B Sankar Mahadevan

Mahadevan spent his working life in a nationalised bank while volunteering with charitable organisations. He has said that seeing poor children and women unable to celebrate Deepavali as others did prompted him to act; he began by providing meals and clothing to orphaned children at the festival.

At the age of 53 he left his banking job to work full time on charitable activity, and with a group of friends established Udhavum Ullangal, a name meaning 'helping hearts'. The trust, based at CIT Nagar in Chennai, supports more than a thousand disadvantaged students a year across Tamil Nadu with tuition fees, uniforms and scholarships, with a particular focus on children with disabilities and those from single-parent households.

The trust also runs preventive oncology work in Tirunelveli, Tenkasi and Thoothukudi districts, covering awareness, digital risk assessment and screening for breast, oral and cervical cancer, which it says has reached close to 200,000 people. Mahadevan's stated aim is to establish an affordable cancer hospital, the Nellai Cancer Prevention Care facility, in Tirunelveli.[2][3]