He is known to his friends as OK — a nickname that has the cheerful accidental aptness of the best nicknames. Omprakash Agrawal is, in the measure that matters most in a general practitioner, someone his patients trust. In Pusad, a small town in Yavatmal district, that trust took three decades to build and was never once taken for granted. When he finally left Pusad in 2012 to follow his sons to Pune, the colony where he settled found him within months: a patient knocked on his door during an emergency, he answered, and the news of his availability spread through the neighbourhood before he had decided whether to advertise.
A Farmer’s Son from Bansi
Omprakash was born in Bansi village, Taluka Pusad, District Yavatmal, to a farming family of the Agrawal community — the Bansiwale, as they were known. He did his primary schooling in Pusad and his high school education at Radhakisan Laxminarayan Toshniwal (RLT) College of Science, Akola. He entered GMC Nagpur in 1973.
At GMC, he was not a man to stay indoors. He served as president of the Ganesh festival committee, led the orange city Medical Youth Club across his second and third MBBS years, organised *Kavi Sammelans*, managed the Maharaja procession, and ran medical camps in suburban areas under the Orange City Social Organisation. He came close to the teaching staff and formed a lasting friendship with Dr. Joharapurkar, patron of the club, whose influence on his thinking about patient care would endure long after Nagpur.
His rural internship was at a primary health centre in Arni, forty-five kilometres southwest of Yavatmal, alongside Vinay Kumar Mahajan. Urban internship followed at the district hospital, Yavatmal. He then went to Mumbai and did house jobs in Medicine and Paediatrics at GT Hospital and St George Hospital, followed by a registrarship at Bhabha Hospital. He had begun a Diploma in Child Health when the telephone rang from Pusad. His father had been diagnosed with Parkinson disease.
Pusad: Three Decades at the Coalface
Caught between the DCH and a duty he could not decline, Omprakash chose duty. He dropped the diploma and returned to Pusad. He served first as medical officer at the municipal hospital for six months, then married, then opened his own practice. The years that followed were, by any measure, full.
“I used to start my OPD practice at 9 am and would work non-stop till 11 pm,” he recalled. “I had three examination tables and two assistants and would serve a wide spectrum of patients — with Medical, Paediatric, Gynaecologic and Surgical problems. I would confidently do all minor procedures in the OT and even treated a patient with sixty percent burns and amputated a gangrenous limb in my practice.” This was general practice as it existed in the small towns of Vidarbha in the 1980s and 1990s — broad, improvised, necessarily courageous.
For close to three decades, between 1984 and 2012, he ran a ten-bed inpatient hospital in Pusad. He served as Secretary of the IMA Pusad branch from 1995 to 2000 and helped found Navjeevan English Medium Convent School in the town — an institution that rose to top ranking in the Amravati divisional board. It is the kind of civic investment that doctors in small towns make quietly, without announcement, because they understand that a good school and a good hospital are not separate ambitions.
Pusad to Pune
In 2012, his sons — one an engineer at TCS, the other preparing for Orthopaedics postgraduation — both in Pune. The hospital was sold. The family moved. Omprakash joined Apollo Hospitals, Hyderabad, as a medical consultant at Cognizant in Pune, and within months had what every good general practitioner eventually finds: a word-of-mouth practice in his residential colony.
“In Pune, patients find it difficult to access a doctor during emergency hours and at weekends,” he said. “Once a patient tapped my door and hesitatingly asked if I could see him. I readily agreed and did whatever best I could, and the patient quickly improved. The news spread in the colony, and soon I became a favourite doctor.” The story pleased him — not for the ego it might have fed, but because it confirmed a view of medicine he had held since Pusad: that availability, plainly offered, is itself a form of care.
His wife managed the home and the children’s schooling through three decades in Pusad — a contribution he names without ambiguity. Both sons stood in the merit list of the SSC and HSC board examinations. The younger qualified for Orthopaedics postgraduation. The elder moved into technology consulting. The Agrawal household, like many households built by first-generation professionals in small Vidarbha towns, produced the next generation and released it into a larger world.