Professor & Head of Orthopaedics \u00b7 Deputy Medical Superintendent \u00b7 Eight Years at Sevagram \u00b7 The Whim That Was Well-Placed<\/p>\n
Subhash Chandra Ahuja was born on March 6, 1943, in Multan \u2014 then Punjab, now Pakistan. Multan carries its own associations in the Indian cricketing imagination as the city where Virender Sehwag made his triple century in 2004; it carries a different kind of historical weight in the story of MGIMS, as the city where Dr. Sushila Nayar was present on January 30, 1948, investigating whether Hindus and Sikhs were facing threats in the region \u2014 the very day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi. After Partition, the Ahuja family resettled in Kanpur, as many Punjabi families did, beginning again with the particular determination of displacement.<\/p>\n
His father, Dr. Suraj Lal Ahuja, was a homoeopath. Subhash attended BNSD College in Kanpur and completed his high school in 1959, then entered G.S.V.M. Medical College, completing his MBBS between 1960 and 1965 with four gold and two silver medals. He completed his MS in Orthopaedics between 1967 and 1969, refined his skills at Willingdon Hospital, Delhi, and then spent nearly two years at Christian Medical College, Vellore \u2014 from July 1971 to April 1973 \u2014 before the morning newspaper and the Sevagram advertisement changed the trajectory of everything.<\/p>\n
He arrived on September 1, 1973, with his wife, a paediatrician \u2014 another of Dr. Nayar’s paired appointments, two specialists contributing to two departments, each one’s presence anchoring the other.<\/p>\n
Dr. A.N. Damle had worked in Orthopaedics for two years before Dr. Ahuja’s arrival and had left a month earlier, which meant the department was without leadership at the moment of transition. Six months after his arrival, Dr. R. Bhalla joined from Willingdon Hospital, and together they nurtured what they had.<\/p>\n
The unit began with thirty beds \u2014 twenty in Kasturba Hospital and ten in the Civil Hospital, Wardha. But Dr. Ahuja understood from the beginning that Orthopaedics at a rural teaching hospital serving the villages of Vidarbha was not merely a department that managed fractures and dislocations. He established a weekly Hand Clinic and a Polio Clinic at Kasturba Hospital. He set up a Leprosy Surgical Clinic at the Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation in Wardha. Fortnightly, he travelled to Deoli and Pulgaon to ensure that orthopaedic care reached patients who could not travel to Sevagram. He had come on a whim and was staying with a purpose that had nothing casual about it.<\/p>\n
In September 1975, he took up a government-approved deputation to Abadan, Iran. The department he left behind \u2014 handed to Dr. R.K. Belsare with only house surgeons and a three-hour weekly visit from Dr. Vikram Marwah \u2014 was inadequately covered for the workload it was carrying.<\/p>\n
The crisis compounded. Dr. V.N. Chaturvedi left on December 29, 1975. His wife, a Paediatrics lecturer, was also preparing to leave. The departure of both Mrs. Ahuja from Paediatrics and Mrs. Chaturvedi created a specific staffing emergency. Dr. Nayar wrote to Dr. Ahuja in September 1976 urging him not to extend his stay in Iran. Her letter was, at its core, a request to come home and continue what had been started. Dr. Ahuja returned on December 1, 1977.<\/p>\n
By the time he was back, Dr. S.A. Farooq had joined as Lecturer. The trio of Dr. Ahuja as Associate Professor, Dr. Belsare as Reader, and Dr. Farooq ran a department whose outpatient numbers had crossed six thousand annually, with major surgeries approaching three hundred per year. In 1980, the department recorded 1,458 admissions \u2014 managed by three doctors across thirty inpatient beds.<\/p>\n
He became Deputy Medical Superintendent in 1979. Promotions at MGIMS were slow, and teachers remained in the same post for years regardless of performance. Dr. Ahuja applied for a professorship in Maharashtra’s government medical colleges, was selected, and received a posting to Ambajogai. He returned to Sevagram with that government order in hand, and the demonstration of external recognition secured his professorship at MGIMS. It was not the most graceful path to a title that should have been his by natural progression, but it was the path available.<\/p>\n
On February 6, 1981, after nearly eight years across two tenures, Dr. Ahuja left MGIMS. He joined Christian Medical College, Ludhiana on the Monday following his departure \u2014 not a single day’s break in service. He rose to become Principal of CMC Ludhiana, serving four years before retirement.<\/p>\n
The department he left behind had fewer than ten research publications across its first decade \u2014 a modest academic output by the standards of the institutions where he had trained. But the measure of what he built was not in papers. It was in the outpatient numbers that had grown year by year, in the hand clinic and the polio clinic, in the leprosy surgical rehabilitation that brought reconstructive surgery to patients in Wardha who had no other option, in the fortnightly trips to Deoli and Pulgaon in an era when most orthopaedic surgeons with his credentials were in cities.<\/p>\n
He had found the advertisement in The Hindu on a morning he might have missed it, applied on a whim, and exchanged a glance worth eight years of building.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"