Meet the 80-year-old Lakshadweep nurse who saved thousands of lives and is now among the world’s Top 10

Eighty-year-old Hindumbi Kaurom Kakkada still walks into Indira Gandhi Hospital at Kavaratti, the most developed island in the Lakshadweep, to turn people’s bad days into good ones. A nurse for 53 years, she’s helped in over 20,000 surgeries and emergencies. She retired once, at 60, before returning as a contract nurse. “When you have birthed babies with petromax lamps, ferried patients on boats and know why people still do not have last mile access to a hospital, I don’t see myself as doing a job. It’s about helping save a life,” she says.

In 2023, the President of India gave her the Florence Nightingale Award. And now she’s found herself somewhere she probably never expected: on a shortlist of ten, chosen out of more than 134,000 nurses nominated from 214 countries, for the Aster Guardians Global Nursing Award 2026, a $250,000 prize that’s become one of the biggest honours nursing has anywhere in the world.

When the boat became an operating room

Back in 1972, when Kakkada started, there wasn’t much of a hospital to speak of. It was just her, a health inspector, and a midwife, who were responsible for an entire island. Most babies were born at home and the power supply was erratic. Medicines came in from Kochi in Kerala whenever a boat happened to be making the trip. “If someone needed to get to a hospital fast, you prayed a fisherman was nearby,” she says.

Everybody in Lakshadweep has been touched by Kakkada in some way; either she has birthed them or helped a family member live through a crisis. (Special arrangement photo)

If you ask her to pick just one memory, she goes straight to Agatti Island. A woman there was bleeding badly during a maternal emergency, and Agatti, like most of Lakshadweep at the time, simply had no facility to treat something that serious. “Her haemoglobin was low. We had no option but to take her to hospital at Kavaratti. And the only way to do that was a fishing boat. We had to do a blood transfusion in the middle of the sea so that she could make it. It was a six-hour journey but we made it,” says Kakkada. A C-section later, the mother and baby both came through. Years later, she ran into them again. The same woman. The same baby, grown now, but who had another health emergency and hospital intervention. She accompanied them on a boat, yet again.

One monsoon, she rode a naval ship overnight to Amini Island for a woman already fully dilated. With barely any equipment at hand, she and her team did a forceps delivery right there on the island. Mother and baby made it through that one too.

Surgeries by lamplight

Today the hospital she works at is equipped and comes with power backup systems. “Back in the day, there were power cuts. The outage was quite frequent but we continued surgeries and deliveries with kerosene or petromax lamps, with an old autoclave (a machine that uses high-pressure, saturated steam to sterilize equipment). The medicines never arrived on schedule. But if a patient needed to get off the island and no naval ship happened to be around, you found a fisherman willing to make the trip,” says Kakkada.

Story continues below this ad

Even getting people to hospital was a challenge with a lack of scientific awareness in the community. Kakkada went door to door, ticking off the number of houses in her register, talking about pregnancy care, hygiene, immunisation and why hospitals were the safest place for deliveries. “What actually convinced people was the death of mothers who couldn’t make it. When someone couldn’t get to the hospital, the medical officer and I would try to visit the patient. Then locals helped spread the word. And now would-be mothers only want to visit a hospital for their births and approach me,” she says.

This outreach of hers helped communities live through cholera outbreaks, the 2004 tsunami and the COVID-19 crisis.

Her own challenges

Maternity leave back then was just 45 days. So Kakkada resumed her duties, entrusting her new-born to other family members. “Sometimes, I would be assigned to another island and I had no way of knowing in advance when I’d be home again, considering I had to see the patients assigned to me through,” she says.

Eighty-year-old Hindumbi Kaurom Kakkada. (Special arrangement photo)

In the earlier years, with only a handful of health workers covering the whole island chain, she would work long stretches without a real break. “Sometimes hospital shifts ended and I would have to run straight into an immunisation drive or home visits,” she adds.

Story continues below this ad

Even becoming a nurse in the first place wasn’t something she was supposed to do. Conversations about women’s health barely happened. But Kakkada’s father supported her when, after the 10th grade, she left for Kozhikode to train as a nurse. A Gandhian, he had walked alongside Mahatma Gandhi in the Dandi March and instilled in her the spirit of community service. Besides a three-year posting in Saudi Arabia, she came back to Kavaratti because she thought islanders needed her the most.

Everybody in Lakshadweep has been touched by Kakkada in some way; either she has birthed them or helped a family member live through a crisis. The Aster Guardians winner will be announced at a gala later this month. Win or lose, one will still find her with her hospital roster, planning the next immunisation schedule.

(Insharah Khan is an intern)