The dream to serve: Samanta Lal Sen becomes new health minister

Professor Dr Samanta Lal Sen, the coordinator of the Sheikh Hasina National Institute of Burn and Plastic Surgery, expressed surprise at the news of being included in Prime Minister's new cabinet. 

"I am very surprised by this development. I don't know how much I can do. I work with my [burns institutes]. And now I have a new role. Let me see. I can't say anything now," he said in an instant reaction on Wednesday.

Today, he took his oath. But much before the swearing-in, Samanta Lal Sen had already decided what he wanted to do. 

Born in Sylhet's Habiganj, Sen passed his MBBS from the Chittagong Medical College in 1973. 

He started his career in Habiganj, before being transferred to Dhaka and joining the  Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital. 

He then moved to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital in 1980.

In an article Sen wrote for the Prothom Alo in 2013, he recalled how he had proposed forming a burn unit after seeing how neglected such patients were at the DMCH. Back then, there was no separate unit for such patients.

Sen played a vital role in the formation of the unit in 2003. 

In a 2016 interview with the Bangla Tribune, Sen spoke candidly about how he had arrived at the burn institute, where he soon became a familiar face. 

According to him, he had started as a plastic surgeon. 

"My dream was to make people look beautiful. I wanted to make a lot of money and own a number of cars," he said. 

The dream, however, changed when he joined the burn department at DMCH. 

He met a lot of burn patients and saw their suffering. 

He recalled how his mother had asked him to work for the poor to find peace in his soul.

And that's what he set out to do.

With that goal in mind, Sen became the founder director of the DMCH's burn unit, a place which he said was like a baby to him.

Sen's appointment as the health minister of the newly formed cabinet is as a technocrat minister.

The Cabinet Division issued a gazette today, outlining the distribution of responsibilities among the new cabinet members.