Balkrishna Tayade holds a distinction that no other student from the GMC Nagpur class of 1973 can claim: he has two MDs. Not two degrees in the same subject — two separate postgraduate qualifications in two disciplines. The first is in General Medicine, earned at GMC Nagpur. The second is in Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases, earned at BJ Medical College, Pune, a decade later, when he was already an established faculty member in another medical college. Between them lies a career defined not by the accumulation of credentials but by the stubbornness of a man who kept returning to the problem of the lungs.
Tuberculosis was the disease of his generation. It killed more Indians than any other single infection in the 1970s and 1980s. Balkrishna arrived at GMC Nagpur in 1973 — the same year that the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme was still years away, when diagnosis rested on sputum smear and chest X-ray, and treatment meant months of streptomycin and PAS, administered in hospitals that could barely afford both. He chose, in the end, to devote his career to this disease. The double MD was not ambition. It was conviction.
From Malkhed to Nagpur
Balkrishna was born in Malkhed, in Jalgaon Jamod taluka of Buldhana district — a village that gave him, by his own reckoning, what villages give best: the knowledge that hardship is ordinary and that ordinary people endure it. His father was a farmer. The primary and middle school years were spent in Malkhed itself. Then his elder brother, who lived in Wardha, drew him out of the village and into the city. Balkrishna completed his eighth and ninth standards at New English High School in Wardha, returned to Ambedkar Vidyalaya in Jalgaon Jamod for the tenth, and came first in his school — a performance that opened the door to Shri Mathuradas Mohota College of Science in Nagpur, one of thirteen students from that college to join the GMC Nagpur batch of 1973.
The Mohota cohort was a remarkable group. It included Harshvardhan Sheorey, who would become a clinical microbiologist in Melbourne; Vilas Tambe, one of Nagpur’s leading critical care physicians; Siddhartha Kumar Biswas, a neurologist in Kolkata; and Rajshree Chaturvedi, who built a career in neuroanaesthesiology at Jaslok Hospital, Mumbai. Balkrishna moved through this company quietly, doing what he had always done: working.
The Long Education
After graduation in 1977, Balkrishna interned with Shyam Bawage, Satish Bhaskarwar, Padmakar Somvanshi, and Sudhakar Sawdatkar at the primary health center in Wadner — 70 km southwest of Nagpur in Wardha district, a posting that suited him because his brother worked there. Convenience and purpose, rarely in conflict, were aligned.
He followed the internship with house jobs in Medicine and Tuberculosis at Swami Ramanand Teerth Rural Government Medical College, Ambajogai, and then returned to GMC Nagpur for his Diploma in Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases — the DTCD — which he obtained in 1981, alongside Satish Bhaskarwar, Mahendra Sawarkar, and Dilip Tikkas. The MD in Medicine came next, supervised by Dr. Kshirsagar, with a thesis on glucose homeostasis in viral hepatitis. He earned that degree in 1983.
By rights, that should have been the end of his formal education. He was already teaching — between 1983 and 1985, he served as a lecturer at the medical college in Aurangabad, in the TB and Chest department, before he had even collected his Medicine MD. But the lungs had not released him. In the late 1980s, as an in-service candidate, he went back to BJ Medical College in Pune to complete a second MD, this one in Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases. His thesis examined Superior Vena Cava Syndrome, a condition caused most commonly in India by tuberculosis and lung cancer — the two diseases that would define his clinical life. Dr. IR Agrawal supervised the work.
Building Departments
The career that followed was, in its structure, an extended exercise in institution-building. Balkrishna did not choose easy postings. In 1993, he moved to Government Medical College, Nanded, to establish a Department of Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases where none had existed. He built it. In 1999, he transferred to GMC Aurangabad. In 2001, his posting took him to GMC Nagpur, where over eight years he secured Medical Council of India recognition for the TB and Chest department — a process that demands documentation, inspections, infrastructure, and the particular patience of someone comfortable with bureaucratic time.
In 2008, the system tried to post him back to Aurangabad. He chose voluntary retirement instead. He had spent twenty-five years building things inside government medical colleges, and he understood both what the system could offer and what it could not. He joined NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences in Nagpur as Professor and Head of the Department of Pulmonary Medicine — the private sector equivalent of the work he had always done — and continued there until his superannuation.
His post-retirement work has taken him to Mission India Hospital, Khadgaon, a charitable facility in Wadi, Nagpur, where he serves as Director of Medical Services — managing, in his seventies, the same complexity of patient care and institutional function that he has managed for forty years. The lungs, it seems, will not let him go.
The Two Degrees and What They Mean
In a profession where specialisation has become ever narrower and postgraduate education more credential-focused, Balkrishna’s two MDs read as anachronistic. They are not. They are the record of a physician who kept learning because the disease he had chosen to study kept changing — from the era of streptomycin to the era of DOTS, from the pre-HIV period to the complex overlap of tuberculosis and HIV, from simple pulmonary disease to multidrug-resistant strains that defeated the regimens he had learned as a resident.
His daughter Samriddhi followed him into chest medicine, obtaining an MD in Chest Diseases at NKP Salve Institute and then moving to London for further training at the Royal College. His son Sarthak took a different direction entirely, working as a software engineer in Pune. Both choices, in Balkrishna’s telling, are equally valid. He did not choose pulmonary medicine because his father was a chest physician. He chose it because the disease was there, and someone had to.