11/02/2023
Rajkumari Amrit Kaur: The princess who built AIIMS.
In the past couple of years, as India has been battling a global pandemic, the role of the country’s apex medical body has come under discussion on several occasions. Significantly, it is the first prime minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru, who is credited for the heights reached by AIIMS. It is true that AIIMS came to be under the Nehru government. However, the real driving force behind it was Kaur..
Princess Amrit Kaur, a daughter of the ruling house of Kapurthala state in north‐central India, was for more than 30 years one of this country's great champions of women's rights. She sat in and served as National Health Minister from 1947, when India became independent, until 1957.
She was daughter of Prince Harnam Singh, a son of Maharaja of , Educated in Britain, Princess Amrit Kaur was as much a product of Edwardian England as she was of India. She was “head girl” and captain of hockey, cricket and lacrosse teams at Sherborne School in Dorset. She also studied at Oxford University
After her return to India in 1918 she wrote to Gandhi and later met him. He told her that she must respect her parents' wishes, and consequently it was not until 1930, shortly after her father's death, that she left Kapurthtala Palace to go to Gandhi's ashram or retreat near Bombay.
She became a secretary of the mahatma, a post she held until Prime Minister Nehru offered her the portfolio of health in his first government. When Gandhi told her she must accept, she said “Why are you turning me out? She had spent three years in prison with him. Gandhi was killed the following year.
Princess Amrit Kaur, a pianist and a good tennis player, was a pillar of strength in the new Government.
One of her great campaigns as Minister of Health was against malaria, the great killers of Asia, At one time it took an estimated total of 1 million lives a year in India. Not yet eradicated, but it is not now one of the country's major sicknesses. At the height of the campaign, in 1955, it was estimated that 400,000 Indians who otherwise would have died were saved by mitigation of malaria in their districts.
Princess Amrit Kaur, founded the Indian Council of Child Welfare and became its first president. She was also president of Indian Leprosy Association and the Tuberculosis Association, vice president of the International Red Cross Society and chief commissioner of the St. John's Ambulance Brigade of India. She led the Indian delegation to the World Health Organization for four years and was president of the W.H.O. assembly in 1950.
On a visit to the United States in 1956, Princess Amrit Kaur was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by Princeton University.
She was awarded Rene Sand Memorial Award, and was named TIME Magazine's Woman of the Year in 1947.
She never married, had no children and died in New Delhi on 6 February 1964. Her private papers are part of Archives at Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, at Teen Murti House, Delhi.
