Aroon Purie

Aroon Purie, the founder-publisher and editor-in-chief of India Today, established the Care Today Fund in 1999 and remains its founder, turning a news organisation's readership into a standing mechanism for disaster relief.

Purie was educated at The Doon School and took a degree in economics from the London School of Economics in 1965. He began work at Thomson Press in 1970 and launched India Today as its publisher in 1975, during the Emergency, later building the group's television channels. The Care Today Fund grew out of that readership: after the Kargil conflict, readers of India Today publications wrote in wanting to help, and the Fund was created so that their contributions could be pooled, spent and then publicly accounted for. Its first project, Lest We Forget, supported and rehabilitated 38 soldiers affected by war and militancy.

The distinguishing feature Purie built into the Fund was accountability rather than scale: it routinely tabulates how donations have been spent and reports back through the group's magazines and channels, and it stays with a disaster long after the coverage has moved on. Over 26 years it has raised and distributed more than 25 crore rupees, responding to the Odisha super cyclone of 1999, drought in Rajasthan and Gujarat in 2000, the Gujarat earthquake in Kutch in 2001, the 2004 tsunami in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, the Bihar floods of 2008, the Leh flash floods of 2010, the Kerala floods of 2018 and cyclone Fani in 2019, as well as running funds for acid attack survivors, for prisoners in Tihar, for sanitation and for scholarships. It has worked in more than twenty states and reports touching about 250,000 lives.

Purie was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2001 for his contribution to Indian journalism, and has received the B. D. Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism.[2][3][4]