Ashwin Balachand Mehta

Ashwin Balachand Mehta is a cardiologist with a career of more than 50 years in Mumbai. He was named for the Padma Bhushan in 2024 in the field of medicine, from Maharashtra ^[1]. He had earlier received the Padma Shri in 2004 ^[2].

Free care and teaching

Mehta was born on 3 March 1939 and won 19 gold medals and distinctions during his MBBS and MD studies ^[2]. From 1967 he worked without pay at the public Sion Hospital in Mumbai for more than 30 years, treating thousands of patients free of charge ^[2]. He also held free check-up camps in towns such as Rajkot, Porbandar and Kolhapur and taught angioplasty to local doctors ^[2].

He set up modern cardiology departments at Jaslok Hospital and at LTM Medical College, Mumbai, and has been invited to demonstrate angioplasty in France, Japan, China, Italy, the USA, Sri Lanka and Singapore ^[2].

New procedures

His citation credits him with a series of early steps in Indian cardiology ^[2]:

• starting angiography in 1973 and angioplasty in 1988;
• catheterisation of newborn babies in 1973;
• the first 2D echocardiography in Maharashtra;
• pioneering primary angioplasty for heart attacks, with a paper on it in 1993;
• the first drug-eluting stent implanted in India, in 2002;
• the first transcatheter aortic valve replacement in western India, in 2013.

Honours

Besides the Padma Shri, he has received the Maharashtra Gaurav award (2004) and several lifetime achievement awards from cardiology societies ^[2].