Devi Prasad Shetty is an Indian entrepreneur and cardiac surgeon who is the chairman and founder of Narayana Health, a chain of 21 medical centers in India.
Shetty was born on 8 May 1953 in Kinnigoli, a village in the Dakshina Kannada district, Karnataka, India. He was educated at St. Aloysius School, Mangaluru. He completed his MBBS in 1979, and post-graduate work in General Surgery at Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore.
He decided to become a heart surgeon when he was a school student after hearing about Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon who had just performed the world’s first heart transplant.
He completed FRCS from the Royal College of Surgeons, England.
He returned to India in 1989 and initially worked at B.M. Birla Hospital in Kolkata. He successfully performed the first neonatal heart surgery in the country in 1992, on a 21-day-old baby Ronnie. 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.
He has performed more than 100,000 heart operations. In 2004 he was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award, followed by the Padma Bhushan in 2012, the third highest civilian award by the Government of India for his contribution to the field of affordable healthcare. There is an episode about his life and work on the Netflix TV series The Surgeon’s Cut.
In 2001, Shetty founded Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH), a multi-specialty hospital in Bommasandra on the outskirts of Bangalore. He believes that the cost of healthcare can be reduced by 50 percent in the next 5–10 years if hospitals adopt the idea of economies of scale.
Shetty also founded Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences (RTIICS) in Kolkata and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Karnataka Government to build a 5,000-bed specialty hospital near Bangalore International Airport. His company signed an MOU with the Government of Gujarat, to set up a 5,000-bed hospital in Ahmedabad.
He was a part of the seven-member panel of the Board of Governors which replaced the MCI and served for a period of one year before it was further reconstituted.
Shetty aims for his hospitals to use economies of scale, to allow them to complete heart surgeries at a lower cost than in the United States. In 2009 The Wall Street Journal newspaper described him as “the Henry Ford of heart surgery”.
His hospitals also provide substantial free care, especially for poor children. Whereas urban India calls him “Henry Ford” for his assembly line approach to heart surgeries, rural Indians call him “Bypasswale Baba” as attested by thousands of sources such as the Deccan Herald, the English newspaper with the largest circulation in Karnataka, Shetty’s home state. This is because, like a saint (or Rishi in Indian mythology), anybody who comes to Devi Shetty’s Ashram/hospital gets a bypass if he or she dreams of it.
Yeshasvini is a low-cost health insurance scheme, designed by Shetty and the Government of Karnataka for the poor farmers of the state, with 4 million people currently covered.
