Ranchhoddasji Maharaj

Founder

Founder of Shri Sadguru Seva Sangh Trust

Ranchhoddasji Maharaj is the founder of Shri Sadguru Seva Sangh Trust (1968)[1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare, education and rural & agriculture from Chitrakoot.

Ranchhoddasji Maharaj, addressed by his followers as Gurudev, was an Indian Hindu saint who founded the Shri Sadguru Seva Sangh Trust at Chitrakoot in Madhya Pradesh. The trust runs Sadguru Netra Chikitsalaya, described as one of the largest rural eye care institutions in the world, together with a general hospital and rural development programmes.

Founding of the trust

According to the trust's own account, while performing sadhu-seva at Chitrakoot Ranchhoddasji Maharaj came upon an elderly blind man who had stumbled against an electric pole. Finding that the man's blindness was caused by cataract and was therefore curable, he resolved to provide eye treatment to the rural poor.

In 1950 he organised a free eye camp at Chitrakoot at which 950 cataract operations were performed despite the absence of basic facilities. He and his followers continued to hold free eye camps and to run relief work for families affected by natural calamities in central India through the early 1950s.

These efforts were formalised in 1968 with the establishment of the Shri Sadguru Seva Sangh Trust at Chitrakoot. Ranchhoddasji Maharaj nominated the industrialist and philanthropist Arvindbhai N. Mafatlal, one of his devotees, as chairman, setting out a vision of food for the hungry, clothes for the destitute and sight for the blind.

Legacy

Sadguru Netra Chikitsalaya was established under the trust in 1968. By the late 2010s it was performing more than 132,000 ophthalmic operations a year, with over 100 full-time ophthalmologists, and had carried out some 2.5 million surgeries since its founding. The trust also runs Jankikund Chikitsalaya, a general hospital at Chitrakoot, and works in education, women's empowerment, agriculture and cattle care at Chitrakoot and at Anandpur in Vidisha district.[2][3][4]

Shri Sadguru Seva Sangh Trust

Founded in 1968 by the saint Param Pujya Shri Ranchhoddasji Maharaj with industrialist Arvind Mafatlal as chairman, Shri Sadguru Seva Sangh Trust grew from famine-relief work into one of India's largest blindness-eradication institutions. Its Sadguru Netra Chikitsalaya at Jankikund, Chitrakoot and Shri Sadguru Netra Chikitsalaya at Anandpur run a 2,500-bed eye-care network with 37 primary referral centres, alongside education, women's empowerment, agriculture and cattle-care programmes for the Bundelkhand region's poorest families.

Shri Sadguru Seva Sangh Trust reports the following, on its own site: