Brig. Dr. Arvind Lal

Arvind Lal took over a diagnostic laboratory his father had founded in 1949 and turned it into the largest chain in India. He assumed control of Dr Lal PathLabs in 1977; it now runs more than 300 laboratories and serves upwards of 27 million patients a year — the country's oldest and biggest diagnostics network.

Born in 1949 and trained at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune, where he completed both his undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, he began as a lecturer in pathology before returning to the family business. What he built there was less a laboratory than an infrastructure: a national network organised around information technology, a broad test menu and international quality accreditation, at a point when Indian private diagnostics had none of those things as standard.

The Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri in 2009. In the same year he became the first civilian doctor to be given the honorary rank of Brigadier in the Armed Forces Medical Services. He has served as pathologist to several serving and former Prime Ministers of India.

His career is a different model of contribution from the professorial one that dominates this series. He did not write the textbook or chair the department; he made laboratory medicine available at scale in a country where access, not knowledge, was the binding constraint.