Odisha doctor Akshya Montry returns to a remote district to serve the poor, powered by a little-known Catholic education network lifting Dalit and tribal youth.
Newsroom (21/01/2026 Gaudium Press ) In a remote corner of eastern India, far from the glass towers and tech parks of Bengaluru, a 30-year-old catholic doctor begins his day at 8 a.m. in a modest government clinic. By the time he stops, often late into the evening, he will have treated between 50 and 100 patients — most of them tribal people and Dalits who have never known what it means to have easy access to a doctor.
This is Kashinagar Community Health Center in Gajapati, one of Odisha’s most backward and isolated districts. And this is where Dr. Akshya Montry, a soft-spoken Catholic from the nearby village of Kattam, has chosen to build his life and career after graduating from one of India’s top medical schools.
“I understand the hardships and struggles of the poor here, because I have experienced them,” he says.
Returning home instead of moving up
Montry qualified as a doctor from the prestigious St. John’s Medical College in Bengaluru, often called India’s “Silicon Valley” for its booming tech industry and urban opportunities. Many graduates from such institutions head for big-city hospitals, lucrative private practice, or overseas careers.
He did the opposite.
He came back to Gajapati — a place defined more by broken roads and chronic shortages than by any meaningful indicator of development — and joined the state government-run Kashinagar Community Health Center. Here, he handles common ailments in crowded outpatient lines, emergency cases from road accidents, and in-patients needing hospital care, often with limited resources.
Montry calls his work a “rare blessing.” The love and care he received in his own “tough early days,” he says, now shapes the way he treats every patient who walks through the door.
“I would not have become a doctor”
The journey that led him back to Odisha almost never began.
“I would not have become a doctor, but for the Catholic Church,” he says bluntly, recalling the day a decade ago when he was selected for the MBBS course — Medicinae Baccalaureus, Baccalaureus Chirurgiae — at St. John’s Medical College.
The offer letter came with a price: an initial 500,000 rupees (about 5,476 US dollars at the time). For a poor farming family in Kattam, that sum might as well have been ten times higher.
“My family couldn’t raise the initial 500,000 rupees required for admissions,” he says. His father, a small farmer, scraped together about 100,000 rupees by borrowing from relatives and friends. It still left a gaping hole.
That is when the quiet machinery of a little-known Catholic support network clicked into place.
Bishop Sarat Chandra Nayak of Berhampur diocese and Father Bijay Nayak contributed 200,000 rupees. Even then, they were still 200,000 rupees short.
“I realized I was not going to be admitted for the medical course with the 300,000 rupees,” Montry recalls.
At that critical moment, Bishop Niranjan Sual Singh of Sambalpur stepped in. He appealed directly to the director of St. John’s Medical College, requesting a concession that would allow the remaining fees to be paid in installments. The college agreed.
The support continued long after that first hurdle. In his second year, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India stepped forward with 100,000 rupees. Father Abraham Karukaparambil, a parish priest of Our Lady of Grace in the Archdiocese of San Antonio, Texas, began contributing 100,000 rupees every year for each of the remaining four years. St. John’s itself provided an annual scholarship to fill the remaining gap.
“My dream was to become a doctor, and I am indebted to all my benefactors,” Montry says. “But first and foremost, it is my faith in Jesus Christ that led me to where I am today.”
A doctor shortage laid bare
Today, that dream intersects with a stark public health reality.
Odisha is in the grip of a severe doctor shortage. According to a government report, when measured against the World Health Organization norm of one doctor per 1,000 people, Gajapati district alone has a shortfall of 550 doctors.
In December last year, state Health Minister Mukesh Mahaling told the Odisha assembly that nearly 60 percent of sanctioned posts in government hospitals across the state lie vacant. The impact is starkest in rural and tribal districts, where families often travel long distances for basic treatment, or go without care altogether.
This is the landscape into which Montry has returned.
He still dreams of specializing and pursuing postgraduate studies, but he also talks about a second ambition born from his own experience: to help other poor and needy students chase their own professional dreams.
Even as he navigates the daily press of patients at Kashinagar, he is acutely aware that his own story is part of a wider, much quieter transition unfolding across Odisha’s marginalized Christian communities.
A web of priests, bishops, and scholarships
The network that carried him to medical college and back is larger than many outside church circles realize.
Montry says the Catholic Church — and especially Father Abraham Karukaparambil, now in Texas — has helped many Catholics of Dalit origin like him study medicine. He personally knows three of them: Sarada Charan Bardhan, Kusum Nayak, and Sailendu Singh, all of whom are now doctors.
Their stories echo his own.
“I could not get a bank loan, as we had no property to mortgage,” says Singh, who hails from nearby Kandhamal district. “But Father Abraham and Father Bijay Naik made it possible for me to become a doctor.” Like many beneficiaries, Singh studied in a Catholic boarding school before moving on to medicine.
The support is not limited to healthcare. There is also Susanto Kumar Beero, an assistant professor at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi, who grew up in a poor Catholic family in Ambagam village, Odisha.
