In Chembur, where the city thins into something almost residential, Paranjpe Maternity Home has occupied the same address for nearly four decades. Hari built it after returning from a spell at Cooper and KEM, choosing a neighbourhood over an institution. It was a modest beginning. The hospital is 15 beds now. His son Sumit — MD (Obstetrics & Gynaecology) — operates alongside him. The brass plate at the entrance still reads Paranjpe, and that, in a city that discards continuity without ceremony, is its own kind of achievement.
The Boy Who Left GMC Early
Haripandit Paranjpe was born in Buldhana, where his father served as Collector. The family moved frequently — a municipal primary school in Akola, then Nagpur, then Khamgaon, then Hadas High School — the itinerant childhood of a government officer’s son. He completed his premedical year at Shri Mathuradas Mohota College of Science in Nagpur, where he was part of a cohort of 13 students who would all enter Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973: Harshvardhan Sheorey, Vilas Tambe, Siddhartha Kumar Biswas, Arvind Dani, Rajshree Chaturvedi, Hari Paranjape, Uday Kanhere, CL Sonkusare, Sujata Sawangikar, Alka Desai, Madhukar Parchand, and Surendra Bhandarkar.
He was not at GMC Nagpur long. His father died during his first year, and Hari transferred to GS Medical College, Mumbai. The transfer was practical, not strategic — proximity to family during a hard time — but it shaped the rest of his career. He completed his MBBS in Mumbai, interned there, did two house jobs in gynaecology, and earned his MD in Obstetrics & Gynaecology from GS Medical College in 1982, writing his thesis on Obstetric Anaesthesia under the supervision of Dr. R.D. Pandit.
Mumbai kept him. After MD, he joined Cooper Hospital and then KEM, spending three years in the city’s great public hospitals, learning the volume and variety that only those institutions can offer. In 1986 he started his own hospital — first in Ambernath, then at Chembur, the neighbourhood where he and Sangeeta, his wife, settled and stayed.
A Practice Built on Consistency
The Velankar-Paranjpe Hospital grew from a small consulting room into a 15-bed facility offering Gynaecology, Surgery, and ENT. Hari ran the Obstetrics and Gynaecology practice. He did not seek visibility beyond Chembur. He worked steadily, saw patients, operated, and over the decades built the kind of reputation that accumulates without fanfare — patients who return, families who refer, the slow architecture of trust.
Sangeeta, his wife, practices Homoeopathy from the same address. Their son Sumit completed his MBBS at DY Patil Medical College, Pune, and his MD in Obstetrics & Gynaecology at MGM Institute of Health Sciences, Navi Mumbai, and has joined the practice. Sumit’s wife, Dr. Amaraja Paranjpe, is also an Obstetrician and Gynaecologist. It is, by any measure, a family of doctors arranged around the same discipline.
The transfer from GMC Nagpur was once an interruption — a father’s death forcing a change of plan. Hari has never spoken of it as such. He carried his class of 1973 membership lightly but genuinely. He still remembers Shashikant Khaire, with whom he shared a bench in primary school before their paths diverged and converged at GMC. He remembers Sanjay Warhadpande, who lived nearby. The connections of 1973 ran deeper than one and a half years of formal attendance. That, too, is not nothing.