There is a cartoon that Meena Patil drew in the GMC college magazine \u2014 two women talking and watering a small plant; in the next frame, the plant has grown tall and flowered, and the women are still talking. Her classmate Prakash Wakode recalled it forty-five years later, which tells you something about the quality of the drawing and something about the woman who drew it. Meena has always had an eye for the long continuity of things \u2014 what grows slowly, what persists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meena was born in Hyderabad, though she belonged, as she would say, to Achalpur in Amravati district. Her father, Madhavrao Patil, served as a Member of Parliament from both Achalpur and Ramtek constituencies and sat on the state legislative committee. Public life was the atmosphere of her childhood. Her mother, Pratibha Patil, was a homemaker who died in February 2021 at the age of 86.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She attended several schools before finding her way to GMC: Rashtriya High School Achalpur, St Ursula High School Nagpur, Saraswati Vidyalaya Nagpur, CP and Berar High School Nagpur, and Vidarbha Mahavidyalaya Amravati. She entered Government Medical College, Nagpur, in 1973. After graduation and her rural internship at Rural Health and Training Center, Saoner, she enrolled in the MD programme in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, writing a thesis on elderly primipara supervised by Dr. Agrawal. She earned her MD in 1981 and completed her residency at Sion Hospital, Mumbai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1984, Meena began practice in Nagpur \u2014 first in Ramnagar, then in Dhantoli. For 13 years, she worked alone: no hospital infrastructure, no institutional support, no business partner. Just a consulting room, a patient list, and a steadily growing reputation built one delivery, one difficult case, one honest conversation at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solo practice for a gynaecologist in a city like Nagpur in the 1980s was not comfortable. It demanded confidence, clinical rigour, and an ability to handle complications without the safety net of a larger institution. Meena handled them. The 13 years were not transitional \u2014 they were foundational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1997, Meena built the Ketki Research Institute of Medical Sciences \u2014 KRIMS \u2014 in Ramdaspeth, Nagpur. It was not a small undertaking. The hospital grew into a large multi-specialty facility with a fully equipped ICU, NICU, Respiratory Critical Care Unit, Paediatric Critical Care Unit, and a post-surgery Critical Care Unit. It also housed Respiratory, Neuro, Trauma, Burn, and Dialysis centres. Meena served as executive director and as the hospital’s consultant gynaecologist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She ran it for two decades. Then, in 2017, she left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The circumstances of her departure from KRIMS are her own. She has not made them a subject of public account. She spent the following four years at Dr Bharti Taori’s Sneha Nursing Home, Ramdaspeth \u2014 a quieter practice, perhaps, but undiminished in care. In January 2021, she returned to KRIMS as a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist. The circle completed itself without bitterness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trajectory of Indian hospital medicine in the 1990s and 2000s moved rapidly toward corporatisation and institutional scale \u2014 the large multi-specialty hospital replaced the solo nursing home as the dominant model. Meena built within that model, shaped it, and when the time came, stepped away from it. That she returned on her own terms is consistent with the independence that characterised her thirteen solo years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her son Sameer completed his MBBS and MD in Pulmonology at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Sawangi, and now serves as Interventional Pulmonologist and Medical Director at KRIMS. He is married to Dr. Tulika Parasher, an aesthetic dermatologist. Their son was born in January 2021, the same month his grandmother rejoined the hospital his mother built.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her daughter Ketki holds an MBA in Hospital Administration and works at KRIMS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plant in the cartoon grew tall, and the women kept talking. Meena Patil drew that image when she was a medical student. She may not have known, then, that she was drawing her own story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"