Sachin Tendulkar

Sachin Tendulkar, the batsman who retired in 2013 as international cricket's highest run-scorer, has spent much of his public life since the 1990s lending his name and money to health, sanitation and education causes. He has been UNICEF's Goodwill Ambassador for South Asia and its national ambassador for India since November 2013, and had worked with the agency well before that, joining its polio-awareness drive in 2003 and its hygiene and sanitation campaign in 2008.

His charitable giving has clustered around children's health. In 2010 he worked with Dr P. Jagannath, head of oncology at Mumbai's Lilavati Hospital, on a fundraising campaign called Crusade Against Cancer in Children that raised about 10.25 million rupees. Proceeds from the limited 'Blood Edition' copies of the 2011 Tendulkar Opus, priced at 75,000 US dollars each, went to his charitable work. In November 2021 he donated retinal cameras used to diagnose retinopathy of prematurity to a hospital in Assam. During the COVID-19 pandemic he gave 2.5 million rupees each to the Prime Minister's and the Maharashtra Chief Minister's relief funds in March 2020, and in April 2021, during the oxygen shortage of the second wave, 10 million rupees to the Mission Oxygen group importing oxygen concentrators.

In education he has funded schooling directly and through campaigns. In 2009 he began sponsoring the education of 200 children a year through Apnalaya, the Mumbai non-profit run by his mother-in-law Annabel Mehta, and was still doing so in 2013. In September 2011 he spent nine hours on the twelve-hour Coca-Cola–NDTV Support My School telethon, which raised about 70 million rupees for basic facilities, particularly toilets for girls, in 140 government schools. He led UNICEF's Team Swachh Bharat campaign in support of the government's sanitation mission and was among the first nine people named by the Prime Minister in 2014 to promote it.

The Sachin Tendulkar Foundation, which he set up with his wife Dr Anjali Tendulkar, a paediatrician who heads it, formalised this work into a grant-making and partnership platform across sports, health and education for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2019 the India Today group named him the most effective ambassador for cleanliness at its Safaigiri awards.[2][3]