Sushila Nayar

Founder

Founder of Mahila Dakshata Samiti · Kasturba Health Society

Sushila Nayar is the founder of Mahila Dakshata Samiti (1977)[1] and Kasturba Health Society (1964)[2], Indian non-profits working on women & children, human rights, education, healthcare and rural & agriculture from New Delhi.

Sushila Nayar (1914–2001) was a physician who spent her working life joining medicine to Gandhian social reconstruction. Born at Kunjah in the Gujarat district of Punjab, now in Pakistan, she came to Delhi to study at Lady Hardinge Medical College, taking her MBBS and MD there. Her brother Pyarelal Nayyar was Gandhi's private secretary, and in 1939 she moved to Sevagram to join him. Soon after she arrived cholera broke out in Wardha and she dealt with the outbreak almost single-handed; Gandhi then appointed her his personal physician. She was imprisoned with other Gandhians at the Aga Khan Palace in Poona during the Quit India movement in 1942.

Her most durable creation began as a small dispensary she opened at Sevagram in 1944. It grew so quickly that it disturbed the ashram, and she moved it to a guesthouse in Wardha donated by the Birlas; in 1945 it became Kasturba Hospital. She set up the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences there in 1969, under the Kasturba Health Society, as a medical college deliberately sited in a village rather than a city so that doctors would be trained in and for rural India, and after leaving politics she devoted herself to developing it. After Gandhi's assassination she had taken two degrees in public health at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and on returning in 1950 she established a tuberculosis sanatorium at Faridabad, the cooperative township set up by the Gandhian Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. She also headed the Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation.

Public office gave her a second platform. She was elected to the Delhi legislature in 1952 and served as Health Minister in the capital, was Speaker of the Delhi Vidhan Sabha from 1955 to 1956, entered the Lok Sabha from Jhansi in 1957, and was Union Health Minister from 1962 to 1967. She campaigned for prohibition, arguing that alcoholism in husbands fell hardest on poor women, and for family planning as a matter of women's autonomy. In 1977 she was among the founders of the Mahila Dakshata Samiti, formed by a group of women to confront dowry demands, bride-burning, violence against women and the neglect of girls' education, and became its first president, serving until 1983. She wrote extensively, including several books on Kasturba and Gandhi and the completion of her brother's multi-volume biography of Gandhi. She never married, and died on 3 January 2001.[3][4]

Mahila Dakshata Samiti

Mahila Dakshata Samiti was founded in 1977 by Dr Sushila Nayar, Pramila Dandavate, Suman Krishan Kant and other leaders of the women's movement, and set up India's first family counselling centre the following year. From its Delhi head office and branches in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Odisha and beyond, it has campaigned for the Dowry Amendment Bill, anti-sati and domestic violence laws and 33% reservation for women, pioneered the family courts idea and consumer movement, and runs the Swadhar Greha short-stay home and legal aid cells for women in distress.

Kasturba Health Society

Registered on 11 September 1964 to manage the Kasturba Hospital that grew out of Mahatma Gandhi's Sevagram ashram dispensary, the Kasturba Health Society is the voluntary society behind India's first rural medical college — the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, founded in 1969 by Dr. Sushila Nayar, Gandhi's personal physician. In village Sevagram in Wardha district, the society runs a 660-bed teaching hospital serving the rural poor of Vidarbha and beyond, community-based medical education that immerses doctors in surrounding villages, and the Dr. Sushila Nayar School of Public Health — keeping Gandhian values at the heart of low-cost, high-quality rural healthcare.

Kasturba Health Society reports the following, on its own site: