Khandwa sits 110 kilometres northwest of Indore in the Nimar plains of Madhya Pradesh — cotton country, a town with a railway junction and a civil hospital and, for several decades, a pair of doctors who decided it was where they belonged. Asha Tungare was one of them. She obtained her DGO from MGM Medical College, Indore, served as an obstetrician in Khandwa’s government hospital, and practised there for years alongside her husband Dilip, an anaesthesiologist at the same facility. When the time came, they both retired and stayed.
From Nagpur to Khandwa
Asha entered Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1973, one of the 205 students admitted that year from across Vidarbha and beyond. She completed her MBBS, did her internship, and then moved to Indore, where she trained at MGM Medical College and earned her Diploma in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The diploma took her further west — to Khandwa, which became her permanent address.
Dilip Tungare, her husband, had taken a parallel path. He studied at Lokmanya Tilak Higher Secondary School and Vikram University, Ujjain, before his MBBS at MGM Medical College, Indore. He obtained his DA in 1978 and spent his career as specialist anaesthesiologist at the government district hospital in Khandwa. When government service ended for both of them, they chose not to leave.
The Generation That Followed
Their two sons chose a different world from medicine, though not from precision. Gaurav, the elder, studied at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, and has worked in technology and consulting — at Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and since 2018 at Cleo Communications in Bengaluru. Amol, the younger, also graduated from VNIT Nagpur and moved to Houston, Texas, where he works at PwC as a manager in software engineering.
Asha and Dilip now spend their time with their children and grandchildren — the particular pleasure of parents who placed their children well and can watch the results. The town of Khandwa, which received them as young doctors and gave them their working lives, remains home.
The GMC Nagpur class of 1973 scattered across India and the world — to Nagpur, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, the Gulf, the UK, the USA, Australia, Malaysia, Kenya, the Caribbean. A few, like Asha and Dilip, stayed close to where they had begun, chose the less-traveled path of small-town practice, and built something durable in the quiet.