Irinder Singh Ahluwalia

Irinder Singh Ahluwalia is the founder and managing trustee of the Hemkunt Foundation, a relief and welfare organisation based in Gurugram. He began the work in 2010 with three after-school centres teaching English, mathematics and computing to children from poor households, and quickly widened it: seeing that the children's families had no reliable income, he opened a driver training institute offering instruction and help with licensing.

The organisation took its present shape after a personal experience of disaster. In 2013 Ahluwalia and his family were caught for a week at the foot of Gurudwara Hemkunt Sahib during the Uttarakhand floods, without food or shelter, watching bridges and buildings collapse and relief helicopters swept away. He has described the week as the point at which he decided to give the rest of his life to relief work, and the foundation is named for the place.

Its best-known intervention came during the second wave of COVID-19 in 2021, when hospital oxygen ran out across north India. From about 18 April that year the foundation ran a round-the-clock oxygen supply operation in Gurugram, styled an oxygen langar after the Sikh free kitchen, giving oxygen without charge to anyone who came and prioritising patients whose saturation had fallen below 80 per cent. It set up a drive-through refill service at its headquarters and collection points in Mumbai working with local gurdwaras, and the model was picked up by gurdwaras in other cities. Before and alongside this it distributed thousands of ration packages and food packets across Delhi NCR. The foundation had earlier worked at the 2018 Kerala floods and during the farmers' protests, and now reports relief operations across 21 states along with programmes in healthcare, education through its Gurukul, and tree planting.[2][3]