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The instalment number four of our special feature on Indian Entrepreneurs who have made hay while the sun shone on them is here, with mini profiles of some extraordinary persona from the Indian corporate world. They have not only made it big, but have de facto set a standard, or raised the bar for others to follow through their remarkable doings, their indomitable spirit, attention to detail, attitude and approach to organisation building, wealth creation, raising human capital and the yeoman service to the community that they have rendered. Each one of them is truly a success story, an inspirational narrative that can motivate others to address spiralling aspirations. Read on and get inspired ! …

Dr. Naresh Treha Ma

Dr. Trehan is today a renowned cardiov-ascular and cardiothoracic surgeon, and recognition for his work is reflected in the Padmashri, Padmabhushan and Lal Bahadur Shastri national awards he has been conferred with. He has also been serving as a personal surgeon to the President of India since 1991. Young Naresh’s life was shaped and forged by early memories of his parents – well-to-do doctors in what is today Pakistan, who lost everything overnight. “A year after I was born in Karachi on August 12, 1946, Partition brought us to Delhi. Me and my elder sister Neena, my Punjabi father, an ENT specialist; and my Sindhi mother, a gynaecologist lived in a three-room flat in CP. My parents occupied a room each for their practice, leaving one room for the four of us to live in.” These circumstances of life led Naresh to inexorably get drawn to medicine. “Growing up amidst patients, I came to appreciate the gratification that comes from being a doctor. There was also the example set by my father, who never accepted payment from poor pa – tients, but they would would try to repay us … there was this shoe-maker who would make footwear for the family, this cook at the Chelmsford Club who’d bring chicken curry for us …”

After his mandatory one-year house surgeonship, he moved to the US in 1969 for further studies. His career began with the New York University Medical Centre at Manhattan, where he worked from 1971 to 1988, and by the late 80s he was an acclaimed and sought-after heart surgeon notching up earnings of over one million dollars a year. While most who taste such success choose to stay on in the US, Trehan opted to return home instead.

Once back in Delhi, he founded the Escorts Heart Institute & Research Centre, a pioneering, state-of-the-art, one-of-its-kind heartcare facility. Trehan served as its Executive Director & Chief Cardiovascular Surgeon until 2007, when he left EHIRC to give shape to his own dream project, the Medanta Medic – ity, an INR 1250 Crore iconic multi-super- specialty hospital, spread over 45 acres at Gurgaon city in the NCR. The Medicity is a 1500-bed hospital with 45 operating theatres, catering to over 20 super-specialties and offering not only state-of-the-art medical facilities, but also cutting-edge surgical technologies and superlative healthcare services.

This establishment has today become an important landmark the world over in cardiology and cardiac surgery, having successfully performed over 48,000 open-heart surgeries. Its Chairman and MD Naresh Trehan, the cardiac surgeon-turned-entrepreneur, is now busy writing a new prescription for success like a man possessed, working hard to match the highest standards of healthcare delivery across the world, more specifically on the lines of a Mayo, Cleveland, Harvard and John Hopkins. Trehan strongly believes that to be healthy one must be multidimensional, and is the person behind “Flying Doctors,” a squadron of super achievers who fly around Asia on stateof-the-art air ambulances to treat critical patients wherever they be. He is also an influentialmember of the Key Advisory Group of the Indian Health Ministry, ardently persuading the Government to move towards the goal of universal and ubiquitous access to healthcare via the public-private partnership route. And on that front, there is indeed no gainsaying that India needs to seriously upscale and enhance its healthcare infrastructure to achieve that goal. Apropos while conceptually Medanta seems to be on course and pushing all the right buttons to match the standards of clinical care offered by the likes of Mayo/Harvard and Cleveland Clinics, in reality it surely is going to be an acid-test for it to make medical care affordable for all and sundry in the long run.

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