Palak Muchhal

Palak Muchhal, now a playback singer in Hindi films, began her charitable career as a child performer in Indore and is known for financing heart operations for children whose families cannot pay for them.

She started singing for causes during the Kargil conflict in 1999, aged seven, when she spent a week performing in shops in Indore and raised about Rs 25,000 for the families of soldiers killed in the fighting; she sang again later that year for victims of the Odisha cyclone. Her focus narrowed to cardiac surgery after teachers at a local school approached her family on behalf of a pupil, Lokesh, whose father, a footwear seller, could not afford an operation for a congenital heart defect. In March 2000 she performed on a street vendor's cart and raised about Rs 51,000. The Bengaluru surgeon Devi Prasad Shetty, hearing of the case, operated on the boy without charge, and the publicity brought her family a list of 33 more children needing surgery.

From 2000 she toured India and abroad with a charity concert billed as Dil Se Dil Tak, or Save Little Hearts, singing around forty songs a night in a range of Indian languages; her younger brother Palash performed alongside her, raising money for children with kidney disease. The family took no income from the shows. Hospitals in Indore reduced their charges for cases she brought: T. Choithram Hospital halved its surgical fee, the cardiac surgeon Dhiraj Gandhi waived his own, and Bhandari Hospital allowed the fund an overdraft of up to Rs 10 lakh so that operations would not be held up for want of money. She was given her own gown at the hospital and sat in on the operations, and kept a doll for each child whose surgery she had paid for.

The work was formalised as the Palak Muchhal Heart Foundation. About 200 children had been operated on by early 2006; by the end of that year some Rs 1.2 crore had been raised and 234 children treated. She entered playback singing professionally in 2011 and continued the concerts alongside it, with the count of children helped by her and her brother reported at around 2,200 by 2020.

She received the Rashtriya Bal Puraskar, the national child award for exceptional achievement, in 2000, and her fundraising has been recorded in the Limca Book of Records.[1][2]