Lata Desai

Lata Desai is a paediatrician and a founding trustee of SEWA Rural, which has worked since 1980 for the health, education and welfare of tribal communities in Gujarat. She is also president of the Sharada Mahila Vikas Society. She was named for the Padma Shri in 2022 in the field of medicine, from Gujarat ^[1].

Doctors in uniform and abroad

Desai was born on 8 August 1941 into a family of freedom fighters, and graduated from B. J. Medical College, Ahmedabad, in 1965 ^[2]. Soon after the 1965 war she and her husband, Dr Anil Desai, joined the Army ^[2]. They later went back to college for postgraduate degrees, she in paediatrics, and from 1971 to 1979 lived in the United States, where she qualified with the American Board of Pediatrics ^[2].

SEWA Rural

Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda, in 1980 she and like-minded colleagues founded SEWA Rural (Society for Education, Welfare and Action – Rural) at Jhagadia, in a neglected tribal area of Bharuch district ^[2]. It began with a small hospital and added outreach health services and programmes for women and young people ^[2]. Its 250-bed hospital has treated about 23 lakh patients, most of them free, and its outreach work has been credited with a large fall in maternal deaths in the area and with eye operations for about 1.25 lakh people ^[2]. Young people from 3,500 poor families have received a year of residential industrial training, and most found jobs ^[2].

SEWA Rural’s health training centre has trained thousands of health workers from more than 150 organisations, and its research has appeared in international journals ^[2]. Her honours include the WHO’s Sasakawa Health Prize in 1985 and a MacArthur award in 2007 for work on the health of mothers and babies ^[2].