Pradeep Indurkar has administered or supervised anaesthesia in more than 5,000 major cases and as many minor ones across a career that has crossed five states, two countries, and at least as many institutional forms. He has worked in government medical colleges, private hospitals, a factory, an island republic in the Indian Ocean, and a series of teaching posts scattered across central India. What he has never worked in is one place for very long.
The School Teacher’s Son
Pradeep was born in Nagpur. His father taught school; his mother kept the home. He attended St. John’s School from 1962 to 1972, then moved to Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya, Amravati, for his pre-university education. He joined GMC Nagpur in 1973 and graduated in April 1978.
His internship was at Wadner, with O.P. Agrawal and Indra Ostwal. After graduation, he went to Mumbai — to Lokmanya Tilak Medical College, where he worked as a house officer and registrar in the Department of Anaesthesia, training in general and spinal anaesthesia. He then served as Medical Officer at Reynolds Memorial Hospital, Washim, from 1979 to 1981, before returning to GMC Nagpur to enrol in the MD programme. His guide was Dr. Ranjana Deshmukh; he completed the degree in 1986.
A Career in Motion
Two years as Medical Officer at the Ordnance Factory, Nagpur followed. Then a lectureship at GMC Nagpur, held for five years. Transfer to Government Medical College, Yavatmal, prompted a departure from government service altogether, and Pradeep spent the next 12 years in the private circuit as an anaesthesiologist.
In 2010, he left India. Victoria Hospital at Quatre Bornes, Mauritius, hired him as Senior Specialist in Anaesthesia. He also taught as Professor and Head of Anaesthesiology at Dr. D.Y. Patil Medical College, Mauritius — a brief but complete sojourn in an island health system with its own rhythms and demands, a long way from Nagpur or Wardha or Washim.
He returned to India and joined Mamata Medical College in Khammam, Telangana, as Professor of Anaesthesiology in April 2015. Faculty positions at People’s Medical College, Bhopal, and Index Medical College, Indore, were interspersed through these years. In May 2020, he resigned from Mamata. In August 2022, he joined Chirayu Medical College, Bhopal.
Through all of it, the work itself remained constant: making patients unconscious safely, keeping them stable across the duration of a procedure, and returning them to wakefulness on the other side. In 30 years of anaesthesia practice, 5,000-plus major cases.
Oxford and Chicago
His wife Varsha taught at St. Ursula Girls’ High School, Civil Lines, Nagpur, as Supervisor, and retired on 31 March 2018. Their daughter Trupti — a master’s in physical therapy from Pravara Institute and a BSc from SUNY Syracuse — works as a Scientific Coordinator at Charles River Laboratories in Chicago. Their son Pranjal studied information technology at Ramdeobaba College of Engineering, Nagpur, earned a master’s in Cyber Technology from De Montfort University in the UK, and now works as an Information Security Engineer with Perspectum Ltd in Oxford.
Pradeep and Varsha live in Nagpur — at 73 Mecosabagh Christian Colony — while their children work in Chicago and Oxford. It is a domestic geography that would have been difficult to imagine when he was interning at Wadner in 1978, or riding out whatever road led from a school teacher’s home in Nagpur to a lectern in an anaesthesia department in Mauritius.
He has kept moving. The practice — and the family — have spread across the map accordingly.