Shared Vision
Over time, my wife Susmita and I have been privileged to engage with a few truly great institutions. They have enabled us to give our little might to make the world a better place. Our quest has always been simple: we work with a very select set of institutions who stand apart on four counts: shared vision with us, deep expertise at what they do, their ability to scale and finally, their institutional governance. Here are a few of institutions with whom we have done some fulfilling work.
Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
One day, Partha my Mindtree co-founder, dropped in at home to seek advice on a project he and his wife Radha wanted to support. I had no idea what it was about. Partha sat down in my study to explain how IISc wanted to bring in medicine to its existing realm of science and engineering.
Halfway through the conversation, I called Susmita and both of us were so smitten with the lofty dreams of IISc that we asked Partha to take us along to meet Professor Rangarajan Govindan, the Director. The result was the beginning of the Bagchi-Parthasarathy Hospital. See more at this beautiful video by Mayur Channagere.
Sri Shankara Cancer Foundation
It was COVID time and the Pandemic was raging everywhere. Susmita and I, like many others, were spending a lot of time at home during the lockdown. It is then that she started envisioning a large medical infrastructure for Odisha. As we started shaping the idea in our mind, cancer emerged as a priority.
With no expertise in the area, we began tapping into multiple sources for guidance and this took us to Dr Srinath BS, the founder of Sri Shankara Cancer Foundation in Bengaluru. He thought we wanted his advice on how to set up and run a cancer hospital. He was completely taken aback when we said, no. We wanted to simply gift it to someone like him who could perhaps set up a world-class cancer hospital in our State. See more in this great narrative by Nilamadhab Panda.
Karunashraya – Bangalore Hospice Trust
Every time, Susmita and I used to cross Karunashraya in Whitefield, Bengaluru, we used to say to ourselves, one day let us go and see the place. We had known about their selfless work to provide end-of-life care for terminal cancer patients who would no longer respond to treatment. We had heard how the institution provides world-class care to such patients, completely free of charge.
Call it serendipity, one day I got a call from Kishore Rao, at the time, Managing Trustee to come and facilitate a visioning exercise for them. They were looking at Karunashraya’s next 25 years. I readily agreed. During the course of that exercise, Susmita and I fell in love with the institution. Little did we know, that one day, our association will lead to the creation of the Bagchi Karunashraya Centre for Palliative Care in Bhubaneswar.
Ahmedabad University
I got to know Professor Pankaj Chandra when he was director of the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru. I used to be on their governing board. In the process, I developed a great affective regard for him. Later, I invited him to join the Mindtree board as an independent director. During this time, Susmita got to socially interact with him and like me, she too admired his world-view.
As time went by, he was chosen to lead the Ahmedabad university as its vice-chancellor. Ahmedabd University is a great institution based on the idea of multi-disciplinary research. This is how we thought of reaching out to him when the thought of creating a School of Public Health came to our mind. The result was Bagchi School of Public Health. More on that here.
JPM Rotary Hospital
It was a dark night on a rural road somewhere near Jajpur in Odisha. Suddenly, the headlights of the vehicle shone on a small sign that said, Taliha. Susmita perked up. That is our ancestral village, she said. I told the driver to stop right there and we detoured to Taliha. We found a small village, fast asleep, engulfed in darkness.
There, the idea of setting up an eye hospital germinated in our minds. Upon our return to Bhubaneswar, we reached out to the management of the JPM Rotary Hospital in Cuttack that has been doing yeoman work for decades. The result has been the JPM Rotary – Adikanda Panda Memorial Eye Hospital in Taliha.
Swasthya Swaraj
I had heard about them; they did not know me at all. I was in awe of the founder, Sister Aquinas, a medical doctor from Kerala, who has given her life to serve the poor tribals in the Thuamul Rampur hills of Kalahandi. I wanted to visit her, see her work. She gets many such calls; some come and go.
Some help. She did not really know what to expect of me. One day, she was really surprised when I landed up. What I saw was far ahead of what I had heard of her and her work. Inspired by the great work she and her team do, Susmita and I helped her to build a permanent hospital facility, along with a few other like-minded folks. But more than that, see this video on them to get inspired.
Aravind Eye Hospital
One of the greatest influences on my life has been Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy, the man who built the world’s largest eye hospital, Aravind Eye. His life is an example of great vision, selfless work and institution building.
We were privileged to work with Aravind Eye in setting up a few rural vision centres in Tamil Nadu, contributed to research in building a predictive model for retinopathy among people with diabetes and screening of newborn babies at high risk of visual complications. Watch this inspiring story behind the building of Aravind Eye in this video.