The government did not always post him where he wanted to go. He had volunteered for Melghat \u2014 the tribal belt in Amravati district, among the most neglected areas in Maharashtra. The government sent him somewhere else. So Sudhir Sathe did what he always did: he showed up and got on with it. Over thirty years, he moved through a string of rural and tribal postings \u2014 Dhanora, Dondaicha, Sindhkheda, Jalgaon, Muktai Nagar, Navapur, Nandurbar, Ranala \u2014 and wherever he went, he operated. Often without an anaesthesiologist. Sometimes without a blood bank. Once, at Toranmal, a village in Nandurbar district 1,100 metres above sea level where the only way in was an eight-hour walk through hill country, he organised a laparoscopic sterilisation camp for women who had never in their lives been offered a choice about how many children they would bear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sudhir was born in Bhandara to a couple who taught. His father taught at Manora High School; his mother taught Marathi and Sanskrit at Dharampeth High School, Nagpur. He did his primary schooling at CP and Berar High School, Nagpur, and his secondary and higher secondary at Dharampeth High School. A year at Dharampeth College, another year at the Institute of Science, and in 1973 he entered Government Medical College, Nagpur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At GMC, he served as secretary of the Rotaract Club and was an active member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh \u2014 simultaneously organising students and teaching young people in an organisation whose ethos of service he found natural. During his internship at Tiroda primary health centre, with Sanjeev Saoji, Madhukar Lanje, and Deonath Nimje, he organised a polio surgical correction camp and a cleft lip and palate repair camp. He persuaded GMC Dean Vikram Marwah \u2014 whom he knew well enough to approach directly \u2014 to dispatch a team of plastic surgeons to the PHC. He was twenty-three years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He returned to GMC Nagpur for his MD in Obstetrics & Gynaecology, completing it in 1981 under Dr. Asha Deshpande. His thesis examined blood loss during medical termination of pregnancy by suction evacuation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The early eighties were not hospitable to male gynaecologists in Vidarbha. Women came to female doctors; male specialists were viewed with suspicion. Private practice was not viable. Sudhir applied for government postings and discovered that he was too blunt for the bureaucratic politics that governed transfers and appointments. He was, by his own account, the kind of man who said what he thought to people who preferred accommodation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government sent him where the government chose. At Dhanora, his first posting, he performed a Caesarean Section with no blood bank, no anaesthesiologist, and equipment that fell well short of what the procedure demanded. He did it. He moved on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over three decades, the postings accumulated: Dhanora, Dondaicha, Sindhkheda, Jalgaon, Muktai Nagar, Navapur, Nandurbar, Ranala<\/em> \u2014 a cartography of Maharashtra’s underserved margins. He performed more than 16,000 family planning operations, almost all by laparoscopic technique. He received state awards for consecutive years for outstanding work in blindness reduction at Sindhkheda in 1997 and 1998. Although trained as a gynaecologist, he operated on bladder stones, intestinal obstructions, and inflamed appendices. He doubled as his own anaesthesiologist when none was available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Toranmal camp, in 2002, was perhaps the most extreme example. The village was accessible only on foot, eight to ten hours through hill country. He went anyway. Women came \u2014 women with nine, twelve, fifteen previous pregnancies, some of them carrying children they had not chosen and would not have chosen, had choice been available to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n India in the 1980s and 1990s was moving its best doctors toward cities and private hospitals. The logic was economic and irresistible. Sudhir moved in the opposite direction, not from indifference to economics but from a sense that the work in the margins was the work worth doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He retired as Class I Medical Superintendent from Rawala in October 2012. His wife Nutan worked as a staff nurse throughout. Their daughters both became pharmacists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I am highly satisfied with my work,” he said. “I have enjoyed working for people for whom modern medicine was a distant dream.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"