Madhusudan Das: The Maker of Odisha Who Was Bihar’s First Health Minister
Can you believe that the First Health Minister of Bihar resigned because he did not want ministers to have salaries? And, did you know that this minister is more popular as the father of modern Odisha? Yes, the man was Madhusudan Das.
The Unlikely Appointment of Madhusudan Das in 1921
The year was 1921. Lord Sinha, the first Indian Governor of Bihar and Orissa, was looking for a man to fill the most consequential ministerial post in the newly created province. He did not pick a Bihari and did not pick a man from Patna, or from the Gangetic plains. The man picked up was a 73-year-old Orissan lawyer from Cuttack.
The man was Madhusudan Das. And in the summer of 1921, he rode into Patna as a real public servant to take up the role of the first Minister of Health and Local Self-Government and Public Works of the newly formed province of Bihar and Orissa.
History remembers Madhusudan as the Maker of Modern Odisha. The man who gave the Oriyas their pride, their language, and eventually their province. But there is a chapter of his life that Bihar has all but forgotten, and Odisha seldom tells. The chapter is about the two years he spent governing Bihar, fighting plague in Bihar, building dispensaries, and then throwing away a minister’s salary of Rs. 4,000 a month because his conscience would not let him accept the money for public service.
Bihar and Orissa Under One Governor
Many in 2026 would wonder why Madhusudan Das was a minister in Patna. One has to understand what the Montague-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 actually created. The Act brought the province of Bihar and Orissa under a single administration, with a Governor in Patna and two Ministers to handle the “transferred” departments, a name for the subjects handed over to Indians as a gesture of limited self-governance.
Lord Sinha, the governor, appointed Madhusudan Das as the first Minister of Health and Local Self-Government and Public Works, as one contemporary wrote in the Life of Madhusudan Das (1955), because his claims to the post “were unrivalled, and which would not have suited anybody else so well.” His decades in the Bengal Council, his work in the Imperial Legislative Assembly, his services to the cause of education, industry, and the Oriya people had made him the most experienced Indian legislator in Bihar and Orissa.
His daughter Sailabala Das wrote in Madhusudan Das: His Life and Achievements,
“The late Lord Sinha was the first Governor of this Province and he appointed my father as the first Minister of Health and Local Self-Government and P.W.D.”
He went to Ranchi first, then summoned her to Patna. She arrived in May 1921 with her “bag and baggage.”
Fighting Plague Over Personal Comfort
The first thing the new Minister of Health, Madhusudan, had to contend with was not a political rival or a hostile Council. It was a disease. Bihar and Orissa in 1921 was ravaged by plague, cholera, and Kalazar.
His daughter asked Madhusudan to sanction Rs. 75,000 for the construction of a minister’s house and the Chief Engineer had a plan ready. But, Madhusudan Das refused to get this palatial home built. The refusal was not polite. He told Sailabala:
“All over the Province people are dying of plague, cholera and Kalazar. I need money to save people from these diseases and cannot afford to spend money for the building of my house. If you are not satisfied, you may return to Cuttack, for as long as I remain a Minister my conscience will not allow me to spend so much money on a Minister’s house.”
This was not a speech on the floor of the Council, not a memorandum to the Governor but a father telling his daughter, in the plainest possible terms, that public money is not private comfort.
Madhusudan rented a small house instead. And that house, Sailabala writes, “was kept open day and night for people to come to him with their grievances.” The Jamadar had standing orders to inform the Minister immediately whenever anyone arrived, regardless of the hour.
This was Madhusudan Das, the Minister of Health, who lived like a servant of the public, in a rented house in Patna, while the plague counted its dead in the countryside.
The history of Western Medicine and its rise in Colonial India
The 1921-22 Public Health Budget
The speeches of Madhusudan Das in the Bihar and Orissa Legislative Council, carefully preserved in Madhusudan Das: The Legislator (1980), are a window into what an Indian minister could do under colonial constraints.
Madhusudan presented the budget for public health in 1921-22. He spoke like a doctor grieving over patients he could not reach. He pushed for dispensaries in rural areas, at least one per police station circle. For Ranchi, Hazaribagh, Sambalpur he knew that this goal could not be reached within a year. So, he pushed for travelling dispensaries, for subsidised medical practitioners who would settle in villages, and for maternity supervisors in Patna city to check infant mortality.
