Seventy. That’s the number the Batch of 1973 links forever with Sonkusare.
Seventy times, he stretched out on the blood donation couch, extended his forearm, watched the needle pierce his bulging vein, and grinned as his blood flowed into the bag—destined to boost haemoglobins, banish anaemia, carry patients through surgery, and speed them home. At seventy, he had to stop. But not before the reunion emcee shared this feat: “Seventy donations!” The room erupted in cheers, classmates leaping to their feet in roaring applause.
That same unyielding drive bridged even greater distances—not just veins to lives, but villages to operating theaters.
His father, Laxmanrao, was an illiterate farmer. His mother, Janabai, never saw a classroom. From Talegaon, a Gadchiroli village 137 kilometers southeast of Nagpur, their son charted a path to Mohota Science College, Government Medical College, and three postgraduate triumphs across three decades—MBBS, DGO, MD—retiring as Civil Surgeon of Amravati.
From Armori to Nagpur
Sonkusare was born in Armori, tehsil headquarters of Gadchiroli district. He started primary school in Talegaon, then tackled middle and higher secondary in Armori—acing his tenth standard with distinctions in English, Marathi, Hindi, Physics, and Chemistry. As school captain of Mahatma Gandhi Vidyalaya, he led with quiet command.
Nagpur beckoned for pre-medical at Shri Mathuradas Mohota College of Science—one of just thirteen in GMC Nagpur’s 1973 batch from Mohota. At GMC, he captained the volleyball team, spiking victories alongside Harish Baheti, Avinash Deshmukh, Sanjay Gadre, and Viraj Tandale.
Post-graduation, he honed his skills in a rural internship at Tumsar (93 kilometers east of Nagpur) and an urban stint at Chandrapur Civil Hospital.
A Career in the Field
Sonkusare entered government service and was posted to Kurkheda Primary Health Centre in Gadchiroli — deep tribal country, where the nearest referral facility was hours away and most patients arrived with conditions that had progressed well beyond the point where a better-served population would have sought care. He earned the DGO at Indira Gandhi Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1984. Between 1982 and 1984 he also served as a lecturer in Forensic Medicine and Jurisprudence at IGGMC.
He moved through postings at PHC Nagbhid in Chandrapur district, then took charge as Medical Superintendent of Rural Hospital Rajura from 1991 to 1997, and Gadchandur from 1998 to 2006. In between — while managing a rural hospital — he completed his MD in Obstetrics and Gynaecology from GMC Nagpur, graduating in 1990. His thesis examined the effect of clomiphene citrate on idiopathic normogonadotropic oligospermia in male infertility — a precise and technically demanding piece of research conducted while running a rural health facility.
That combination — administrative responsibility, clinical practice, and postgraduate study, all simultaneous — describes the particular endurance demanded of government doctors who chose to remain in the field rather than relocate to institutional comfort.
The Work That Was Seen and the Work That Was Not
The awards accumulated quietly. The WHO Leprosy Foundation award in 1981. Five successive years as best medical officer, awarded by Chandrapur Zilla Parishad. State-level awards for blindness control. Family welfare awards for three consecutive years between 2001 and 2004. The Anandibai Joshi Puraskar in 2005.
His wife ran Adivasi Arogya Sanstha in Rajura — a free clinic for tribal and poor people. The work was hers. The support, quietly, was shared.
None of this made news. It was the texture of a career spent in places where careers of this kind are spent: without visibility, without institutional prestige, in the conditions that the majority of Indians who need medical care actually inhabit.
Two Sons, Two Sciences
What Sonkusare built — the discipline, the long years in difficult postings, the willingness to study while working — appears to have passed into the next generation in a different register. His son Sarang completed his MBBS at Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh Memorial Medical College, Amravati, and then went to Germany: MD in Child Psychiatry at Hessan Hospital, Frankfurt. His son Saurabh also completed his MBBS at BJ Medical College, Pune, then an MSc in Neurosciences in Yorkshire, a PhD in Neurosciences at Queensland University, Brisbane, postdoctoral research at Queensland, and is now a neuroscience researcher at Cambridge University, London.
A farmer’s grandson in Cambridge, working at the edge of what neuroscience knows.
The generation that arrives at government medical colleges from villages in Gadchiroli district does not always stay in Gadchiroli. Sometimes it travels to Cambridge. Sonkusare, who made the first crossing — from Armori to Nagpur, from primary school to Civil Surgeon — created the conditions for a crossing his father could not have imagined.