Devi Shetty, 67, Cardiac Surgeon

Dr Devi Shetty’s entire medical career and the success of Narayana Hrudalaya is a study in frugal innovation. So it was no surprise that he had the most radical yet simple solution to the pandemic: beds don’t treat patients, doctors do. Asking, along with Biocon CEO Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, for an imaginative approach to medical education, they showed that India could fulfil its immediate lack of trained doctors and nurses by waiving final exam results—that would yield about 50,000 more doctors and about 1.5 lakh-2 lakh nurses to be deployed across district hospitals as a flexible, moveable force.

He was one of the first to raise the alarm about the disease spreading to the interiors of India’s 740-odd districts where there is a lack of anaesthetists and ICU units. Shetty has long-term solutions as well, asking for a change in the way we design our health system, moving it to focus on surgeries rather than managing diseases, including infectious disease. Lack of basic surgeries such as emergency C-section, laparotomy and those for compound fractures kill about 17 million people annually in India alone.

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