Every weekday, Milind Dangre sees about 50 patients at his clinic on Wardha Road. One in five pays nothing. This has been true for 40 years. His consultation fee when he started, in the early 1980s, was Rs 2.50. The number has risen since, but the principle has not moved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I must be one of the most middle-class doctors among private practitioners in Nagpur,” he says, with something that sounds more like pride than complaint. “And I am proud of this financial status.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Milind was born in Nagpur, the son of a man who was simultaneously a journalist, a dramatist, and a freedom fighter \u2014 and who had refused every privilege the Government of India offered to those who had struggled for independence, including the Tamra Patra<\/em>. He led a principle-led life and expected his household to do the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That formation shows. Milind went to Sule Mahila School for his primary years, then to New English High School at Congress Nagar \u2014 where he shared a long friendship with Ajit Pradhan \u2014 and on to Shivaji Science College, Nagpur, before entering Government Medical College in 1973. For his internship, he chose the primary health centre at Kuhi, 40 km southeast of Nagpur, spending six months alongside Ashok Badhe and Harshvardhan Sheorey. He began his private practice in Nagpur soon after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n General practice in Maharashtra in the 1980s was not the diminished career it would later become \u2014 sidelined by specialists, undercut by corporate hospitals, and abandoned by the brightest students. Milind entered it at the end of its last confident decade, and he built his practice on a foundation that would have seemed ordinary then and seems almost eccentric now: see every patient who comes, charge what they can pay, and treat the fifth one free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He has never stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 40 years of practice, Milind has not admitted the kind of cases that require critical care facilities he does not have. He sees outpatients \u2014 close to 50 a day \u2014 and refers what needs referring. His fees remain, by Nagpur standards, deliberately modest. “When power and wealth become the goal of the average physician,” he says, “the poor will find no place in the minds or hearts of their physicians.” He is aware that he is describing a condition he has spent four decades trying not to embody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not known to many of his patients, or even to close friends and family, Milind has spent his weekends for years doing something that his father would have recognised immediately. A group of six friends identifies a village in Vidarbha or Chhattisgarh, finds its most pressing problem, and helps the community fix it. On several occasions the group has done what Milind calls voluntary labour \u2014 cleaning drains, sweeping streets, the work that carries no credit and leaves no record. “I wanted to give something back to society,” he says, “and wanted to repay the social debt incognito.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He has also written Marathi ghazals for several years. The poet Manik Godghate \u2014 known as Poet Grace \u2014 read them and approved. At the Maharashtra Sahitya Sammelan in Pune in 2007, Milind won second prize for extempore poetry. A collection of Marathi ghazals was ready for publication. A novel, unnamed, was in progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The practice runs. The weekends fill. The poetry accumulates. None of it is announced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n\n\nThe Practice<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n\n\nThe Secret Life<\/h3>\n\n\n