Dr Aparna Hegde: The maternal health champion among Fortune’s 50 greatest global leaders of 2020

 As a medical resident in a Mumbai hospital, Dr Aparna Hegde had been witness to many pervasive systemic problems that often led to disastrous consequences. One incident remains fresh in her mind. It 

was a long night in the Emergency ward when a 25-year-old woman was brought in with serious childbirth complications. The woman had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes and her baby was too large to be delivered normally, leading to the baby being stuck in the birth canal. Despite the team’s best efforts, they weren’t able to save the mother.

“Her death will forever stay with me. Not only because she died a most horrible death, but also because it was preventable… She had gone for her first antenatal visit but she had not been counseled about the remaining visits, danger signs, and potential complications. If only she had been…” writes Dr Hegde on the Armman website.  

It was incidents such as these that made the urogynecologist question the systemic problems present in maternal healthcare which included the lack of access to critical preventive healthcare information and services. She launched ARMMAN in 2008; the NGO helps minimize the preventable morbidity and mortality of mothers and children in India. Dr Hegde also decided to make information more easily accessible to pregnant women through the mMitra project in 2014. Under this project, the NGO calls women with recorded messages twice a week throughout their pregnancy and continues to follow up with them till their babies turn a year old.  Read More