Dr Mehta, 62, is currently head of the department of preventive
and social medicine at Patan Medical College, which is, run by Gujarat Medical
Education and Research Society.
Known to be an upright, honest, and dedicated doctor, Dr Mehta is
said to have made substantial contributions to improving the health of the poor
of Gujarat, in a career in public service that began in 1979 when he was
himself a medical student in the Medical College in Vadodara.
An out-of-the-box thinker and innovator, his passion is to combine
the best that different traditional and modern systems of health, medicine, and
nutrition can offer, and create public awareness for healthy living and
low-cost self-care initiatives. The very low-cost anemia posters that he has
invented, which enable users to estimate the extent of their own anemia and to
educate communities about anemia, are widely used by NGOs and government
programs across the country. He has also invented a device to objectively
identify night blindness, a common symptom of vitamin A deficiency and he has
used the device to screen and treat hundreds of bus drivers of Ahmedabad city,
potentially preventing many road accidents.
He and his small organization have painstakingly developed a multilingual nutrition software for lay persons, which uses complex information on nutritive values of Indian foods to create an intuitive menu of options that help analyze individual diets and menus and nutrition surveys. The Trust is considered a repository of huge collections of print and electronic health education material and uses these in health exhibitions and campaigns in urban and rural Gujarat. Besides direct contributions to community health, he has mentored hundreds of medical students in several medical colleges and trained thousands of rural and urban health workers in a selfless teaching career spanning five medical colleges and numerous NGOs across the state. He has influenced large numbers of medical students to consider non-exploitative, natural, and low-cost approaches to patient care in an era of relentless commercialization of medical practice.
