Budh Singh Dhahan

Founder

Founder of Guru Nanak Mission Medical & Educational Trust

Budh Singh Dhahan is the founder of Guru Nanak Mission Medical & Educational Trust (1984)[1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare and education from Dhahan-Kaleran.

Budh Singh Dhahan (died 20 April 2018) was a Punjabi-Canadian community organiser and philanthropist who founded the Guru Nanak Mission Medical and Educational Trust in 1979 at Dhahan-Kaleran in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar district, Punjab. The trust built a rural hospital, a nursing college and schools on land donated by surrounding villages, and remains one of the larger charitable healthcare complexes in rural Punjab.

Early life

Dhahan was born into a Sikh family in rural Punjab. His formal schooling ended at grade eight. After the partition of India in 1947 he worked with displaced refugees, helping to build shelters, schools and places of worship. During the 1950s he was district head organiser of the Akali Dal for Jalandhar, vice-president of the Punjab Peace Council and an executive member of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, and was jailed on six occasions as a political prisoner.

Career

He emigrated to Canada in 1960, settling first in Port Alberni, British Columbia, and moving to Vancouver in 1973, where he ran a construction business. As general secretary of the Khalsa Diwan Society in 1975 he started English-as-a-second-language and Punjabi language classes for the community.

Having seen the healthcare and education available to Canadians, Dhahan returned to Punjab in 1979 and founded the Guru Nanak Mission Medical and Educational Trust. In 1980 the village of Dhahan donated 23 acres of land and the neighbouring village of Kaleran a further 7.5 acres. The Guru Nanak Mission Hospital opened to the public on 17 April 1984. The complex grew to include a hospital of more than a hundred beds, the Guru Nanak College of Nursing - among the first nursing degree programmes in Punjab and the first in a rural area - a senior secondary school and a paramedical college. Patients from 78 contributing villages are not charged bed or basic room charges. In 2010 he founded a second body, the Guru Nanak Mission International Charitable Trust. He died at Nawanshahr, Punjab, on 20 April 2018.

Recognition

Dhahan received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Kwantlen University College in British Columbia.[2][3][4]

Guru Nanak Mission Medical & Educational Trust

The Guru Nanak Mission Medical & Educational Trust was established by the late S. Budh Singh Dhahan, who returned to Punjab in 1979 after two decades in Canada determined to bring the same healthcare and education access he had seen abroad to his home villages. Its flagship, Guru Nanak Mission Hospital, opened to the public on 17 April 1984 on 33 acres donated by the gram panchayats of Dhahan and Kaleran villages in Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar district, and charges no bed or room fees to patients from the 78 villages that helped fund it, alongside free cataract surgeries and subsidised care for the economically disadvantaged. The trust now also runs the Guru Nanak College of Nursing, a paramedical college and a senior secondary school on the same campus. The NABH-accredited, 100+ bed teaching hospital reports treating over 65,000 patients a year, including more than 55,000 outpatient and 10,000 inpatient visits, supported by a network of donors across Punjab, the UK, the US and Canada.

Guru Nanak Mission Medical & Educational Trust reports the following, on its own site:

The hospital treats 65,000+ patients a year — 10,000+ through the In-Patient Department and 55,000+ through the Out-Patient Department.
A 100+ bed teaching hospital staffed by a team of 30+ qualified doctors and specialists.