The record on PD Parmar is thinner than most. He came from RLT College, Akola \u2014 that reliable feeder institution which sent multiple students to GMC Nagpur in 1973 \u2014 graduated, went to Mumbai, spent a long career in the ESIS hospital system, and eventually settled into a position as Health Officer at the District Court in Chembur. His brothers are in Akola. The details are few. The outline is plain. And yet it is an outline worth drawing, because it belongs to a category of medical career that the archive risks under-representing: the doctor who did not seek recognition, did not build a hospital or found an institution, did not accumulate prizes or publications, but showed up, worked honestly, and served a defined community for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ESIS System and the Invisible Work<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Employee’s State Insurance Scheme hospital network in Maharashtra is not a glamorous system. It serves industrial workers and their families \u2014 a population defined by its labour, its exposure to occupational hazards, and its limited access to private care. The doctors inside it worked, for much of the post-Independence decades, without the recognition that accrued to specialists in private hospitals or academics in teaching institutions. Eleven doctors from the GMC Nagpur class of 1973 served in ESIS hospitals at various points in their careers: Pratibha Thakre-Deshmukh, Avinash Joshi, Shashikant Khaire, Mahendra Sawarkar, Sudhakar Dupare, Hema Deoras, Arun Deshmukh, Ganeshgir Gosavi, Ashok Gambhir, and Chandra Mohan Singh Hajari among them. PD Parmar was part of this cohort \u2014 a doctor whose professional life was spent inside a system designed not for individual distinction but for consistent, accessible care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The structure of ESIS service shaped the practice. A listed doctor in an ESIS hospital serves a defined catchment of families \u2014 close to a thousand families per doctor at peak load \u2014 and provides outpatient services, referrals to specialists, and assessments for temporary and permanent disability. The work is repetitive in the way that all general practice is repetitive: the same presentations, the same anxieties, the same negotiations between what can be treated and what must be referred. What it requires, more than brilliance, is reliability. The patient who comes at eight in the morning and finds the doctor present has already received something of value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Parmar provided that reliability. For how long exactly, across how many ESIS hospitals, in which years \u2014 the record does not say with the precision it offers for those who kept journals or returned calls from SP Kalantri’s patient telephone surveys. What it says is that he was there, and that the system worked, in part, because people like him were there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The District Court and the Long Finish<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n His move to the position of Health Officer at the District Court, Chembur, represents a different kind of public service \u2014 institutional medicine in a legal setting, which carries its own demands. Health Officers in district courts manage the medical needs of a complex population: court staff, lawyers, litigants, and the particular category of people who arrive at a courthouse in states of physical or psychological crisis. The work requires clinical competence, administrative capacity, and the ability to function without the collegial support that hospital medicine provides. Parmar, in Chembur, worked in exactly this setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His brothers remain in Akola. He remained in Mumbai. The separation is common among doctors of his generation who followed their practice to the cities and found, after decades, that the city had become home. The ties to Akola \u2014 to the family that shaped him, to the college that sent him to GMC Nagpur \u2014 are maintained across the distance, as such ties are: by telephone, by occasional visits, by the shared memory of a place that made them what they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Life in Plain Service<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The archive exists, in part, to honour lives like this one. Not every career produces a published paper or a hospital founded or a national award presented by the President of India. Most careers produce something quieter and, in aggregate, more important: patients seen, families reassured, problems diagnosed and referred in time. PD Parmar’s career produced that. The institutional biography \u2014 ESIS hospital service, Health Officer, Chembur \u2014 is a map of a working life given without fanfare to the public health of a city that absorbs such contributions without acknowledgment and depends on them without knowing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He did not come to the class reunion in December 2013. Whether the absence was a matter of distance, or preference, or the kind of quiet self-effacement that defines certain people, the record does not say. What it says is that Roll No. 162 of the GMC Nagpur class of 1973 graduated, went to Mumbai, worked for decades in the public system, and built a life that was, by any honest measure, useful. That is not nothing. In medicine, it is very nearly everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The class of 1973 produced neurologists who became presidents of national academies, surgeons who repaired twenty thousand cataracts, physicians who served as personal doctors to Presidents of India. It also produced PD Parmar \u2014 a man who worked in the ESIS system in Mumbai, kept his patients’ appointments, and went home each evening to Chembur. The archive holds his name and holds it with the same respect it accords to everyone in it, because the respect is not conditional on the size of the achievement. It is conditional on the sincerity of the effort. Of that, there is no doubt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"