Devi Shetty
Devi Prasad Shetty (born 8 May 1953) is an Indian philanthropist and a cardiac surgeon. He has leveraged economies of scale to provide affordable healthcare. He was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award, in 2004, followed by the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award, in 2012, by the Government of India for his contribution to the field of affordable healthcare.
Life and career
Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty is chairman and Founder, Narayana Health (Narayana Hrudayalaya is now Narayana Health).
Devi Shetty was born at Kinnigoli village Dakshina Kannada district, Karnataka, India. The eighth of nine children, he decided to become a heart surgeon when he was in tenth grade at school after hearing about Dr. Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon who had just performed the world's first heart transplant.
After completing his graduate degree in Medicine and post-graduate work in General Surgery from Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, he trained in cardiac surgery at Guy's Hospital in the United Kingdom. He returned to India in 1989 and initially worked at B.M. Birla Hospital in Kolkata. He performed the first neonatal heart surgery in the country on a 9-day-old baby named "Ronnie" 1992 a successful operation in medical history. In Kolkata he operated on Mother Teresa after she had a heart attack and subsequently served as her personal physician. After some time, he moved to Bangalore and started the Manipal Heart Foundation at Manipal Hospitals, Bangalore. Financial contribution for the construction of the hospital was provided by Shetty's father-in-law. He was elected as the chief patron of Indian Association of Clinical Cardiologists during the annual scientific session IACCCON 2013 at Bangalore.
