The woman who brought the CT scanner to India and changed healthcare forever

Forget reminiscing about simpler times, Dr Sneh Bhargava’s memoir begins with Indira Gandhi on a gurney and ends with her shaping the future of Indian radiology. At 94, Bhargava has casually dropped a memoir detailing how she became India’s first female director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), pioneered CT scanning in the country, and ran the capital’s most elite hospital the day the country’s prime minister was assassinated. No biggie. Just a lifetime of making medical history while most of us are still Googling “what is a normal heart rate?”

In a world where glass ceilings are still looming high above our heads, Dr Bhargava shattered hers with clinical precision. Radiologist, trailblazer, administrator, and now author of The Woman Who Ran AIIMS... Her story isn’t just about medicine, it’s about guts, grit, and the kind of ambition that doesn’t come with a LinkedIn summary. Her new book, out on Juggernaut Books, scans through it all (pun intended), and, trust us, the image it reveals is one for the archives.

The book opens on October 31, 1984. Her first day as director of AIIMS, New Delhi, a premier public medical research university and hospital, widely regarded as one of the best medical institutions in India. She was appointed to her role by none other than Indira Gandhi. Dr Bhargava wasn’t even settled into her new desk when a radiographer burst into her office, coat flapping, eyes wide: “The prime minister is in casualty!” Indira Gandhi had just been gunned down by her own security guards. As Dr Bhargava rushed through the corridors, she was met with chaos, disbelief, and the stark image of the prime minister lying lifeless on a gurney. It was a moment suspended in shock. “Somewhere in the remote periphery of my consciousness,” she writes, “I registered that the gurney did not even have a bed sheet over it.” When we speak over the phone, she recalls this time: “My job at that point was to organise knowing that the crowds would be coming into the hospital on treetops, on car tops, on rooftops, or whatever you have.”

That eerie collision of power, politics, and public health is exactly what sets her memoir apart. It’s not just about machines and medicine. It’s about standing still in the storm, steady hands in a nation’s crisis. Most of us might get onboarding emails and awkward icebreakers at new jobs. Dr Bhargava got an assassinated PM and history knocking at her hospital doors.

Her journey into medicine began during the Partition, when her family fled Jhelum for Ferozepur. The train was packed with fear and uncertainty—but 17-year-old Sneh, ever the student, was mostly worried about her delayed Science exam. It was in the aftermath, at a refugee camp set up by her father, that she first encountered real suffering. Watching patients arrive bloodied and broken, she felt something shift. “I used to go with him to the camp that he had set up to receive the refugees crossing over from the border from Pakistan into India. And they had tales of horror. I heard all those tales, and I saw many of them crying because they had left everything behind and come across the border into India. I had seen all this misery. And I thought at that point in time that I should do something to relieve this misery.”

For someone who would go on to revolutionise radiology in India, Dr Bhargava’s early exposure to the field was surprisingly minimal and hilariously underwhelming. At Lady Hardinge Medical College, Delhi’s only academic medical college back then, radiology was the class you napped through. A few blurry X-rays and vague mentions of “white patches in the lungs” was about as high-tech as it got. Even her decision to pursue the field was one born out of necessity, not passion.

What makes it wildly ironic is that years later, she’d be in the room when radiology had its mic-drop moment. During the early 1970s, at a conference in New York, she watched in awe as Godfrey Hounsfield introduced the CT scanner to the world. For the first time, doctors could actually see inside the human brain—layers, ventricles, soft tissue, the works. It wasn’t just impressive, it was era-defining. “I mean, the applause that Hounsfield got was deafening. And our eyes couldn’t believe that you could see the brain apart from the bones. Until then, we were used to seeing only the bones because an X-ray could only show you that,” she recalls.

When Dr Sneh Bhargava joined the Radiology department at AIIMS in 1961, it barely resembled a medical unit: a couple of technicians, one errand boy, no typist, and some outdated equipment. From the start, she fought tooth and nail to bring visibility and respect to the department. After witnessing firsthand how technologically advanced radiology had become in the rest of the world, especially with the arrival of the CT scanner, she knew India couldn’t afford to be left behind. So, she pushed harder. Despite resistance from other departments, who grumbled that funds were being “wasted” on a support service, she stood her ground. The result? AIIMS became the first institution in South Asia to install a CT scanner, turning radiology into a frontline force in modern diagnostics.

She didn’t just bring innovation, she brought order. Dr Bhargava ran AIIMS like a tight ship, and everyone knew it. She was respected, admired, and yes, a little feared. Think Dr Miranda Bailey from Grey’s Anatomy. “If Dr Bhargava is on leave,” people joked, “just put up a scarecrow of her somewhere.” The point? Even in her absence, her discipline loomed large.

And as if ushering in a radiological revolution wasn’t enough drama, there’s also a full-blown medical thriller tucked into her story, complete with accusations, betrayal, and a plot twist worthy of a medical drama finale. In the middle of her fight to modernise radiology, Dr Bhargava was suddenly accused by the head of her own department of stealing radium needles. Yes, actual radioactive material. The allegation was as outrageous as it was serious and, like any good suspense arc, it involved a dramatic airport moment and a classic evil move from a senior colleague.

All these experiences, tests, and triumphs shaped the woman who, at 54, took on the top job at AIIMS. To date, she remains the only woman to have done so. And nearly 40 years later, she’s still sharp as ever, finally giving in to years of persuasion from friends and family to write it all down in a memoir. Retirement didn’t slow her down. After AIIMS, she continued working part-time at two hospitals—Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Research and Science, and Dharamshila Cancer Hospital in Delhi—till the age of 90. It took a global pandemic to finally pull her out of clinical work.

While COVID may have slowed her down, Dr Bhargava wasn’t quite ready to retire. As someone who’s always loved teaching and chasing knowledge, she simply shifted gears, trading hospital corridors for her Delhi home, where she now writes from. Currently, she’s working on a second book. Because of course she is. “I’m 95 now and I am now writing the history of radiology. That’s how I keep myself busy,” she admits enthusiastically. And she did all of this without Google Calendar, without Teams, without “productivity hacks”. Just solid systems and organisation.

In her memoir, she also delves into motherhood with honesty, not romanticism. One moment that shifted her perspective was when her young daughter, Anju, with childlike bluntness, told her she was always in a hurry. It was a wake-up call. “There are times when bearing a mother’s cap is foremost and there are times when the profession comes first and then your family life comes next,” she explains. Learning when to prioritise what became her quiet superpower. She credits this balance to a deeply supportive family and a community that helped carry the load when things got overwhelming.

But she never let her gender stop her. Not when she joined her postgraduate programme in the UK as the only woman in the Radiology department of London’s Westminster Hospital. Not when she travelled the world on a WHO fellowship, chasing every scrap of knowledge about medical imaging while her husband, also a doctor, held the fort back home with their kids. And certainly not when she applied for the post of AIIMS director—an unexpected, even controversial move, especially coming from someone in a specialty often dismissed as “supportive” rather than central.

As we wrap up, her voice turns firm, almost sharp with emphasis. “Women need to be independent,” she tells me. Then she says it again, quieter but with even more weight. She’s seen what happens to those who aren’t, and she’s spent her life showing what’s possible when they are.

The Woman Who Ran AIIMS is published on Juggernaut Books; ₹471