Devi Shetty: the surgeon who made heart operations affordable

A decision at fourteen

Devi Prasad Shetty was born on 8 May 1953 in Kinnigoli, a village in Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka. In 1967, when he was fourteen and studying at a school in Mangalore, the South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first human heart transplant. India Today records that Shetty was so struck by the news that he decided to become a heart surgeon.

He has also said that the respect people in his town showed doctors reinforced the ambition. He studied medicine at Kasturba Medical College in Mangalore, completing his MBBS in 1979 and then a master's degree in general surgery.

“Ultimately, we are all artists.”

— Devi Shetty, via NPR

Training in England, returning to India

In the 1980s India had little training or infrastructure for heart surgery. Shetty went to England, qualified as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and trained as a cardiac surgeon at two hospitals there, including Guy's Hospital in London.

He returned to India in 1989 and began operating in Kolkata. He has described that year, when he performed a hundred heart operations, as the moment he knew a revolution in Indian cardiac surgery was possible.

In 2001 he founded Narayana Hrudayalaya on the outskirts of Bengaluru, a hospital built around one idea: that heart surgery could be done well and at a far lower cost if a hospital did a very large number of operations. The chain, now called Narayana Health, has grown across India, and he remains its founder and chairman and still operates.

The Henry Ford of heart surgery

Journalists have often compared his hospitals to an assembly line. An NPR correspondent who watched him operate in 2015 described a building full of operating theatres working in parallel, and a surgeon who said he had never turned away a patient who could not pay.

NPR's reporter watched him repair the leaking heart valve of a six-year-old girl. Shetty explained that such repairs need a great deal of expertise and are done in very few centres in the world, and that his hospital had done thousands of them. He also told the reporter that heart disease was rising in India, which is why he believed the country needed heart surgery on a much larger scale.

In the same report Shetty explained that long operations, lasting six, eight or ten hours, need a calm environment, and that his teams play music in the theatre. He also insists that young surgeons at his teaching hospital attend painting classes, so that they learn to handle instruments like paint brushes.

His reputation reached beyond medicine. In 2021 the Karnataka government made him head of its COVID-19 task force, and he is widely called the Henry Ford of heart surgery. Wikipedia records that he has performed more than fifteen thousand heart operations.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was an early, clear goal. He decided at fourteen what he wanted, and every exam after that, from school to MBBS to the FRCS, was a step towards it.

The second was going wherever the training was. When India did not have the facilities he needed, he went to England, learned, and came back. The knowledge travelled with him.

The third was thinking about cost as a doctor's problem. Most surgeons focus only on the operation in front of them. Shetty asked how the same operation could reach a farmer's child, and built a hospital system to answer that question. Compassion and arithmetic worked together.