On his birthday, Padmakar Somvanshi does not accept gifts. He accepts blood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For nearly four decades, he has organised donation camps on 15 July each year, and the rule is fixed: anyone who comes to wish him must first give a unit of blood. It is not a quirk. It is a statement about what medicine is for \u2014 and a fair summary of the man who made it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Padmakar was born in Kamalapur, a small settlement in Morshi taluka of Amravati district, to a schoolteacher. The village was modest, the schooling local. He went to Janata Vidyalaya in Nerpinglai before moving to Shivaji Science College in Amravati for his premedical year. In 1973, he joined Government Medical College, Nagpur \u2014 one of the large Vidarbha cohort that would define the batch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation, he interned at Wadner primary health centre, 70 kilometres southwest of Nagpur in Wardha district, alongside Shyam Bawage, Satish Bhaskarwar, Balkrishna Tayade, and Sudhakar Sawdatkar. The PHC was short of everything except patients. It was useful preparation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He returned to GMC Nagpur for his MD in Medicine, working under Dr. Kshirsagar. His thesis examined the clinical profile of acute gastroenteritis \u2014 a common enough illness, but one that still killed children across rural Maharashtra at a rate that demanded attention. He earned his MD in 1982.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What followed was a career spent, almost entirely, inside public medical colleges \u2014 as teacher, administrator, and eventually as the person other administrators called when things went wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Padmakar joined the Department of Medicine at GMC Nagpur immediately after postgraduation, moving between the main college and Indira Gandhi Government Medical College as lecturer and then reader from 1981 to 1987. In 1987 he crossed the city to Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh Memorial Medical College, Amravati \u2014 a newer institution that needed building. He became Reader in Medicine, then Professor in 1988. By 1997 he was Dean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He held the deanship until 2010 \u2014 thirteen years that included the college’s period of fastest growth, its affiliation struggles, and the persistent tension between clinical teaching and administrative compliance that occupies every dean of a government medical college. He has served on the Medical Council of India, on the Senate of the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences in Nashik, and as a member of the Faculty of Medicine \u2014 the kind of overlapping commitments that make reform possible, slowly, in Indian medical education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He is one of six classmates from the GMC 1973 batch to have served as dean of a medical college. The others are Madhukar Parchand in Kolhapur, Prakash Wakode at IGGMC Nagpur, Abhimanyu Niswade at GMC Nagpur, Vinayak Sabnis at K.J. Somaiya in Mumbai, and Narayan Umale at Rajendra Gode Medical College in Amravati. That six doctors from a single batch rose to lead institutions scattered across Maharashtra says something about the generation \u2014 and something about the college that trained them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Padmakar retired as Dean on 30 December 2021. He did not stop working. He now heads the Department of Emergency Medicine at Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh Medical College \u2014 a specialty he took up late, in the knowledge that emergency medicine in India remains chronically understaffed and underbuilt. He also serves as State Vice President of the Indian Medical Association, Maharashtra, and as Divisional Medical Referee for the Life Insurance Corporation in the Amravati division \u2014 roles that keep him in motion long after the deanship ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His wife Pushpa is a Professor and Head of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the same college. She pioneered Non-Descent Vaginal Hysterectomy in the region and established Central India’s first Human Milk Bank \u2014 work that has measurably changed maternal outcomes for women in eastern Maharashtra. She serves as Principal Investigator in a collaborative research project with Harvard University. Padmakar describes her contributions with a pride that is entirely unguarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Their daughter Amyukta earned the Chhatrapati Award as an international athlete before moving into journalism and then communications consultancy. Their son Ajinkya directs the FASTag tolling category at BlackBuck, one of India’s largest logistics platforms. Both carry, as their father would put it, an adventurous and socially minded streak \u2014 a trait the family does not appear to have left to chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When asked how he practices clinical medicine, Padmakar reaches for an image. “If computers could make the diagnosis and there was a pill for every ill, this world would not need doctors. You would only need vending machines to eject prescription slips.” He pauses. “Human beings are nature’s supreme creation. Much as we envy and hate other human beings, we will always need them. A humane doctor will always be required to comfort and heal.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The blood donation camps are, in their way, a physical extension of this belief. Medicine is not a transaction. It is an obligation \u2014 freely given, on a fixed date, in exchange for nothing except the greeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He turns the logic around quietly on his birthday each year, and the donors keep coming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"