She had already spent five years putting other surgeons’ patients to sleep when she decided she would rather be the surgeon. “I always wanted to be a surgeon,” Alka Naik said, “and grew tired of being behind the wickets.” In 1985, when a seat opened in the MS (Surgery) programme at GMC Nagpur, she took it with both hands.
She was already practising in Bhusawal. She had a husband and a child. She was 29. She enrolled anyway.
From Mohota to Medicine
Alka was born in Nagpur. Her father retired as a Divisional Engineer in the Telegraph Department; her mother taught English at a Physical Education Training School. She attended Mount Carmel School through the seventh standard, then Somalwar High School, then moved to Shri Mathuradas Mohota College of Science for her premedical year. Thirteen students from the GMC 1973 batch came out of Mohota — Harshvardhan Sheorey, Vilas Tambe, Siddhartha Kumar Biswas, Arvind Dani, Rajshree Chaturvedi, Hari Paranjape, Uday Kanhere, C.L. Sonkusare, Sujata Sawangikar, Alka Desai, Madhukar Parchand, and Surendra Bhandarkar among them.
During her GMC years, Alka represented the college in All India Inter-Medical competitions for three consecutive years. After graduation she did her internship at the Rural Health Centre, Saoner — where she was part of the group remembered as the Famous Five: Vijaya Vithalkar, Rajshree Chaturvedi, Sujata Sawangikar, Alison Girling, and Ratna Shekhawat, all posted there together. From Saoner she moved into the postgraduate programme in Anaesthesiology, earning her Diploma in 1980.
Then she moved to Bhusawal, where her husband Pradip had already established an Obstetrics and Gynaecology practice. For five years she worked as an ad hoc anaesthesiologist for Central Railway. She was good at it. She did not love it.
Behind the Wickets, Then Over Them
The language Alka uses — being behind the wickets — is precise. An anaesthesiologist in the operating theatre is, in one sense, the most important person in the room: responsible for keeping the patient alive while the surgeon works. But the work is largely invisible. The patient is unconscious. The surgeon acts. The anaesthesiologist monitors.
Alka wanted to act.
She enrolled in the MS (General Surgery) programme at GMC Nagpur in 1985. Her guide was Dr. K.D. Golhar. Her thesis examined the acute abdomen in children — a subject that required both surgical judgment and an understanding of paediatric physiology. She earned her MS in 1986, returning to Bhusawal with a degree that changed what she could do in the operating theatre.
The move was not without friction. Bhusawal in the late 1980s was not accustomed to a female general surgeon. The Central Railway posting had given her credibility within the institution, but private practice in a small Maharashtra town was a different matter. She built it anyway, case by case, through the only means available: doing the work well, consistently, over time.
The Hospital They Built Together
Pradip and Alka run a 20-bed hospital in Bhusawal. Between them they cover surgery and obstetrics and gynaecology — a combination that allows the institution to handle most of the acute surgical and reproductive health emergencies that reach them from Bhusawal and the surrounding villages of the Jalgaon district.
In 1998 they established an infertility centre — the first of its kind in Bhusawal — and performed their first successful in-vitro fertilisation that same year. For a town 420 kilometres northeast of Mumbai, this was not a small thing. It meant that couples who would previously have had to travel to Pune or Mumbai for assisted reproduction could be treated where they lived, by doctors who knew them.
They also tried, for a time, to run a critical care unit in partnership with eight colleagues. The venture did not survive. Medicine in a small town is a series of experiments in what the local economy can sustain. Some succeed. Some do not. Alka speaks of both with the same equanimity.
Their son Anand, born in 1982, went to the United States as a mechanical engineer. Their daughter Harshada, born in 1987, completed a Master’s in Medical and Psychiatric Social Work and now lives in Toronto.
What She Built
The generation of women who entered GMC Nagpur in 1973 faced a medical culture that regarded certain specialties — surgery, orthopaedics, neurology — as inappropriate for them. Some accommodated this. Some ignored it. Alka ignored it, took a diploma in anaesthesiology when surgery was unavailable, waited, and then went back for the surgery degree when the moment came.
She is not the only woman from the batch who crossed specialty lines or challenged assumptions about what women could do in operating theatres. But her particular arc — anaesthetist to surgeon, railway employee to private practitioner, student to institution-builder — has a specific shape. It is the shape of a woman who knew what she wanted, was prepared to wait for it, and did not ask permission when the waiting was done.
The hospital in Bhusawal is still running. The infertility centre is still there. Behind the wickets no longer describes her.