Dipak Bhatia was head of India's national family planning programme in the 1960s. He was born in Punjab on 27 November 1909 and educated in Lahore, leaving high school at the age of 14. After receiving an MB BS degree from Lahore Medical College, he went to England and stayed in London for a few years, becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He returned to India and joined the Indian Army as a commissioned officer in the mid-1930s. During the Second World War he was posted to North Africa and later Italy with the Indian troops of the Eighth Army. He was awarded an OBE for his wartime services. Colonel Bhatia, as he then was, quit the army at the time of independence and the partition of India in 1947 and joined the government of Indian Punjab. He served for nearly 20 years as civil surgeon, chief medical officer, deputy director of research and medical education (in which capacity he was closely involved with the establishment of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh) and director of health services. In the mid-1960s, Bhatia was deputed to the central government of India as commissioner of family planning, to head the national family planning programme. In 1969 he retired from government service. After his retirement, the Ford Foundation, which was then funding family planning programmes in India, asked him to join them as an adviser. In 1973 the United Nations Development Programme posted him to Cairo as an adviser on family planning in Egypt. Bhatia retired from this assignment after five years in 1978. Bhatia remained associated with family planning issues, as a member of the governing body of the Family Planning Foundation (India) until his demise. In 1945, after his return from the war, Dipak Bhatia married his long-time fiancée, Pushpa Bery. They had two sons. Bhatia was in indifferent health during his last years, due to respiratory problems and Parkinson's disease. He died on 1 December 1992.