Rajkumari Amrit Kaur was born in 1889 into the ruling family of Kapurthala, was educated at Sherborne and Oxford, and became Gandhi's secretary for sixteen years.
She was jailed repeatedly in the independence movement, was a member of the Constituent Assembly, and became independent India's first Health Minister, holding the post for ten years from 1947.
She founded the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and pushed the legislation through Parliament. She was the first woman to be president of the World Health Assembly. She founded the Indian Council for Child Welfare and was central to establishing the Tuberculosis Association of India and the National Sports Club.
She gave her family's Simla house to the Tuberculosis Association.
A Punjabi princess from Kapurthala founded India's leading medical institution and ran its health ministry for a decade, and outside a hospital name almost nobody in Punjab could say who she was.
Her father Raja Harnam Singh was a younger son of the Kapurthala house who became a Christian, and she was raised in that household and stayed in it. A Sikh princely name, an English boarding school and a Christian upbringing is a combination the Punjab of her generation produced more than once and has more or less forgotten.
She wrote to Gandhi for years before she worked for him and the letters are published. She was at Sevagram, she was in the Quit India arrests, and she went from a palace at Kapurthala to a jail in Ambala without any recorded difficulty about it.
She chaired the World Health Assembly in 1950, the first woman and the first Asian to do it.