In 1971, Deepak Bahekar held an IIT Powai admission letter in one hand and his father’s opinion in the other. His father was a drawing teacher who had spent his working life in a classroom and had decided that his son would spend his in a hospital. Deepak was, by his own description, an obedient child. He put the IIT letter down and switched from mathematics to biology.
It was not a resignation. It was a redirection — and what he built in Gondia over the next four decades suggests that the organisational instincts that might have made him an engineer found their way into medicine after all.
From Pusad to Nagpur
Deepak was born in Pusad, 110 kilometres southwest of Yavatmal, into a family of educators. His father taught drawing at Koshetwar Daulatkhan Vidyalaya; his mother was headmistress at the Municipal Girls Primary School. Deepak attended the same school, sharing benches with Shyam Bawage, Satish Bhaskarwar, and Prabhat Deshmukh. In 1971, the school produced a remarkable trio in the Vidarbha Higher Secondary examination: Bahekar ranked second across eight districts, Bhaskarwar sixth, and Bawage missed the rankings by a single mark.
After his enforced switch to biology, Deepak studied at Shri Radhakisan Laxminarayan Toshniwal (RLT) College of Science, Akola, and entered GMC Nagpur in 1973. His first year in Nagpur was spent at Smruti Bhavan, Reshimbag — sharing a room with Shyam Bawage, while Prabhat Deshmukh and Satish Bhaskarwar took the adjacent room. The four young men from Pusad had followed each other to the city. “We had a great time interacting with learned people in RSS — very dedicated, nationalist, and selfless — Bala Saheb Deoras, Pandurangpant Kshirsagar, and many others,” Deepak recalled.
During his undergraduate years, Deepak worked in collage, oil, drawing, ink, and acrylic, producing portraits and elaborate rangolis for annual day. The art was not a hobby set aside at graduation. It was evidence of a temperament — the capacity to hold a complex picture in the mind and render it with precision.
The Marriage, the MD, and the Move to Gondia
After graduation, Deepak interned at Primary Health Centre, Parshivani, 40 kilometres north of Nagpur, with Satyanarayan Rathi, Rajendra Sarda, and Prakash Katariya, followed by urban internship at GMC. He then moved to Mumbai for house jobs at Parsi General Hospital and Bombay Hospital, and a registrarship at Parsi General Hospital.
On 23 June 1980, Deepak married Alka Mehta (Roll No. 25 of the same batch) in Pune. His portraits, he says, had something to do with it — the lines he drew lit the flame. After the wedding, both intended to sit for DCH and DGO through the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Mumbai. Destiny, as Deepak tells it, intervened. Back in Nagpur in 1981, the MARD president Aziz Khan advised them to apply for MD (Medicine) and MD (Obstetrics and Gynaecology) respectively. They applied. The dean approved. By 1983, both held MD degrees.
With his thesis on clinical profiles and complications of hepatitis in pregnancy complete — supervised by Dr. P.D. Kshirsagar — Deepak found himself a doctor, a husband, a father of a one-year-old daughter, and jobless. He was offered a district hospital post in Yavatmal, Amravati, or Gondia. He chose Gondia. He had never visited the town. He went, and stayed.
After three years as a medical officer at the district hospital, Deepak persuaded a local bank to back him. He built the hospital almost brick by brick. Bahekar Hospital opened in 1986 with modest means and grew, over four decades, to 50 beds, eight mechanical ventilators, three haemodialysis machines, and a 10-bed ICU. NABH accreditation followed.
A Hospital Built Across Generations
What distinguishes Bahekar Hospital is not its size but its depth — the degree to which a single family has committed to a single institution across three generations. Alka, whose MBBS joined Deepak’s at GMC in 1973, built the obstetrics and gynaecology department to over 10,000 deliveries. Their son Anurag returned to Gondia after training in cardiology at MY Hospital, Indore, and has performed the first 3D radiofrequency ablation for arrhythmia in Vidarbha, conducted more than 25 open-heart surgeries, and established a functioning paediatric cardiology department. Anurag’s wife Gargee, a specialist in obstetric critical care, has co-authored chapters on DVT and diabetes management in pregnancy.
Their eldest daughter Anupama, a cardiologist with a fellowship from Bengaluru, now practices at a multispecialty centre in Abu Dhabi alongside her husband Dr. Sathya Kakade, a vitreoretinal surgeon. Their grandson Ameya Kakade, Anupama’s son, was among the only students from India selected to the London School of Economics in 2023. Their second daughter Anushree, an anaesthesiologist at Indira Gandhi Medical College Nagpur, won first prize at MISACON 2019 for her work on anaesthesia in complex cardiac surgery. Her husband, Dr. Abhijeet Chaudhari, has served as district collector, divisional commissioner, and is currently Municipal Commissioner of Nagpur.
In 2019, when Covid arrived, Bahekar Hospital was among the first centres in the region to establish a tertiary care unit for critical patients — treating more than 1,000 across three waves, with one of the lowest mortality rates in the area. In 2022–23, Deepak served as president of the API Vidarbha chapter, overseeing 30 CME sessions focused on non-communicable diseases.
The IIT letter from 1971 was never used. What Deepak built instead — a hospital, a dynasty of doctors, an institution that has treated generations of patients in a city he had never visited before he moved there — is a more complete answer to what he was capable of.