s medicine was of history and examination, of clinical judgement formed in conditions where the history and the examination were all there was.
“In 1983, there were just two MDs in Yavatmal,” he says. “Now they have grown to fifteen.” And the doctor-patient relationship, he adds, is no longer what it used to be. From physician-patient to provider-client — a shift he names with the precision of a man who has watched it happen over four decades and does not entirely approve.
He continues to practice at Shiv Nursing Home on Veer Waman Rao Chowk in Yavatmal. The clinic that opened on Independence Day 1983 is still open.