Harakhchand Savla

Founder

Founder of Jeevan Jyot Cancer Relief & Care Trust

Harakhchand Savla is the founder of Jeevan Jyot Cancer Relief & Care Trust (1997)[1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare and hunger from Mumbai.

Harakhchand Savla is an Indian social worker in Mumbai who founded the Jeevan Jyot Cancer Relief and Care Trust, which provides free meals, medicines and support to cancer patients and their families outside the Tata Memorial Hospital at Parel. He began the work in the mid-1980s and is the trust's managing trustee.

The trust started as a food service on the pavement beside the Kondaji Building opposite the hospital, feeding around fifty people a day. It has grown to serve several hundred meals daily and to run a medicine bank, a toy bank for children with cancer, an ambulance service and a range of other projects, with centres in several Indian cities.

Early life

Savla came from a modest background in Mumbai. As a schoolboy he walked several kilometres to school and used the saved bus fare to pay a classmate's school fees. In his youth he was active in a neighbourhood association in Lower Parel, organising blood donation camps, free food distribution and medical aid, and arranging cremations for unclaimed bodies. He also managed a library in Lower Parel, through which he developed an interest in literature and philosophy.

Career

Savla ran a hotel business in Mumbai. He became involved with cancer patients after helping the family of a woman who had been diagnosed with cancer and seeing at first hand the conditions in which patients and relatives who had travelled to Mumbai for treatment were living outside Tata Memorial Hospital. He rented out, and at one stage mortgaged, his hotel to raise money and began distributing food, medicines and guidance on the pavement opposite the hospital.

He worked largely alone for the first twelve years before registering the Jeevan Jyot Cancer Relief and Care Trust to widen the work. The trust provides free meals to more than 700 patients and relatives a day, distributes free medicines through a drug bank staffed by volunteer doctors and pharmacists, runs a toy bank for children undergoing treatment, and operates an ambulance service. It has expanded to a dozen centres in cities including Mumbai, Jalgaon, Sangli and Kolkata, and undertakes relief work such as flood relief in Sangli, Chiplun and the Konkan.

The trust reports running more than sixty humanitarian projects. Savla has also raised funds through door-to-door collection of old newspapers and clothes.[2][3]

Jeevan Jyot Cancer Relief & Care Trust

Founded by Harakhchand Savla, who began serving free meals to cancer patients on the pavement opposite Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel in 1985, the trust was registered in 1997. It provides free food, a medicine bank, guidance and allied services to poor cancer patients and their families, and has grown into a network of humanitarian projects across several cities.

Jeevan Jyot Cancer Relief & Care Trust reports the following, on its own site:

The 'Jeevan Jyot' trust founded by Mr. Savla now runs more than 60 humanitarian projects.
He is the managing trustee of the trust which has expanded itself to 12 different centres throughout the country including Mumbai, Jalgoan, Sangli and Calcutta.