Prema Sagar

Prema Sagar founded the Genesis Foundation with her husband Jyoti Sagar after a private loss. Their second child, Sameer, died of a congenital heart defect on 20 December 1983, sixteen hours after he was born. The couple spent a long period without an answer as to why, and eventually began volunteering with the Missionaries of Charity, work that gave the bereavement a direction.

Two children they met there decided the shape of what followed. One was a twelve-year-old girl, the daughter of a poor farmer, whose face had been severely damaged by disease; the Sagars found an American non-profit to fund corrective surgery, and after a long series of operations she was able to eat and breathe normally and later married and settled in the United States. The other was a boy who had been thrown into a dry well by his father at the age of seven, breaking and dislocating most of his major bones; the Sagars reached him through a friend, Eugene Mihaly, and arranged treatment at the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children in the United States, after which he was adopted by an American family. He died in October 2012.

Those cases led the Sagars to concentrate on the condition that had killed their own son. The Genesis Foundation pays for heart treatment for underprivileged children aged up to eighteen whose families earn no more than 20,000 rupees a month, working directly with families, doctors and a network of partner hospitals across India to get children diagnosed and operated on in time. The foundation marks about twenty-five years of this work.[2]