Compiled from public sources: the college and Bapuji Educational Association websites and press reports. Awaiting confirmation by the college.
Jagadguru Jayadeva Murugarajendra Medical College — JJMMC to generations of its students — has trained doctors in Davanagere since 1965. This page traces how a town’s ambition for its own medical college became one of the established teaching institutions of Karnataka.
The founding
The story begins with the Bapuji Educational Association. In 1958 eight citizens of Davanagere — Rajanahalli Maddurayappa, G. Veerappa, Bondade Hanumantha Rao, Kasal Shreenivas Shetty, Mundas Veerabhadrappa, Shinde Hanumantha Rao, Belludi Shivasangappa and A. H. Shivananda Swamy — came together to manage the town’s first college and to foster the cause of education in Davanagere. That first college, built by the businessman and philanthropist Dharmaratnakara Rajanahalli Maddurayappa, is known today as DRM Science College.
A medical college for Davanagere
Seven years later the Association took on something far more ambitious. In 1965, with the consent of the Government of Karnataka, the Medical Council of India and the Central Government, it established a medical college in the town, and the first MBBS students began their studies that same year. The founding purpose, as the college still describes it, was to develop skilled healthcare personnel to meet the healthcare needs of the local population.
The college carries the name of Sri Jayadeva Murugharajendra Swamiji, the revered pontiff of the Murugha Math of Chitradurga, whose donation helped make it possible.
Hospitals to learn in
A medical college is only as strong as the hospitals its students train in, and JJMMC was fortunate in the city around it. Davanagere already had the Chigateri General Hospital, the gift of the philanthropist “Dharmaprakasha” Murigappa Chigateri, which remains the district’s main public hospital and one of the college’s principal teaching hospitals.
Alongside it grew Bapuji Hospital, now one of the oldest hospitals in central Karnataka and for decades the tertiary referral centre for the surrounding districts. Today it has 720 sanctioned beds and sees around 1,800 outpatients a day. The network has since widened to include SS General Hospital on K. R. Road, the Women and Child Hospital at Mandipet, the Bapuji Child Health Institute and Research Centre, the STJ Rural Hospital at Channagiri and the Community Health Centre at Kukkavada, so that students see medicine in the city, in the district hospital and in the villages.
Three universities
The college’s degrees have been awarded by three universities over its history. It was first affiliated to the University of Mysore, then to Kuvempu University after that university was founded in 1987, and since 1996 to the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Karnataka’s dedicated health-sciences university. Its degrees have been recognised throughout by the national regulator: first the Medical Council of India and now the National Medical Commission.
Growth
The college grew as the Bapuji Educational Association grew. Under the long stewardship of the late Dr. Shamanur Shivashankarappa, the Association expanded from five colleges to more than fifty, among them a second medical college, two dental colleges and an engineering college, and Davanagere became one of the recognised education centres of the State.
For JJMMC, that meant a campus of some 25 acres holding the pre-clinical, para-clinical and administrative blocks, with the clinical departments working across the teaching hospitals. Postgraduate education followed the undergraduate course: by 2017–18 the college offered 220 postgraduate seats across 21 specialities, from Anaesthesiology to Radio-Diagnosis. It has since added fellowships in Perinatal Medicine and Paediatric Anaesthesia, and a Medical Education Unit to train its own teachers.
The college today
JJMMC now admits 245 MBBS students a year and teaches through twenty-three pre-clinical, para-clinical and clinical departments, from Anatomy to the newer specialities of Emergency Medicine and Neonatology. Its laboratories include an NABL-accredited COVID-19 molecular laboratory, and the Bapuji Child Health Institute carries NABH accreditation. Its students continue to feature among the university’s rank holders, as in 2018, when JJMMC postgraduates took first rank in Pulmonary Medicine, Orthopaedics, Radio-Diagnosis and Psychiatry.
The college states its vision simply: “to impart quality medical education of global standards, provide comprehensive patient care at community level and promote research.”
Milestones
1958 — Bapuji Educational Association founded in Davanagere, beginning with a first-grade college.
1965 — JJM Medical College established; the first MBBS batch admitted.
1987 — Affiliation passes to the newly founded Kuvempu University.
1996 — Affiliation passes to the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences.
2015 — The college completes fifty years.
2025 — Sixty years of JJMMC; the passing of Dr. Shamanur Shivashankarappa, who guided the Association for decades.
Your history
Every batch has its own chapter of this story — the teachers who shaped it, the wards it worked in, the friendships it made. The Alumni Association welcomes photographs, memories and corrections from every graduate, so that this page grows into the history its alumni remember.