This year, the ANIO Award for Excellence in Community Service goes to Dr. Devinder Singh Rana
Dr. Rana currently serves as Chairman of the Institute of Renal Sciences and Chairman of the Sir Ganga Ram Trust Society at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi.
A graduate of Indira Gandhi Medical College, Shimla (MBBS, 1972), Dr. Rana completed his MD at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Chandigarh (1976), and became a Member of the National Academy of Medical Sciences in Nephrology at AIIMS, New Delhi (1980). He furthered his training as an International Scholar at the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, in 1986, focusing on kidney transplantation.
Joining Sir Ganga Ram Hospital as a Consultant Nephrologist in 1981, Dr. Rana went on to chair its Department of Nephrology for nearly four decades (1981–2019), building it into one of India’s largest and most respected transplant and dialysis programs. He was among the first nephrologists in India to perform vascular access procedures himself, helped establish one of the country’s earliest ethical kidney transplant programs in the non-government sector, and pioneered chronic peritoneal dialysis services using indigenous technology in the 1980s.
It is Dr. Rana’s community service, however, that this award recognizes. In 2005, drawing on his roots in rural Himachal Pradesh, he founded the Parvati Education & Health Society to bring healthcare and education to underserved hill populations. What began in 2007 as a single telemedicine kiosk in his native village of Dasmal grew, under his continued direction, into Parvati Hospital — a 30-bed charitable facility now offering free and low-cost consultation, imaging, physiotherapy, and surgical care to patients from roughly 80 surrounding villages. In 2009, the hospital opened rural India’s first standalone hemodialysis unit, sparing patients hours of travel to Jalandhar, Chandigarh, or Ludhiana for life-sustaining care. Since Sir Ganga Ram Hospital formally adopted the center in 2017, Dr. Rana has continued to expand its reach, extending subsidized surgical and diagnostic services to villagers under India’s Ayushman Bharat and HIMCARE schemes.
Dr. Rana’s contributions have been recognized nationally with India’s Padma Shri (2009) and the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award (2017), among many other honors. Throughout, he has kept one hand on the bedside in Delhi and the other on the hillside hospital he built to serve the village where he was born — a career-long commitment to ensuring that advances in kidney care reach the patients most often left without them.
Categories: Announcements, ASN event, award
American Nephrologists of Indian Origin 
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