Mahatma Gandhi

Founder

Founder of Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Mahatma Gandhi is the founder of Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital (1941)[1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare, palliative & cancer care and women & children from Prayagraj.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 - 30 January 1948), known as Mahatma Gandhi, was an Indian lawyer and anti-colonial nationalist who led the campaign for India's independence from British rule through nonviolent resistance, and whose methods influenced civil rights movements elsewhere.

Alongside his political work he was closely associated with a range of constructive and charitable causes. Among these was the Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital at Allahabad, for which he laid the foundation stone in 1939 and which he inaugurated on 28 February 1941.

Early life and education

Gandhi was born in Porbandar in present-day Gujarat in 1869 and studied law at the Inner Temple in London, qualifying as a barrister in 1891. He practised in South Africa from 1893, where he first developed his methods of nonviolent civil resistance before returning to India in 1915.

Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital

In 1931 Kamala Nehru, wife of Jawaharlal Nehru, converted rooms in her family home at Swaraj Bhawan in Allahabad into a Congress dispensary providing inpatient and outpatient care, and ran it until her death in 1936. After she died, Gandhi and other national leaders, among them Jawaharlal Nehru, Madan Mohan Malaviya and B. C. Roy, undertook to continue the work in her name.

Gandhi laid the hospital's foundation stone in 1939 and opened it on 28 February 1941, the anniversary of Kamala Nehru's death. It is recorded as the only hospital in India for which Gandhi personally collected donations. The hospital opened with forty obstetrics and gynaecology beds, twenty-eight of them free, and has since grown to about 350 beds, of which around 175 are free or subsidised. Its oncology department has been a government-recognised Regional Cancer Centre since 1994.

Recognition

The honorific Mahatma was first applied to Gandhi in South Africa in 1914. He is officially honoured in India as the Father of the Nation, and his birthday, 2 October, is observed in India as Gandhi Jayanti and internationally as the United Nations International Day of Non-Violence.[2][3][4]

Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital

Born of the freedom struggle, Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital traces its roots to the Congress Dispensary Kamala Nehru ran in Swaraj Bhawan from 1931. Its foundation stone was laid by Mahatma Gandhi in 1939 on land donated by Jawaharlal Nehru, and the hospital he inaugurated in 1941 began with 40 beds, 28 of them free. Today the charitable trust hospital is the region's foremost cancer centre, running a regional cancer centre, multispeciality departments, a school of health sciences and a rural base hospital for the underserved.

Kamla Nehru Memorial Hospital reports the following, on its own site: