Who is Devi Shetty, head of Karnataka’s Covid task force?

Known as 'the Henry Ford of heart surgery', Shetty has worked to make heart surgery cheaper for India’s poor

Noted cardiac surgeon Devi Prasad Shetty has been appointed to lead Karnataka’s task force to prepare the state for a third wave of Covid-19 a day after the Karnataka High Court asked the state government to present a road map of how it plans to tackle a third Covid-19 wave.

Read | Karnataka picks Dr Devi Shetty for third Covid-19 wave team

India should move as fast as possible to secure at least 300-400 million doses of vaccines through a single channel, Shetty said in an interview with Moneycontrol. He laid out his three-pronged strategy solution to speed up the pace of vaccination, saying India should buy as one, buy in bulk and work with private hospitals.

Shetty is the founder and chairman of Narayana Health, a chain of 21 medical centres across the country. Known as “Bypasswale Baba” in rural India, and once called the "the Henry Ford of heart surgery" by The Wall Street Journal, he is credited with making heart surgery affordable for millions in India, bringing down the price of bypass surgery in the country to one-tenth the price in the United States.

The doctor’s Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bengaluru performs 30 surgeries every day and is the world’s largest heart hospital with over 1,000 beds. Shetty himself has performed 15,000 heart operations over his career.

The Yeshasvini scheme, a low-cost health insurance programme for poor farmers of Karnataka, is Shetty’s brainchild and covers more than four million people for about 830 kinds of surgery. His focus on providing affordable healthcare to the poorest sections of society changed the landscape of rural healthcare and earned him the Padma Shri in 2004, followed by the Padma Bhushan in 2012.

Shetty had even treated Mother Teresa in 1984 after she suffered a heart attack and cared for her over the next five years.

With his focus set firmly on making quality healthcare cheaper, Shetty has founded the Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences in Kolkata, and inked an agreement with the Karnataka Government to build a 5,000-bed specialty hospital near Bangalore International Airport. He has also signed a deal with the Gujarat government, to establish another 5,000-bed hospital at Ahmedabad.