Ask Kashinath Kuhikar why he chose the Central Government Health Scheme over a state government posting or private practice, and he will give you a precise answer. He did not like the political interference in PHC functioning. He wanted to stay in and near Nagpur. He ranked central government service above the state. And when the choice came — ESIS, Central Railway, or CGHS — he chose the one that offered stability, proximity to home, and freedom from the bureaucratic pressures that had already begun to corrode his colleagues’ enthusiasm in the primary health center network.
It was a careful, deliberate choice, made by a man from a weaver-farmer family in Bhandara who had watched how institutions worked and decided that the one he entered would be one he could stay in without compromising himself. He joined CGHS, Nagpur in 1984. He is still there — four decades later, at the same dispensary on Sakkardara Road, four kilometres from the GMC campus where his career began.
Mohada to GMC
Kashinath was born into a weaver-farmer family in Mohada, a village in Bhandara district, 40 km east of Nagpur. The combination of craft and agriculture that sustained his family also defined its place in the village economy: skilled, self-sufficient, not wealthy, connected to the rhythms of the land and the loom in equal measure. He went to Zilla Parishad School for primary education and Janata High School, Mohada for middle and high school. The next step required travel: he moved to Nagpur for pre-medical education at Shivaji Science College.
The transition from Mohada to Nagpur in the early 1970s was a significant one. The city was large, English was necessary, and the social idiom of Government Medical College — with its mix of urban Nagpur families and small-town Vidarbha students — required adjustment. Kashinath managed it by attaching himself to a group of similarly-situated classmates: Chandrashekhar Meshram, Chandrashekhar Jambholkar, and Gagan Panjwani. The four of them cycled to GMC together in the mornings. “I used to start from Kamal Chowk, Gagan from Jaripatka, Jambholkar from Indora Chowk, Meshram from the neighbourhood,” Kashinath recalls. “And we all used to pedal our cycles to GMC.” It is a specific image — four young men on bicycles, sari-wrapped aprons over the handlebars, converging on the Medical Square — and it places him in the city as a newcomer who found his bearings through fellowship rather than familiarity.
In 1974–75, Kashinath stayed with a relative for two months in the Pachpaoli area, then rented a room in the Golibar Chouk area. He was at GMC for six years, through the rigours of the MBBS curriculum and the particular social education of hostel life in a government medical college in Vidarbha.
Four Decades at Sakkardara
After graduation, Kashinath interned at Tumsar for his urban component and at Mohadi Primary Health Center for the rural one, alongside Sudhakar Dhakite, Suresh Satghare, and TK Khillare. He then spent a year at IGGMC, Nagpur, as a medical officer in MMHS, and a further period as a locum lecturer in the Skin and VD department. In 1984, he joined the Central Government Health Scheme, Nagpur, as a Junior Class I Medical Officer.
The CGHS serves a specific constituency: central government employees, their dependents, and pensioners. It is not emergency medicine; it is not glamorous; it is not the kind of practice that generates publications or conference invitations. What it is, and what Kashinath has spent four decades providing, is reliable, accessible, affordable primary care to a population that would otherwise navigate the crowded corridors of government hospitals alone.
“My job,” he says, “is to provide comprehensive medical facilities to central government employees and their dependents, and to refer patients requiring advanced care to CGHS-approved hospitals.” The description is modest. The practice is not: over forty years, he has risen from Junior Class I Medical Officer to Senior Class I (1989), Chief Medical Officer (2002), CMO-NSSG, and Senior Administrative Grade (2008). He has served one of the 12 CGHS Wellness Centres in Nagpur continuously, from the same dispensary, for four decades. The stability is intentional, not accidental.
Travel, Facebook, and the Philosophy of Staying Put
There is an apparent contradiction in Kashinath Kuhikar’s life that resolves itself on closer inspection. He is, professionally, a man who chose stability — the same dispensary, the same city, the same patient population across forty years. He is, personally, a man who travels constantly. His Facebook posts, as his classmates in the GMC 1973 network note, show him and his wife abroad every year, in destinations across Asia, Europe, and the Gulf, faces beaming in photographs taken at temples, markets, coastlines, and mountain passes.
“Travelling disconnects me from daily mundane life,” he says, with the enthusiasm of a person who has thought about this carefully. “It improves my understanding of other cultures, lets me try amazing food, makes me feel adventurous, expands my social network, lets me create lifetime memories, and makes me love my wife even more.” The last phrase, added with evident pleasure, is very much in character: Kashinath Kuhikar is someone who says what he means without performing restraint.
The contradiction resolves because the stability is professional and the travel is personal. He chose a career that kept him in one place so that his private life could range freely. The dispensary at Sakkardara is the fixed point; everything else can move. It is a structure that has worked, for forty years, with a precision that suggests it was not accidental.
His wife accompanies him on the travels. She is not named in the accounts left by his classmates, an absence that this archive notes with regret. She has been his partner in the journeys that the photographs document and in the life that the photographs don’t show. Kashinath’s career at CGHS is a record of service to a city. His travels are a record of curiosity about a world beyond it. The combination is, in a man who came from a weaver-farmer village in Bhandara to spend forty years at the same dispensary in Nagpur, something rather fine.