On 26 April 2001, Murtaza Akhtar was riding his scooter to NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Nagpur, when a vehicle struck him. He arrived at his own hospital with a head injury, multiple rib fractures, a fractured clavicle, and a severely comminuted fracture of the left leg. His colleague, intensivist Dr Vilas Tambe, worked to save his life. More than half a dozen surgeries followed. For over a year, Murtaza moved through the wards on crutches. He continued to teach.
“The accident taught me resilience,” he said. “I came out more invigorated, sharper in my thinking, and more creative and empathic in my treatment approach.”
The physiotherapist who helped him recover was Pooja Busaina. On 5 November 2010, he married her.
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A Family of Learning
Murtaza’s father had been a GMC Nagpur student — a classmate of the great paediatric teacher Dr AM Sur. He left after the first year, returning to the family business, setting aside his ambition to be a doctor. That ambition passed to his son.
His mother’s family were teachers. His maternal grandfather taught science; his uncles taught. His first cousin Dr Shafaat Talib was Professor and Head of Medicine at GMC Aurangabad. Murtaza was born in Nagpur and went to Husamiyah Urdu School, then St Francis De Sales (SFS) School, Sadar, where his classmates included Sharad Arvind Bobde — later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India — and Harish Salve, later Solicitor General. He entered GMC Nagpur in 1973.
After graduation he interned at Kalmeshwar primary health centre, alongside Chandrashekhar Meshram and Siddhartha Kumar Biswas — both of whom went on to become neurologists. He enrolled in MS (General Surgery) at GMC Nagpur alongside Sanjay Warhadpande, working under Professor NK Deshmukh and learning craft from SR Joharapurkar. He served as a house officer under Dean Vikram Marwah. His MS thesis examined male infertility.
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Twenty-One Years at NKP Salve
On 17 July 1999, Murtaza joined NKP Salve Institute as Professor and Head of Surgery. Alongside his batchmate Ramesh Mundle, he helped build the clinical infrastructure of what became Lata Mangeshkar Hospital — now a 1,200-bed facility. He initiated the MS (General Surgery) programme, which eventually carried 12 MCI-recognised seats. He established allied specialty departments including MCh Paediatric Surgery and MCh Plastic Surgery.
In 1990 the Rockefeller Foundation sent him to the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, for a year of clinical epidemiology training under Professors Richard Hellar and David Christie. He returned with a Master of Medical Science and a research orientation that sharpened the rest of his career. His PubMed listing runs to 85 publications. He guided 25 postgraduate students.
In 1994 he managed two mass casualty events: a deputation to Mecca during Haj — for which he received a Commendation Certificate from the Consul General of India — and the Gowari stampede in Nagpur, one of Vidarbha’s worst crowd disasters, where he served as triage master at the casualty centre.
He served as Medical Superintendent of Lata Mangeshkar Hospital through the COVID-19 pandemic, overseeing a 200-bedded dedicated COVID unit that treated close to 1,300 cases. He stepped down from both institutions in 2021.
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After the Institutions
In 2021, Murtaza began a consulting surgical practice in western Nagpur. On 1 November 2023, he and Pooja opened Akhtar’s Physiotherapy, Rehabilitation and Research Centre at Chaoni Square, Nagpur. His wife — who holds an MPTh with specialisation in Cardio-Respiratory and Intensive Care and a PhD in Physiotherapy — is the clinical anchor of the centre.
Their son Adnan, a mechanical engineer from IIT Guwahati with an MS from the University of Illinois, works as a Senior Research Engineer at ANSYS, Austin, Texas.
The accident that came within a whisker of ending his career produced instead, in his own account, a more invigorated man. That is a particular kind of resilience — not the resilience of ignoring what happened, but of absorbing it and being changed by it, in the direction of greater skill and greater empathy. In medicine, that is not a small outcome.