Jyoti Sagar

Jyoti Sagar is a corporate lawyer, the founder of the law firm J. Sagar Associates and of the intellectual property practice K&S Partners, who with his wife Prema Sagar set up the Genesis Foundation to pay for heart surgery on children whose families cannot afford it.

The reason was personal. On 20 December 1983 the Sagars lost their second child, Sameer, to a congenital heart defect within sixteen hours of his birth, at a time when little could be done for such a condition in India. In the years afterwards they began volunteering at Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity, where they met two children whose cases shaped what they went on to do. One was a girl whose face had been disfigured by disease, for whom they arranged reconstructive surgery in the United States through an American non-profit; the other was a boy who had been thrown down a dry well by his father at the age of seven and had every major bone broken, and who was treated at a Shriners hospital in the United States and later adopted by an American family.

They formally established Genesis Foundation in 2001. Its work began with funding treatment for a range of chronic childhood illnesses including cancer and thalassaemia before narrowing to congenital heart defects, which it judged to be the most acute gap. The foundation pays for paediatric cardiac surgery for children aged up to eighteen from families earning under about 20,000 rupees a month, identifying cases through hospital referrals, its own screening camps and direct applications, and verifying both the diagnosis and the family's circumstances before approving support. It works with more than 25 hospitals selected for their paediatric cardiology capability and their willingness to treat poor families, and reports having supported over 5,000 children, with roughly half of recent beneficiaries being girls.[2][3]