For 17 of the 24 years Rajiv Garg spent at the ESI Hospital in Noida, the hospital was two kilometres from his home. He has mentioned this fact with a particular satisfaction \u2014 not as evidence of comfort, but as evidence of clarity. He knew what he wanted from his professional life and he arranged his life to match. The ESI system, which exists to provide health care to industrial workers and their families, is not a route to fame or high fees. It is a route to sustained, unglamorous, ethically clean medicine practised on people who cannot afford private alternatives. Rajiv chose it, stayed in it for more than three decades, and built something durable inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rajiv was born in Kaservakala, a village in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, 122 kilometres north of Delhi on the Grand Trunk Road. His father, a civil engineer with the Central Public Works Department, was transferred regularly \u2014 to Manipur, to Nagpur, to various stations across India \u2014 and Rajiv’s schooling moved with him: Central School in Imphal, Government Model School in Delhi, Central School at Seminary Hills in Nagpur. He completed his pre-medical year at St. Francis de Sales College in Nagpur, a college that also sent Aziz Khan, Tapash Saha, Dilip Gohokar, Sharad Jaitly, and Murtaza Akhtar to Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His rural internship was at Karanja Ghadge, 130 kilometres south of Nagpur, alongside Kailash Murarka, Ravi Kasat, Harish Baheti, Madhusudan Bagdia, and Nandkishor Salampuria. The urban segment followed at GMC Nagpur. After internship, he left for Delhi, where his parents had settled, and secured an ICMR scholarship to pursue MD (Medicine) at Banaras Hindu University. Under Dr. HS Bajpai, he wrote a thesis examining how leprosy affects endocrine function \u2014 a question combining clinical medicine with a disease that affects millions across rural India. He earned his MD in 1982.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What followed was a sequence of government postings: Senior Resident at Safdarjung Hospital (1983\u201386), Pool Officer at Lady Hardinge Medical College (1986\u201389), and then 31 years at the ESI Hospital, Sector 24, Noida. He retired as Senior Medical Specialist in June 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Within the ESIS structure, Rajiv found a particular interest in occupational health \u2014 the medicine of the workplace, the management of industrial disease, the intersection of employment conditions and human physiology. In the mid-1990s there was no active branch of the Indian Association of Occupational Health in Delhi. Rajiv started one. He served as founding secretary, organised two national conferences (2001 and 2012), represented India at an American College of Occupational Health conference in Orlando, and held a World Health Organization fellowship that took him to Vietnam. Over 16 years of active IAOH engagement, he built occupational medicine into a serious subspecialty presence in the capital region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2003, he turned a similar attention toward fitness and health \u2014 forming a Medical Fitness Society that brought physicians, fitness trainers, and nutritionists together around preventive medicine. The society has run eight annual national conferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rajiv’s view of the medical profession is held with visible feeling. Medicine, he says, has dropped from the top position in public esteem to fifth, pushed down by corporate interests, pharmaceutical lobbying, legal pressure, and marketing. He does not say this as complaint \u2014 he says it as diagnosis, and like a good clinician, he follows the diagnosis with a prescription: the medical fraternity must unite around ethics, morality, and concern for the common person, and recover the ground it has lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not a fashionable position. It requires believing that professional ethics, practised collectively, can change the conditions under which medicine is practised. Rajiv believes it. His career \u2014 inside a public health system, building institutions around prevention and occupational welfare, working two kilometres from home for 17 years \u2014 is what believing it looks like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n