Kamalatai Hospet

She was born Yamuna Krushna Mohoni on 23 May 1896 at Shirpur in Dhule district, in what is now Maharashtra. She was married at the age of twelve to Gururao Hospet, who died when she was fifteen. Her brother brought her to Nagpur rather than allow her to be subjected to the customs then imposed on widows.

She studied at the institution for widows founded by Dhondo Keshav Karve in Pune, and then trained as a nurse at the Dufferin Hospital in Nagpur between 1918 and 1920. She later recalled being reprimanded by a British doctor for treating a poor Indian patient with dignity, an incident she said shaped her subsequent work.

In 1921 Hospet and Venutai Nene founded Matru Sewa Sangh at Sitabuldi in Nagpur, beginning with a four-bed maternity home. Conditions for pregnant women in the Central Provinces and Berar at the time were poor, and the organisation opened further maternity homes across the region.

Matru Sewa Sangh expanded to some twenty-one branches in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and came to include nursing schools, an institute of social work, schools for disabled children and homes for elderly people. In 1971 she co-founded the Vidya Shikshan Prasarak Mandal, which today runs a large number of educational institutions.

Hospet received the Nalawa Medal in 1959, the Padma Shri in 1961 and the Jamnalal Bajaj Award in 1980.[2][3][4][5]