“I have earned two doctorates just because a priest went out of his way to help me,” Beero says. Thanks to the generosity of bishops and priests, he notes, many young people have been able to pursue degrees in social sciences, engineering, nursing, and law.
In each case, the pattern is similar: a promising student from a Dalit or tribal Catholic family, unable to afford higher education; a priest or bishop identifying potential; and a patchwork of stipends, personal savings, and borrowed funds keeping the student in school and, eventually, into a professional career.
From persecution to professional class
For church leaders in Odisha, this emerging professional cohort would have been unthinkable two decades ago.
“About two decades ago, nobody thought our boys and girls would become doctors, nurses, college teachers, and even enter the prestigious Odisha Administrative Services,” says Bishop Sarat Chandra Nayak of Berhampur.
Now, he estimates, there are nearly 45 Catholic doctors and 35 trained nurses across the state who come from tribal or Dalit communities — communities historically locked out of quality education and stable employment. The foundation, he notes, was laid through affordable, English-language Catholic schooling that gave students a path to broader opportunities.
That this has happened at all is striking when placed against the backdrop of recent history.
In December 2007, the state of Odisha saw what many rights groups describe as the worst-ever wave of anti-Christian violence in India. The immediate flashpoint was a quarrel between Christians and Hindus over Christmas celebrations in Kandhamal district. Tensions escalated dramatically on Aug. 25, 2008, when Hindu hardline leader Lakshmanananda Saraswati was killed.
Media reports at the time alleged that communist insurgents were behind the killing. Hindu hardliners, however, blamed Christians, and the accusation triggered a full-scale pogrom.
Human Rights Watch later documented how the slain leader’s body was paraded across Kandhamal for two days as calls for revenge echoed through the district. Armed mobs attacked Christians indiscriminately, torching homes and churches. Many were hacked to death; some were burned alive as their houses went up in flames. Thousands fled into nearby forests, surviving for days with little food or shelter.
Government intervention came only after weeks, when national and international media attention forced a response. By then, 104 Christians had been killed, thousands injured, and around 50,000 displaced.
Among the many consequences of that violence was a quieter casualty: the education of Christian children. Families who had already been living on the brink suddenly found themselves homeless, uprooted, and even less able to send their children to school.
A mission born from ordination
It was into this climate of fear, loss, and disruption that some priests deepened their commitment to education.
“My mission to reach out to poor students started 30 years ago, shortly after my ordination,” recalls Father Abraham Karukaparambil, the Texas-based priest whose name surfaces again and again in these stories.
Over the years, he has funded scores of students by saving his Mass stipends and fees from preaching retreats, and even by borrowing money in the United States. For him, the motivation is clear.
“Education is a powerful tool to restore human dignity and empower the poor and needy” in a state like Odisha, he says.
Initially working in the Berhampur diocese, he received backing from Bishop Sarat Nayak. Later, after he was incardinated into the diocese of Rayagada in 2016, Bishop Aplinar Senapati supported his growing outreach. Together, they helped channel funds to young people who, like Montry, sat at the intersection of talent, poverty, and systemic exclusion.
Now, Father Karukaparambil is turning particular attention to girls.
“There are 26 nursing students, most of whom are pursuing B.Sc. degrees, as well as some schoolchildren,” he says. Nursing, he believes, offers a relatively accessible professional path for young women from poor families, combining employment with a chance to serve.
But the need far outstrips his means.
“I have an annual budget of 1 million rupees, but the actual requirement exceeds 4 million rupees,” he notes. Requests for educational assistance pour in, many of them compelling, almost all exceeding what he can realistically provide.
Yet he measures success not only in degrees earned, but in what happens afterward.
“With more than 50 percent of my students giving back to society, my mission has been successful in creating a ripple effect of generosity within the community,” he says.
A quiet ripple in a fragile landscape
That ripple is visible in the lives of those who return to the same landscapes that once pushed them to the margins.
In Gajapati, it looks like a young doctor who could have stayed in a metropolis instead choosing an understaffed community health center in a neglected district. It looks like Dalit and tribal Catholics stepping into roles that once seemed reserved for others: doctors, nurses, professors, civil servants.
For Montry, the path ahead is still demanding. He wants to specialize. He wants to mentor and support students like the boy he once was, stuck between a dream and a fee he could not pay. His home state still reels under a doctor shortage that leaves its most vulnerable citizens waiting at clinic doors that never open, or turning to healers who can do little for chronic illness or acute trauma.
Yet the fact that a doctor from Kattam now holds an MBBS degree from one of India’s top colleges — and chooses to stand in a crowded rural outpatient ward instead of an air-conditioned city hospital — suggests that something fundamental has shifted.
From the ashes of persecution and the grind of generational poverty, a quiet, church-driven experiment in education is reshaping lives at the edges of India’s development story. It operates largely off the books and outside the headlines: a bishop’s recommendation letter here, a priest’s saved stipend there, a scholarship negotiated with a skeptical college administrator.
For patients lining up outside the Kashinagar Community Health Center each morning, its impact is immediate and personal. For Odisha’s Dalit and tribal Catholics, it is a slow but profound reimagining of what is possible.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from UCA News
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