Dr. Digpal Dharkar

Dharkar trained as a cancer surgeon in India. In 1987 he visited the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York to study the working of a multidisciplinary comprehensive cancer centre, with the intention of building a national centre in India for head and neck cancers, which are among the commonest cancers among adult Indian men, and of making scientific cancer treatment available regardless of a patient's means.

He returned to India in 1988 and opened the Indore Cancer Foundation in December that year, in the presence of Jatin P. Shah, then chief of the head and neck service at Memorial Sloan Kettering; the actor and member of parliament Sunil Dutt; Surendra Wadhwani of Hong Kong; and citizens of Indore. The Indore Cancer Foundation Charitable Trust was settled on 14 November 1989 by Usha Devi Holkar, the former ruler of Indore, and her husband Satish Chandra Malhotra, and registered under the Madhya Pradesh Public Trust Act 1951.

Under Dharkar the foundation ran cancer awareness and detection camps in rural areas from 1989, took part in World Health Organization-supported projects on community oral cancer control and on cancer pain, and from 1998 ran an AusAID-funded pilot project in Dhar district on district-based palliative care for terminally ill patients, which trained more than 2,000 primary health workers, nurses and doctors. From 2000 the foundation held free cancer surgery camps in district hospitals, beginning at Jhabua.

The Indian Institute of Head and Neck Oncology opened in 1995 on ten acres leased at a nominal rate by the Madhya Pradesh government, starting as an outpatient radiotherapy service with a second-hand cobalt machine donated by the Nargis Dutt Memorial Foundation in Canada. It has since added chemotherapy, three-dimensional conformal and intensity-modulated radiotherapy, a modular operating theatre, radiology, biochemistry and pharmacy services. Dharkar sits on the institute's executive committee.

Over roughly 35 years the foundation reports having held 234 cancer camps, 250 awareness programmes and 220 training programmes in early detection and palliative care across Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.[2][3][4][5]