Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Sathya Sai Baba (23 November 1926 - 24 April 2011), born Sathyanarayana Raju in the village of Puttaparthi in what is now Andhra Pradesh, was an Indian religious teacher whose following funded a large body of free education, healthcare and drinking water work in southern India. His maxims, Love All Serve All and Help Ever Hurt Never, framed service as a religious obligation for his devotees.

The charitable work began small and close to home. A free general hospital was built at Puttaparthi in 1954, followed by a second inside the ashram in 1957. The first education project, a college for girls at Anantapur, opened in 1968, and a boys' college at Puttaparthi in 1978; both were folded into the university inaugurated in 1981. In 1972 he established the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust as the umbrella body for these projects.

Two undertakings dominate the later record. The first was hospital building: the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences opened at Prasanthigram in 1991 and a second institute and super-speciality hospital at Whitefield near Bangalore in 2001, both providing specialist surgery and treatment without charge and, by the institution's own description, without a billing counter. The second was water. In March 1995 he began a project to pipe drinking water to about 1.2 million people in the drought-stricken Rayalaseema region of Anantapur district, and further schemes followed in Medak and Mahabubnagar in 2001, Chennai in 2002 and East and West Godavari in 2007. The Chennai project, which brought Krishna river water to the city, was publicly acknowledged at an event in the city in January 2007 attended by four chief ministers.

The Department of Posts issued a stamp in November 1999 in recognition of his work on rural drinking water. The Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust was granted special consultative status by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 2020. He was also the subject of sustained criticism from Indian rationalists, who disputed his claimed materialisations, and of allegations of fraud; he was never charged with any offence.[3][4]