Mahesh Jadhav

Founder

Mahesh Jadhav is the founder of Mahesh Foundation [1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare, orphans & child care and education from Belagavi.

Mahesh Jadhav is an Indian social worker from Belagavi, Karnataka, and the founder of the Mahesh Foundation, a charity that cares for and educates children living with HIV. He began the work in 2008 while still a college student.

The foundation runs a residential care home, Asha Kiran, for HIV-positive children, together with schooling, nutrition and vocational programmes and public awareness campaigns on HIV and AIDS.

Career

Jadhav and a group of friends began visiting the children's wards of hospitals in Belagavi to mark their birthdays by distributing fruit. During one such visit he met a four-year-old boy living with HIV, and on learning how many children in the ward were affected the group, then aged twenty-one, began supporting them from their own pockets with travel costs, food and school kits.

When the boy's mother died in 2010, Jadhav tried to place him in an orphanage and found that homes refused to admit a child who was HIV-positive. He opened his own house to the children, and it became the care home later named Asha Kiran. The Mahesh Foundation was subsequently organised into separate divisions for schooling, the hostel and awareness work, and reports having supported several thousand children.

Recognition

Jadhav received a Karnataka state award in 2014 and the National Award for Child Welfare in 2017 for his work with people affected by HIV. In 2022 he received the Badlaav Humse Hai award.[2][3][4]

Mahesh Foundation

Mahesh Foundation was started in 2008 by Mahesh Jadhav in Belagavi, Karnataka, to support HIV-infected and underprivileged children. It runs the Ashakiran shelter home for children living with HIV, the Utkarsha Learning Center for medically challenged and underprivileged children, community HIV support programmes and a charitable hospital project at Kanbargi.

Mahesh Foundation reports the following, on its own site: