Purnota Dutta Bahl

Purnota Dutta Bahl is the founder and chief executive of Cuddles Foundation, which she set up to address a problem in Indian paediatric cancer care that had been largely ignored: children from poor families arriving for treatment already malnourished, and unable to withstand the therapy as a result.

She had spent eleven years in marketing, handling brands for Shaadi.com and the Hindustan Times, after a degree from Sydenham College in Mumbai and an MBA from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. A visit to Tata Memorial Hospital, where she saw how badly undernourishment was affecting children being treated for cancer, led her to leave the corporate sector and start the foundation.

Her answer was to place trained nutritionists inside hospitals rather than to distribute food from outside. Under the FoodHeals programme, a nutritionist attached to a hospital's paediatric oncology unit assesses each child, prescribes a diet, and supplies supplements, ration baskets and hot meals as needed, tracking progress through a purpose-built application so that treatment and nutrition are managed together. The foundation reports that the programme has supported more than 20,000 children and now operates in over 48 hospitals across seventeen states, with 81 per cent of patients maintaining or improving their nutritional status during therapy.

The organisation received the President's Award for National Child Welfare in 2015-16, the Nourisher Award from the United Nations Global Compact and the Akshaya Patra Foundation in 2018, and an Outlook Poshan award in 2019.[2][3]