In the winter of 1974, an examination result moved through Government Medical College, Nagpur with the quiet force of genuine surprise. In Anatomy — a subject that routinely defeated even diligent students — one candidate had scored 303 out of 400, earning an honour. The candidate was not from a city, had not attended an English-medium school, and had no doctor in his family. He came from Khandala, a village 100 kilometres east of Nagpur, in the eastern reaches of Vidarbha. His name was Abhimanyu Kapgate. And when the results were confirmed, what surprised his batchmates most was not the score but what Abhimanyu chose to do with it.
The Village That Shaped Him
Abhimanyu was born in Khandala, Taluka Sakoli, Bhandara district, to a farmer. His schooling moved through local schools in Khandala, Salai, and Bhivkhedi — the ordinary schools of ordinary villages. In 1971, he sat the Vidarbha Higher Secondary Board Examination and ranked 18th across the entire board. He then earned third rank at the university in his premedical year at the Institute of Science, Nagpur, and entered GMC Nagpur in 1973.
He loved anatomy from the beginning — not the rote learning that most students endured, but the actual knowledge: the names, the relationships, the intricate logic of how a human body is assembled. He memorised everything and could recall it without effort. The honour he received in his first MBBS Anatomy examination was not luck; it was the product of a particular kind of intelligence, the kind that finds genuine pleasure in understanding how things work.
After graduation, he completed his rural internship at Tirora, 110 kilometres east of Nagpur, with Siddhartha Kumar Biswas and Sharad Jaitly, and his urban internship at GMC Nagpur.
The Road Not Taken
A young man who ranked 18th in the Vidarbha board, third in his university premedical examinations, and earned an honour in Anatomy at one of Maharashtra’s most competitive medical colleges had, by any conventional measure, a wide open future. Nagpur was there. Mumbai was there. A postgraduate seat was within reach.
Abhimanyu went to Navegaon Bandh.
Navegaon Bandh is a small town in Arjuni Morgaon Tehsil of Bhandara district, 135 kilometres east of Nagpur. It sits in the flat agricultural plains of eastern Vidarbha, surrounded by paddy fields, close to the forested buffer of Navegaon National Park. It is not where careers are built in the conventional sense. It is where Abhimanyu was from, or close enough to it that it felt like home.
He set up a general practice there and has not left. He also harvests paddy. For more than four decades, he has provided primary care to the farmers, labourers, and families of a region where the nearest specialist is a long drive away, and where a doctor who knows your name and your family’s history is worth more than any credential.
Vilas Tambe, his batchmate, says it plainly: “Abhimanyu never forgot his own villagers.”
The Anatomy of Modern Medicine
Abhimanyu has watched Indian medicine change from the inside — from a village practice that sees what urban specialists rarely see, which is what happens to patients before they reach a tertiary centre, if they reach one at all.
“Over the years,” he has said, “the general trend has been to seek specialist advice even for minor illnesses. The absence of a generalist who can act as a gatekeeper means that even simple problems are seen in tertiary care centres and viewed through a specialist’s lens. The specialist, with his perspective of excluding the rarest of rare conditions in the field, usually ends up over-investigating even the most innocuous of symptoms. Therefore, poor people — or even those from the middle class — simply cannot afford private medical care.”
This is not a complaint. It is an observation, made with the calm authority of someone who has spent forty years watching it happen. It is also, for a man who once scored 303 out of 400 in Anatomy, a fitting diagnosis: naming what ails the body of Indian medicine with the same precision he once applied to naming the structures of the human one.
His neighbours include several old classmates — Anand Patil in Wadsa Desaiganj (43 kilometres), Manik Khune in Bramhapuri (53 kilometres), Nabatosh Biswas in Nagbhid (72 kilometres), Deepak Bahekar in Gondia (62 kilometres). The GMC Nagpur Class of 1973 planted itself across eastern Vidarbha, and Abhimanyu is among the deepest roots.