Prof Emeritus Sureshwar Pandey, widely regarded as the father of foot and ankle surgery in India, died on 5 August 2026. A tribute by two of his protégés, Dr Mandeep S. Dhillon, past president of the Indian Orthopaedic Association, and Dr Shiva Shankar Jha, past president of the Indian Foot and Ankle Society, was published in the Indian Journal of Orthopaedics on 18 September.
How Sureshwar Pandey built a subspecialty
Born in Shahpur, in Bihar’s Bhojpur district, Sureshwar Pandey championed foot and ankle surgery at a time when it had little recognition in India. According to the tribute, Prof B. Helal, then president of the C.I.P., invited him to the C.I.P. Congress in Eastbourne in 1979 and asked him to form a society of foot surgeons in India. That work led to the founding of the Indian Foot and Ankle Society in 1986. He remained its Emeritus President.
His influence reached well beyond India. He was Honorary President of the Asia Pacific Society for Foot and Ankle Surgery, chaired the Asia zone of the International Federation of Foot and Ankle Societies, and was a visiting professor at universities in Tokyo, Osaka and Adelaide. In 1998 he chaired the 3rd Asia-CIP Congress in Patna, which drew delegates from Japan and across Asia.
Surgeons know his name from Pandey’s T-osteotomy for correcting heel varus. His textbook Clinical Orthopaedic Diagnosis, published by the National Book Trust of India, won a national Best Book Award and is now in its fifth edition.
Care for the disadvantaged
For more than five decades Sureshwar Pandey also cared for disadvantaged and tribal communities. He founded the Guru Nanak Home for Physically Challenged Children and the Ram Janam Sulakshana Artificial Limb Centre, which the tribute says has given thousands of people surgery, physiotherapy, orthotics, prosthetics and rehabilitation. He later set up the Ram Janam Sulakshana Pandey Cancer Hospital and Research and Rehabilitation Centre in Ranchi to provide charitable cancer care.
Dhillon and Jha remember a humble, approachable mentor who kept in touch with younger surgeons for decades, encouraging and advising them. “His footsteps will continue to guide us,” they write.
IMEA POD Perspective
Prof Pandey’s career is a reminder that foot and ankle care in India was built deliberately, by people who argued for it before it was fashionable. Two parts of his legacy matter to every foot health professional, not only surgeons. First, he treated the foot as worth a specialty of its own, and created the society and the training culture to back that up. Second, his limb centre put surgery, physiotherapy, orthotics and rehabilitation under one roof for patients who could not otherwise reach them. That is the multidisciplinary model diabetic foot and limb salvage teams across India and the wider IMEA region are still working towards. As podiatry and pedorthics grow in India, the closer they work with foot and ankle surgeons, the better they honour that vision. IMEA POD extends its condolences to Prof Pandey’s family, colleagues and the many surgeons he trained.
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