Establishing the Radium Institute at Ranchi
A Radium Institute at Ranchi, the first of its kind in India, for which a special provision of Rs. 75,000 was made, was sanctioned under his tenure. As the Council record shows, it was to be an institution that would “remove a long-felt want in India,” giving treatment for diseases “mostly beyond the reach of surgery.”
The index of his speeches across that period tells its own story: “Medical Relief in Rural Areas,” “Charitable Dispensaries in Rural Areas,” “Contamination of Ganges Water,” “Budget Demands: Public Health,” “Ancient and Indigenous Systems of Medicine on a Scientific Basis,” “Vernacular Medical Training.” His civil works budget pushed for bridges in Manbhum and Gaya, drainage in Muzaffarpur and Patna, water supply in Puri and Sambalpur. He fought for Sambalpur’s road grants, Puri’s water works, Cuttack’s share of provincial resources in every session.
His colleagues in the Council had nicknamed him “Cato”, after the Roman senator who, by sheer force of wit, wisdom, and unsparing criticism, made himself the conscience of the legislature. Cato the Elder refused to spare Rome’s comfortable classes. Madhusudan Das refused to spare Bihar’s comfortable administrators.
“Tell H.E. I Accept Rs. 4,000”, A Resignation Built on Principle
In the winter Council session of 1923, certain members moved to reduce the ministerial salary from Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 4,000 a month. The Governor would not consent to the cut. The Government whip worked for the Council. Both ministers were asked not to accept the reduction.
Madhusudan Das had been saying for two years that a minister’s salary ought to be an honorary one and it was unjust to draw thousands of rupees while a Chairman of a local board did the same work without pay. He had approached the Viceroy himself about this. Now, with the salary cut on the table, he said that he would accept Rs. 4,000. He said so in the chamber. The other minister, Sir Fakhruddin, appeared to agree. Then, mid-session, Sir Fakhruddin reversed course.
Madhusudan Das’s daughter went to Sir Fakhruddin’s chamber herself and told him that her father would resign. She then phoned the Council President, the Chief Secretary, every high official she could reach.
“The whole town rang with the news,” Sailabala writes. “People were both sorry and surprised.” The resignation was accepted. Madhusudan Das left Patna for Cuttack, where his tannery was waiting for him in the Insolvency Court.
He had thrown away Rs. 4,000 a month and “all the honour and position attached to it,” because his principles were not for sale. A man who had told his daughter he would not spend public money on a minister’s house while plague killed his constituents was never going to stay in a post that had compromised his word.
What Bihar Meant to the Maker of Modern Odisha
It would be a mistake to read the Bihar chapter as a digression in the life of Odisha’s great founder. It was, in fact, its logical continuation.
Madhusudan Das went to Patna as Minister of Health and he carried with him the memory of the Ganjam and Sambalpur districts, the Cuttack villages, the Puri coastline. He fought for these inside the Bihar budget. He fought to ensure the Oriya districts were not swallowed whole by the administrative gravity of Patna.
Dr. Devaprasad Sarbadhikari recalled sitting with Madhusudan Das on the Bengal Council “fighting shoulder to shoulder, sometimes hand to hand, but always good friends.”
He was not a Bihari. But he governed Bihar as though he were answerable to it as its first Minister of Health.
The Enduring Legacy of Bihar’s First Health Minister
Bihar remembers Lord Sinha as its first Indian Governor. It does not, in any particular way, remember Madhusudan Das as its first Minister of Health. Yet the Radium Institute at Ranchi, the dispensary network pressed into the mofussil, the civic infrastructure budgeted for Patna and Muzaffarpur and Gaya are his legacy too.
Odisha calls him the Maker of Modern Odisha. He founded the Utkal Union Conference in 1903, pioneered the Utkal Tannery, championed Oriya language rights, mentored a generation of leaders, and spent his personal fortune on the revival of Orissan art and industry. He died on 4 February 1934 at the age of 86, two years before the separate province of Orissa was created.
He arrived in Bihar when the province was young, when plague was killing its villagers, and its administrative machinery was being assembled from scratch. He brought to Patna an open house, a closed purse for personal use, an open purse for public need, and a resignation letter ready for the moment principle required it.
(The views expressed are personal)
