What were your father's views on this dispute with the MVSS on the real people behind the Jaipur foot?

To set the record straight, my father set up the first ever orthopaedic department in Rajasthan in SMS Hospital in 1959 and his work on the foot piece of the Jaipur foot began in the 1960s. It was progressing for years with failures and improvements.

The Mahavir Viklang Sewa Samiti was started in 1975 by Mr Mehta an IAS officer and an old patient of my father. Its objective was to work for rehabilitation of amputee. My father was a government servant and things which could not be done by a government set up could be done in collaboration with the samiti. So, my father associated with it.

The Magsaysay award came seven or eight years after the invention and my father said in his acceptance speech itself that it was awkward for an individual to get credit for a work done with numerous institutions and craftsmen.

When he made the first technical presentation on the limb, he was asked to call it the Sethi foot but he refused. He also refused to patent it saying that it will innovate and improve.

Why did the NGO fall out with the doctor?

The innovation was not just the foot piece . It is a shoe and you have to make it for a certain person. So it has to be customised for you, and he felt that a doctor should oversee it.

The debate was whether a central person should be a orthopaedic surgeon. Mehta differed with my father on this . These are deeper issues other than issues like the award or the patents.

Why is so little known about the callipers he invented for polio-hit kids?

The Jaipur foot has reduced him to just one invention. His work for polio affected people goes back to the 50s.

The earlier polio callipers were heavy metal foot-pieces. He collaborated with the department of science and technology, IIT Bombay and the National Chemical Laboratory Pune to develop polio callipers which were made from polyurethane and were lightweight.

It does not get talked about as it cannot be bought off the shelf like the Jaipur foot and has to be custom made for each patient.

Was he unhappy in his last days about these controversies?

He had a good run. People remember him fondly as an excellent surgeon, teacher and if as an author I get a bad review, of course I am not pleased.

But then, all have their share of brickbats. We also have the sense to see things in perspective. Now we don't read Newtonian physics but read Einsteinian physics. But that doesn't take away credit from Newton.

What about the sculptor Ramchandra Sharma? It is said that his ideas made the foot possible.

He was a sculptor who worked in a local arts college and had lost his job. He was introduced to my father as a skilled craftsman.

He needed someone for his rehabilitation centre for occupational therapy. He hired him as a class 4 worker as he was not educated. For 25 years I saw masterji in my house and he worked closely with my father.

LIf Mr Mehta now tells him that you are the real guy and that this doctor educated from London has gone away with all the glory then what can be said? Or, to say that MVSS created the product is to stretch it hugely. Even the doctors who work with them today were trained by my father.

Harsh Sethi seen here with his father PK Sethi (middle).