The first girl from the class of 1973 to marry did so on 19 December 1977 — before she had taken her final MBBS practical examination. Vandana Kamdar married Ajay Khanolkar, a surgeon from the GMC Nagpur 1971 batch, in a ceremony that her classmates would remember for its timing as much as anything else. The examinations waited. The wedding did not.
That decision — to marry mid-examination, to move, to adapt — set the pattern for a career that never stayed in one place long enough to calcify. Over four decades, Vandana taught community medicine in Nagpur, Yavatmal, London, Libya, Wardha, and finally Kerala. She inspected a hundred medical colleges as a Medical Council of India assessor. She ran a hospital. She headed departments. She went where the work was, and she did the work.
Roots and a Reluctant Subject
Vandana was born into a family with deep roots in GMC Nagpur itself. Her father belonged to the first batch of the college — the class that walked through those gates before Independence — and her mother taught Botany at Bhide Girls’ School in Nagpur, where Vandana studied until the eleventh standard.
For her premedical year, she moved to Shivaji Science College, Nagpur, and entered GMC in 1973.
After graduation and internship, she took jobs in Paediatrics and Gynaecology at Matru Seva Sangh, Nagpur, then applied for postgraduation. The timing proved fortuitous. The GMC 1977 batch had swollen to 275 students — Union Health Minister Raj Narayan had expanded seats across India’s medical colleges — and GMC needed additional tutors and lecturers in a hurry. New posts opened. More PG seats followed.
Vandana seized the moment, choosing Community Medicine over Pharmacology. The choice surprised her. She had not liked Preventive and Social Medicine during her undergraduate years — few did. But the subject, encountered again as a postgraduate, revealed different dimensions. The teenage indifference became an adult fascination. She earned her MD in 1983, under Dr (Mrs) Vasudeo, with a thesis on the morbidity pattern of children aged five and younger.
A Life in Motion
What followed was a career that moved more than most. Vandana joined the Department of PSM at GMC Nagpur and taught there until 1992. She then served as Associate Professor at Shri Vasantrao Naik Government Medical College, Yavatmal. In between, she went to London — eighteen months at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, earning an MSc in Epidemiology from London University. The degree sharpened tools she had been using by instinct.
Back in India, she was appointed Senior Programme Officer at ORBIT, an international organisation funding projects in community ophthalmology. She moved to Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College at Sawangi, Wardha, as Professor of PSM and Medical Superintendent of the hospital simultaneously. Then Libya — two years teaching at Misurata University, a detour that most of her classmates would not have contemplated and Vandana took without apparent hesitation.
In 2011, she joined Azeezia Institute of Medical Sciences in Kollam, Kerala, as Professor and Head of the Department of Community Medicine. She also served briefly as Executive Director at Shri Aurobindo Hospital and Postgraduate Institute in Indore.
For four years running, she served as a full-time Medical Council of India inspector, travelling across the country to assess undergraduate medical programmes. She inspected no fewer than a hundred colleges. The work required rigour and the willingness to say uncomfortable things in formal reports — qualities that Vandana, who chose Community Medicine over comfort, had in sufficient supply.
What Community Medicine Is
The generation of GMC 1973 produced a handful of doctors who went into public health and community medicine rather than clinical practice: Nandkishor Kasturwar, Adesh Gadpayle, Ganesh Ramteke, CL Sonkusare, and Vandana Kamdar among them. These were not the glamorous choices. Surgery and medicine carried prestige; Preventive and Social Medicine carried a reputation for tedium that its most committed practitioners spent careers disputing.
Vandana’s trajectory — from a subject she disliked as a student to a department she eventually headed and an inspectorate she served as a national assessor — is its own argument in that dispute. The discipline that teaches doctors to look at populations rather than individual patients, to measure outcomes across communities rather than in wards, to think about why people fall ill before they fall ill: this was the work she chose to do, in Nagpur and Yavatmal and London and Libya and finally in the southernmost corner of the country, in God’s own country, where she now leads a department in a private medical college overlooking the backwaters of Kerala.
Abhishek, her elder son, is an engineer working with Cognizant in Miami, Florida. Alekh, her younger son, is a commercial pilot flying Boeing 737 aircraft with SpiceJet, based in Hyderabad — a career that took him through the Regional Airline Academy and Air America. Ajay, her husband, is a surgeon from the 1971 GMC batch.
The family spread itself across the country and across disciplines. Vandana went south and stayed. The backwaters, it seems, are a reasonable place to stop moving.