Sunder Subramaniam

Founder

Sunder Subramaniam is the founder of Freedom Trust (1997)[1], an Indian non-profit working on disability and healthcare from Chennai.

Sunder Subramaniam is an Indian physician specialising in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and the founder of Freedom Trust, a Chennai-based charitable trust that supplies prosthetics, orthoses and mobility aids to people with physical disabilities. The trust's full name is the Foundation for the Rehabilitation Education and Empowerment of the Disabled of Madras.

Early life and education

Subramaniam took his medical degree at Stanley Medical College, Chennai, in 1984 and holds an MD in physical medicine and rehabilitation. He is one of a small number of practitioners of that specialty in India.

Career

Subramaniam is the founder and medical director of the Prem Centre for Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Medicine in Chennai.

He established Freedom Trust in 1997 to address the mobility needs of physically disabled people in rural areas, and serves as its founder trustee. The trust is based at Thiruvanmiyur in Chennai and works through rural camps at which wheelchairs, tricycles, artificial limbs, callipers, crutches, walkers and other appliances are fitted and distributed free of charge. Its projects include Walk India, which provides custom-made prostheses to amputees in rural areas; Gram Vikalang Punarjanmam, which distributes mobility aids to people affected by polio, muscular dystrophy, locomotor disability and spinal cord injury; Shishu Punarjanmam, which since 2003 has supported disabled children in music and the fine arts; and an appliance bank.

The trust reports having reached about 40,000 people through more than 1,200 rural camps across states including Assam, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Telangana, Goa, Karnataka and Kerala.[2][3][4]

Freedom Trust

Registered in Chennai on 12 December 1996 by Dr. Sunder Subramaniam, Freedom Trust (Foundation for the Rehabilitation, Education and Empowerment of the Disabled of Madras) equips persons with physical disabilities across India with tailor-made artificial limbs, calipers, wheelchairs and other mobility aids. Its flagship Walk India rural camps, Gram Vikalang Punarjanmam village rehabilitation programme, Shishu Punarjanmam arts initiative for differently abled children, and an appliance bank have carried prosthetic rehabilitation from Thiruvanmiyur to amputees in villages across multiple states.

Freedom Trust reports the following, on its own site: