Samir Narayan Chaudhuri

Founder

Founder of Child In Need Institute (CINI)

Samir Narayan Chaudhuri is the founder of Child In Need Institute (CINI) (1974)[1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, healthcare, education and orphans & child care from South 24 Parganas.

Samir Chaudhuri is an Indian paediatrician who founded the Child In Need Institute (CINI) in 1974, a non-governmental organisation working with deprived women and children in the villages and informal settlements around Kolkata and across eastern India.

He is the director of CINI and president of CINI International, and has advised bilateral, international and United Nations agencies on emergency relief and on health and nutrition programmes for women and children in countries across Africa and Asia.

Education

Chaudhuri qualified as a physician at the University of Rangoon in 1961 and trained as a paediatrician specialising in child nutrition at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, in 1970.

Career

Chaudhuri founded CINI in 1974. It began as a clinic for malnourished children under five in villages south of Kolkata and expanded into nutrition rehabilitation and then into a broader programme covering health and nutrition, education, child protection, adolescent empowerment, environment and relief work, and training.

In 2007 CINI adopted what it calls the Child-Friendly Communities approach, a rights-based framework for programming at the local level. The organisation is headquartered at Daulatpur in South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, and works across states in eastern India including West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha and Assam, reaching several million people. Among its interventions is Nutrimix, a low-cost nutritional supplement, which received recognition from the World Bank in 2009. CINI marked fifty years of operation in 2024.

Chaudhuri is a past president of the Voluntary Health Association of India, sits on the boards of CINI support organisations in Italy, Scotland and England, and has been a founder member of SRUTI, a Delhi-based organisation supporting grassroots social action. He and his colleagues at CINI have taken part in policy bodies of the Indian ministries of health and family welfare and of human resource development.

Recognition

Chaudhuri received an award from the Italian Parliament's Commission for Infants in 2005, the World of Children Health Award in 2007, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor Global Humanitarian Award in 2008, and the Sera Bangali award from ABP Ananda in 2013.[2][3][4][5]

Child In Need Institute (CINI)

Child In Need Institute works on maternal and child health and nutrition, education, child protection and adolescent empowerment. It reports serving 1.4 million pregnant and lactating women.

Child In Need Institute (CINI) reports the following, on its own site:

Impacted the lives of more than 50 million children, adolescents and women over the last 50 years
1.4 million pregnant and lactating women given access to services
5.1 million adolescents engaged in the empowerment process
92,000 children supported in accessing educational services