“I am a proud student of Indian Institute of Management, Raipur”
- is not something you often hear a 24-year old MBBS graduate say. Yet here I am, voicing those exact words. Yes. I’m a doctor and a registered medical practitioner. I’m also a student of PGP 2018-20 Batch of IIM Raipur and this is the story of how a young boy from the linguistically isolated region of Tamil Nadu, landed right in the heart of the country in one of the most prestigious institutes of the nation.
Ever since the beginning of MBBS, I always carried an instinct that this wasn’t my bread and butter. Somehow being a clinician and performing surgeries on people never excited or drew wonder to me like it did to my fellow peers. I was fortunate enough to work under some of the most reputed Medical professionals of my time and I realised I could never carry the passion for the work as they did. So it’s around the middle of my third year of MBBS that I started looking for other opportunities outside of the clinical world of medicine.
So I set upon this path to discover my calling. Not an easy one obviously. And with a lot of roadblocks. But one fine day when I was walking around the hospital, I saw a patient and a crowd of people around him (probably his relatives) who were fighting with the hospital staff that a particular investigation necessary for the patient to be further evaluated by the physician was getting delayed. On further inquiry, I discovered that the staff and equipment necessary to perform were all available and ready to use.
So what was the problem? The
investigation
requisition form that had been filled by the doctor still hadn’t reached the lab. On further research, I realised that
every single step in the hospital had to go through its due process in order to get fulfilled. The hospital which would have started out small three decades back is now riddled with institutional mechanisms and processes riddled with inefficiencies. But there was a silver lining in this story for me and it is -
I cared!
Yes. I cared enough to put my entire life on the stake and decided to get into the field of healthcare administration. But the facts were apparent to me. I was a novice. I had no knowledge of how the business world works. There are so many recent advances happening in the healthcare but they never seeped down to the grassroots level for the common man to reap the benefits. All I had was a desire to bring change and the grit to make that happen. I realised I needed to get myself to a place where I can equip myself with the necessary skills. I needed
to get better. And the Indian Institutes of Management are never far off in a person’s radar when he sets upon this journey.
So here I am at IIM Raipur, still a guy with a dream, making baby steps, but moving closer each and every day, to his ultimate goal of Bringing Positive change to this world around him, because at the end of the day I firmly believe -
We need to leave this world a better place than we found it.
Which ABG Division would you want to work at?
Being a medical graduate, I would love to get into ABHI - Aditya Birla Health Insurance Programme. It’s a relatively new wing of Aditya Birla Group started on November 2016 and is their standalone arm health insurance arm. It is currently in its current phase of expansion from major metros to the next tier cities.
The health insurance market in India is a ₹27,000 crore market and it’s a tough nut to crack. Working in this industry, I expect to face many challenges and hope to learn the finer aspects of the health insurance model and would love to work alongside with various hospital networks to shape the policy according to the needs of various parties involved.
Being a fresher with little experience in this industry I expect that initial phase of my career wouldn’t be easy at all. But I believe my experience, working in an esteemed organization like Aditya Birla Group would help me equip myself with skillset necessary to tackle to growing challenges of not just today, but the industry needs of the next decade.
- Dr Abinav Venket. S is a first-year student of IIM Raipur