Early Life and Career
He spent his early childhood in Kolkata and later his family settled in Dhaka. He was one of ten children born to his parents. After attending Nabakumar School at Bakshibazar, he studied at Dhaka College. He studied medicine at Dhaka Medical College, where he got involved with leftist political ideologies. As the general secretary of the Dhaka Medical College students’ union, he held a press conference to expose the corruption at the hospital. After a turbulent student life, he finished his MBBS degree in 1964 and left for the UK for post-graduate studies in general and vascular surgery. In 1971 when the independence war started, he returned home.
He was involved in setting up the 480-bed Bangladesh Field Hospital for freedom fighters and the refugees. The hospital was run by a team of Bangladeshi doctors, medical students and volunteers. Women with no previous training in healthcare were trained within days to help out the patients. This experience in the field hospital led him to believe that an effective healthcare delivery system can be developed in rural Bangladesh by training women as a primary healthcare delivery platform. This achieved worldwide credibility when it was eventually published in The Lancet.
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