They gave him a nickname — Sher. It had nothing to do with ferocity, though Rooplal Lanjewar was not a man easily pushed around. It came from his childhood fascination with forests, with tigers, with the dense stands of teak and sal that covered the hills around Tumsar, the Bhandara town where he grew up. Fifty years on, the forests still draw him. He speaks of them the way other men speak of old friends — with knowledge, with pleasure, with a quiet proprietary pride.
That a boy who loved jungles became a public health officer is not, on reflection, surprising. Public health is also a kind of ecology: you study populations the way a naturalist studies habitat, tracing illness back to the conditions that produced it. Rooplal spent thirty years doing exactly that — mapping disease, training health workers, coordinating HIV surveillance across two states, and trying, with the patience of someone who had watched trees grow, to push a reluctant bureaucracy toward evidence.
The Boy from Tumsar
Rooplal was born to a grain merchant in Tumsar, a town that sits on the Wainganga River in Bhandara district, about 93 km northeast of Nagpur. His early schooling took place at Malviya Primary School and Lokmanya Tilak Vidyalaya in Tumsar before the family moved to Akola, where he completed his premedical college education at Radhakisan Laxminarayan Toshniwal (RLT) College of Science. He joined Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973 — one of the 205 who walked through those gates that summer.
During his first year at GMC, he lived with his brother in Laxminagar, commuting to the medical campus by cycle. The hostel came later, in the second year, and with it the particular education of shared rooms and communal meals that shapes medical students as much as any lecture. He was not among the batch’s most conspicuous figures — not a cricketer like Ravi Kasat, not a musician like Shriram Kane — but he was steady, attentive, and, as his colleagues would later confirm, possessed of an instinct for what public health actually requires: the willingness to go where the disease is, not wait for it to arrive at your door.
A Career Spent in the Field
After completing his MBBS and internship — his rural posting was at the primary health center in Deolapar, alongside Bhikulal Bahetee and Pradeep Deshpande — Rooplal did house jobs in Medicine and Skin and Venereal Diseases at Swami Ramanand Teerth Rural Government Medical College, Ambajogai. He then returned to GMC Nagpur for his MD in Preventive and Social Medicine. His thesis, supervised by Dr. Deotale, examined health hazards among printing press workers, with particular attention to lead poisoning — occupational health, a field barely acknowledged in Indian medicine at the time, but one that Rooplal understood mattered.
He earned his MD and spent the years between 1982 and 1995 in private practice in the MIDC area of Nagpur — an industrial corridor where the printing press workers he had studied lived and worked. Then, characteristically, he returned to public health, joining the Vaccine Division of the Public Health Institute as a lecturer. What followed was a long, circuitous journey through the machinery of Maharashtra’s health administration: Zilla Parishad Nagpur, Bhandara, health officer at Ulhasnagar Municipal Corporation, Additional District Health Officer at Nagpur Zilla Parishad, District Health Officer at Akola, Assistant Director for Malaria under the National Vector Borne Diseases programme. He retired in 2010.
The posting that gave him the most satisfaction — and the one he describes with the most animation — was his work as Regional Coordinator for India’s first HIV surveillance programme. The National AIDS Control Organisation nominated him to cover Andhra Pradesh and Goa, two states with very different epidemics and very different health systems. The work required him to build surveillance networks from scratch, train staff who had never encountered the concept of systematic disease monitoring, and report findings to a government that did not always welcome what the data showed. He did all of it, methodically, without complaint.
What Public Health Actually Requires
Ask Rooplal about his three decades in public health and he answers with the directness of a man who has thought hard about a single question. “There is so much to do in public health,” he says. “All one has to do is ask the right questions, design innovative solutions and implement them. The irony is that we do not have the right people in the right places at the right time. People either do not want to work or do not know how to work. And with bureaucrats now dictating to technocrats, things are becoming increasingly difficult.”
It is not a bitter assessment — Rooplal is not a bitter man. It is an accurate one. He has spent a career watching well-designed interventions founder because the person placed in charge of implementation had neither the training nor the inclination to implement them. He has also watched the reverse: modest resources, in the right hands, produce outcomes that better-funded programmes could not. What the system requires, he believes, is not more money or more schemes. It is more people who genuinely want to work.
After retiring from government service, he took up a consulting role with the Public Health Foundation of India as an external observer under the India Public Health Standards programme — an effort to define and measure what a good public health facility should look like. The work suited him. He is good at measuring things against a standard, and honest about the gap between the standard and the reality.
The Forest, and the Life Beyond the Office
The nickname Sher has stayed because the forests have stayed. Rooplal still travels into them when he can, still talks about tigers with the enthusiasm of someone who first saw them as a boy in Tumsar. It is not a sentimental attachment. He knows what threatens the forests and says so plainly.
His children have moved in directions far from medicine and public health. His son Ashay is a textile engineer with an MS in Industrial Engineering and Supply Chain Management, working as a Senior Manager at General Mills. His daughter Ankita is a software engineer at Tech Mahindra. Neither chose medicine, and Rooplal is evidently not troubled by this. He wanted them to find work that interested them. They have.
He lives in Nagpur, in the house he has occupied for years, not far from the city’s western ring road. The forests he loved as a boy are two hours away by road. He still goes.