He used to start his OPD at nine in the morning and work without stopping until eleven at night. Three examination tables. Two assistants. Patients arrived with the full, messy spectrum of what small-town medicine could send—medical, pediatric, gynecological, surgical. He treated patients with sixty percent burns; he amputated gangrenous limbs; he lanced abscesses without ceremony and set fractures without apology.
“Those days were unbelievable,” he says, looking back across four decades. He isn’t boasting. He is describing, with the flat precision of an eyewitness, what it meant to be a general practitioner in a Vidarbha district town in the 1980s and 90s—the years before specialization completed its conquest and left the generalist without a recognized territory.
The Daal Mill and the Road to Nagpur
Makhan was born into a business family in Khamgaon, Buldhana. His father owned a daal mill, the kind of enterprise that anchors a small town’s economy and demands a particular combination of physical stamina and financial shrewdness. He attended Kela Hindi High School in Khamgaon before moving to Mungilal Bajoria School in Akola. His pre-medical education was at RLT College of Science, the same institution that sent Vijay Kherde, Kailash Murarka, and several others to GMC Nagpur in 1973.
In his first year at GMC, Makhan shared room number 360 in Hanuman Nagar with Inder Ostwal. He remembers the address with the specificity of a memory held close. From the outset, he was a member of the “Saptrishi” group—seven students from Akola and Buldhana who traveled together and looked after one another with the loyalty of those far from home. The group—Vijay Kherde, Kailash Murarka, Nandkishor Salampuria, Nandkishor Taori, Indra Ostwal, Ajit Jadhao, and later, Dhulip Tajne—was not a formal arrangement. It was the kind of fellowship that forms when young men from the same geography find themselves in a large, unfamiliar institution and decide, instinctively, that looking after one another is simply what is done.
After graduation, Makhan went to Mumbai for house jobs in Medicine, Pediatrics, Surgery, and Gynecology at MGM and St. George Hospitals. He had already decided, quietly, not to pursue a post-graduation. The plan was always to return to the Buldhana-Akola belt—to the kind of town that had produced him and needed a doctor who understood its pulse.
Three Friends, Three Towns
In 1981, almost simultaneously, three “Saptrishis” began their private practices: Nandkishor Taori in Malkapur, Ajit Jadhao in Jalgaon-Jamod, and Makhanlal Gupta in Akola. The synchrony was not arranged; it was the result of three friends arriving at the same conclusion at the same moment.
Makhan’s early years in Akola were extraordinary in their scope. He saw everything. He performed minor procedures in his own OT and never turned a patient away because a condition sat outside a notional specialty boundary. In Akola in the early 80s, such boundaries were a luxury the town could not afford. The broad clinical training at GMC—the grueling ward rounds and the experience of handling complications without a specialist safety net—turned out to be the exact training Akola required.
The Leaner Tolerance
He watched the transformation of medicine arrive and named it with controlled precision. The doctor-patient relationship—once built on trust and the loyalty of three generations—gave way to something less stable. Patients arrived with searches done on mobile phones and expectations calibrated by television dramas. Local journalists and politicians discovered that doctors made useful adversaries.
“People now wear tolerance the way Helen used to wear dresses in our college days,” Makhan says, reaching for a witty, punchy image. Just as the famous dancer’s costumes were notoriously minimal, he found that public patience had become dangerously thin.
He decided, with the same quiet logic that governed his clinical life, to step back. He handed the heavy lifting of the practice to his assistants and turned his attention to the family’s industrial interests.
What Remains
His daughter, Pooja, completed her BE in Computer Science, earned a Master’s from Ohio State University, and now works for Apple in San Jose, where she lives with her husband, Bharat Kumar. His son, Bharat, manages an electrical and electronics business in Akola’s MIDC area. It is the classic story of the first professional generation: one child sent to California, one kept in Akola.
Today, the fourteen-hour OPDs are a memory. Makhan still practices from his residence, keeping gentler hours—9:00 am to 12:00 pm and 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm.
He belongs to a generation of doctors from the GMC Class of ’73 who practiced in the district centers of Vidarbha without fame or institutional backing. They were simply present, doing the work that needed doing. The medical landscape of central India was shaped by the accumulation of their daily presence. Makhanlal Gupta was one of them. He lanced the abscesses, set the bones, and kept the doors open until eleven at night. The town was healthier for it.