Dr Naresh Trehan (born 12 August 1946) is an Indian cardiovascular and cardiothoracic surgeon and the founder, chairman and managing director of Medanta, the hospital group based at Gurugram near Delhi. After nearly twenty years in the United States he came home in 1988 to set up the Escorts Heart Institute, which made advanced heart surgery available in India. He has performed or supervised tens of thousands of operations.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Naresh Kumar Trehan |
| Born | 12 August 1946, Delhi |
| Age | 80 |
| Education | King George’s Medical College, Lucknow (MBBS); Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia; New York University Medical Center |
| Occupation | Cardiovascular surgeon, entrepreneur |
| Known for | Founder of the Escorts Heart Institute and of Medanta – The Medicity |
| Awards | Padma Shri (1991), Padma Bhushan (2001), Dr B. C. Roy Award |
| Spouse | Madhu Trehan |
| Children | 2 |
Early Life
He was born in Delhi a year before Partition. Both his parents were doctors who had moved from what became Pakistan; his father was an ear, nose and throat specialist and his mother a gynaecologist, and they ran a clinic at Connaught Place. He grew up watching them at work.
Education
He studied medicine at King George’s Medical College in Lucknow. In 1969 he went to the United States, trained at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, and then joined New York University Medical Center, where he worked under the pioneering heart surgeon Frank Spencer.
Career
New York
He qualified as a specialist in both general and cardiothoracic surgery and practised in Manhattan from the 1970s to 1988. He became one of the busiest heart surgeons in the city, and Indian patients who could afford the journey flew to New York to be operated on by him.
Escorts
The sight of those patients, he has said, persuaded him that he should be working in India. In 1988 he returned to Delhi as the founding director of the Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre, built with the backing of the industrialist H. P. Nanda. In the following two decades it became the country’s best-known heart hospital, and coronary bypass surgery, until then rare in India, became routine.
He left Escorts in 2007 after a dispute with its new owners.
Medanta
He then built Medanta – The Medicity, which opened at Gurugram in 2009 on a site of more than forty acres. Planned as a single campus covering every speciality, with research and teaching alongside, it has more than a thousand beds and dozens of operating theatres. The group has since opened hospitals in Lucknow, Patna, Indore, Ranchi and Noida. Its parent company, Global Health Limited, was listed on the stock exchanges in November 2022.
At Medanta he has encouraged robotic surgery and the study of how traditional Indian medicine might be combined with modern treatment.
Other roles
He has been personal surgeon to several Presidents of India since 1991 and has served as president of the International Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery. He has sat on government committees on health policy.
Honours
- Padma Shri (1991)
- Padma Bhushan (2001)
- Dr B. C. Roy National Award
- Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award
Personal Life
He is married to Madhu Trehan, a journalist who was the founding editor of the magazine India Today, created the video news magazine Newstrack and later co-founded the media site Newslaundry; she is the sister of Aroon Purie, the magazine’s publisher. They have two daughters, Shyel and Shonan. He continues to operate in his late seventies.
Featured image: Naresh Trehan at the World Economic Forum on India, November 2012. Photo by the World Economic Forum, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
