Dr. Pankaj Sugaonkar

Fifteen Years Spent on One Thing

Dr. Pankaj Sugaonkar is a Senior Consultant Interventional Paediatric Cardiologist based in Pune, practising since 2009. In more than fifteen years he has performed over 100,000 paediatric echocardiograms and more than 5,000 interventions — a volume that places him among the most experienced paediatric cardiologists in Maharashtra and India.

His particular expertise is transcatheter intervention: closing holes in the heart and opening narrowed valves through a catheter rather than through the chest. For a family, that difference is enormous — a child who might once have faced open-heart surgery and a week in intensive care can instead go home in a day or two with a small puncture mark in the groin.

Alongside his clinical practice, he teaches — a national and international faculty member at paediatric cardiology conferences, running two training programmes that have together reached more than 1,750 doctors — and alongside all of that, he goes to the districts: fifty free paediatric cardiac camps across Maharashtra, more than 5,000 children screened, the work that eventually became Save Little Heart Foundation.