There is a word in Marathi — *ekla* — that means alone, solitary, without company. Hemraj Nimje’s internship was ekla in the most literal sense: he completed both halves of it by himself, without the co-interns who populate most such accounts in this archive. He chose Tumsar for the urban component and Deori for the rural, both in Bhandara district, and he seems to have worked through them without fuss. It is a small detail, but it is characteristic. Hemraj Nimje is a man who got on with things.
Mundhari to Gondia
He was born in Mundhari, a village in the Mohadi tehsil of Bhandara district, 32 km northeast of Bhandara town. His father was a farmer who supplemented the agricultural income by running a sari shop in the village. The combination — land and commerce, the two anchors of rural Vidarbha’s middle class — gave the family enough to invest in education. Hemraj went to Zilla Parishad Primary School in Mundhari and then to Nutan High School, also in the village, for his middle and secondary schooling. The next step required a move: he went to the Municipal High School in Gondia for his final school years, and then to Dhote Bandhu College of Science in Gondia for his pre-medical education.
Government Medical College, Nagpur admitted him in 1973 as Roll Number 171, Batch D. The college was, like all institutions of its kind in that decade, a place of crowded wards and scarce resources — a setting that demanded clinical resourcefulness before it could be formally taught. Hemraj was part of a cohort that would go on to scatter across the length of Maharashtra and beyond; he himself would stay close to the geography he had grown up in.
After his solo internship at Tumsar and Deori, he entered government service as a medical officer. His early postings took him through the primary health center network of Bhandara and Gondia districts — Mohadi for two years, Satgaon for six, Amgaon for three. Twelve years at PHCs across three districts: the accumulation was not glamorous, but it built the kind of deep familiarity with a region’s disease patterns and patient populations that no textbook provides. He knew what the wells tasted like in Mohadi, what the seasonal fevers looked like in Amgaon, which presentations needed immediate referral to Bhandara and which could be managed with what was in the dispensary.
The Late Degree
In 1998, twenty years after his MBBS, Hemraj Nimje obtained a postgraduate opportunity as an in-service candidate. He enrolled for the DGO at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur and completed the diploma in 1999. The decision to pursue obstetrics and gynaecology at this stage of a career — when he was already in his mid-forties, with decades of general practice behind him — reflects something about the man: a refusal to accept that the window for learning had closed.
The DGO changed the shape of his final years in government service. In August 1999, equipped with the new qualification, he moved to Gondia to begin what he described as a new inning. A year later he went to Gadchiroli as an obstetrician and gynaecologist for two years — remote, tribal, chronically underserved — before returning to Gondia, where he served in public health for a further decade. He retired from government service contented and, as he himself said, visibly relaxed.
The Gadchiroli posting deserves a moment’s attention. By the time Hemraj arrived there, the district had been made famous in India’s public health literature by the work of Drs Abhay and Rani Bang, whose SEARCH project had documented the staggering burden of neonatal and maternal mortality in the tribal population and developed community-based interventions to address it. Hemraj was not part of SEARCH; he was part of the government system that SEARCH had spent years trying to move. But his presence in Gadchiroli as a trained obstetrician — at a time when such skills were desperately scarce in that part of Maharashtra — was itself a form of service that the statistics don’t fully capture.
Gondia and the Years After
Retirement from government service brought Hemraj back to Gondia, where he settled permanently. He set up a modest outpatient practice, seeing a spectrum of general medicine and gynaecology patients. The practice was not large; it was not meant to be. He had spent thirty years in government service — moving between PHCs, sub-district hospitals, and district postings — and the idea of building a large private facility held no appeal. Gondia was home. The work he did there was the work he knew how to do.
His wife Prabha, who has a BA degree, managed the household through the years of transfers. Their son Nikhil has a BSc in Computer Science and married in 2017; they have a daughter born in 2018. Their daughter Shraddha has an MSc in Biotechnology. Their daughter Priya has a B.Pharm degree and is married and settled in Bengaluru. Three children, three different fields, three different cities — the dispersal pattern of the Vidarbha medical family is complete.
Hemraj Nimje’s career is not one that generates headlines or citations. There are no eponymous procedures, no national awards, no founding of institutions. What there is, instead, is a three-decade record of showing up: in Mohadi, in Satgaon, in Amgaon, in Gadchiroli, in Gondia. Showing up at PHCs where the equipment was inadequate and the political interference was real. Showing up in Gadchiroli when a trained obstetrician was needed and almost no one else was there. The word for this, in the vocabulary of Indian public health, is not glamour. The word is service. Hemraj Nimje practised it without announcement.