In April 1983, Pramod Bangde set up a pathology laboratory in Chandrapur when there was one other laboratory in the entire city, and a handful of tests anyone ever ordered. Forty years later, there are eleven MD pathologists in Chandrapur. The tests are processed by machines. The accuracy is better. And Pramod is still there — at Hi-Tech Pathology Lab, near Shree Talkies, exactly where he started.
The Deputy Collector’s Son
Pramod was born in Chandrapur. His father retired as a Deputy Collector — a government man, transferred across districts, anchored eventually in the town where Pramod would spend his entire professional life. He went to Buniyadi School in Wardha for his first four years, then Jubilee High School, Chandrapur, then Lokmanya Tilak School for his tenth standard. At Janata Mahavidyalaya, Chandrapur, his pre-medical classmates included Vijay Karmarkar, Sudhakar Dupare, Maya Bhaskarwar, and Suresh Satghare. He entered Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973.
In his first years at GMC, he shared lodgings at Hanuman Nagar with Suresh Batra and Vijay Karmarkar, then moved to Smruti Bhavan, Reshimbag. After graduation, he interned at the primary health centre in Balharshah alongside Aziz Khan, Nandkishor Kasturwar, and Pradeep Desai, and completed his urban posting at District Hospital, Chandrapur — colleagues who would remain friends across decades.
The Pathologist
He chose pathology. His MD thesis, completed at GMC Nagpur in 1982 under Dr. Asha Kher, examined bone tumours and tumour-like lesions. The following year he started his laboratory.
“When I started my laboratory, there was just a single laboratory in Chandrapur, and only a handful of tests were ordered,” Pramod recalled. “Now the number of MD Pathologists has swollen to 11. And we used to do almost all tests manually — now automation has reduced the time, improved the accuracy and precision of our test reports.”
The arc of his career maps onto the arc of Indian pathology itself — from manual counts and hand-processed slides to automated haematology analysers, from a discipline seen as ancillary to one that sits at the centre of modern diagnosis. Pramod watched all of it from the same bench, in the same city, building the same practice one test report at a time.
Hi-Tech Pathology Lab offers diagnostics across biochemistry, histopathology, cytology, haematology, and immunology. It is Chandrapur’s reference laboratory — the place other doctors send their difficult cases.
The Rotarian
Outside the laboratory, Pramod has been a dedicated Rotarian. He was president of the Junior Chamber of Chandrapur in 1987 and President of the Rotary Club in 1993–94. In 2003, he led a Rotary Study Group to the Netherlands — a month-long visit to eight hospitals, examining how Dutch healthcare functions: its financing, its patient flows, its relationships between primary and specialist care. The group returned with notes and questions that took years to fully absorb.
Both his sons are doctors. Akshay completed his MBBS at JNMC Sawangi and his MS in Surgery at NKP Salve Medical College, Nagpur; his wife, Dr. Anup, is a gynaecologist. Pratik completed his MBBS at NKP Salve and his MD in Radiodiagnosis at DY Patil Medical College, Navi Mumbai, followed by a fellowship in interventional radiology at GMC Nagpur; his wife, Dr. Apoorva, is a dermatologist. All four practice in Chandrapur.
Still There
The family Pramod built — a pathologist father, two specialist sons, two specialist daughters-in-law, a school principal wife who holds a PhD, a granddaughter named Amulya born in 2021 — has its centre in Chandrapur. It did not scatter, as so many GMC 1973 families did, to Nagpur or Mumbai or further.
When he opened that first laboratory in 1983, Chandrapur had one other diagnostic centre. Now it has eleven pathologists. Some credit belongs to the city’s growth, and to the expansion of Indian medicine. Some belongs to the man who was there first, who stayed, and who showed that a good pathology practice, built carefully in a small city, is a thing worth building.