Swami Dayananda Saraswati

Founder

Swami Dayananda Saraswati is the founder of AIM for Seva [1], an Indian non-profit working on education and rural & agriculture from Chennai.

Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930–2015), born Natarajan Gopala Iyer, was an Indian monk of the Saraswati order of sannyasa and a traditional teacher of Advaita Vedanta. He founded the Arsha Vidya Gurukulams and, in 2000, All India Movement for Seva (AIM for Seva), a charitable organisation providing education and healthcare in rural and tribal India.

Early life

He was born in Tamil Nadu in 1930 and worked as a journalist before becoming involved with the Chinmaya Mission in 1952. He was initiated into monastic life in 1962 and spent three years studying in Rishikesh before beginning to teach.

Career

Dayananda established Arsha Vidya teaching centres at Saylorsburg in Pennsylvania, Rishikesh, Coimbatore and Nagpur, and conducted long residential courses in Vedanta and Sanskrit. He trained more than 200 monastic disciples who teach in India and abroad, and wrote over 60 books on Vedanta.

In 2000 he founded AIM for Seva, whose flagship programme is the chatralayam, a free student hostel attached to existing rural schools so that children from remote villages and tribal areas can continue their education. Children living at a chatralayam receive boarding, uniforms, fortified meals and after-school academic support at no cost. The organisation also runs projects in healthcare, community development, support for people with developmental delays and sustainable living, and reports 262 projects across 17 states.

He also convened the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha, a body bringing together the heads of Hindu religious traditions, and took part in interfaith initiatives.

Recognition

He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour, in 2016, posthumously.

Death

Dayananda died at Rishikesh in September 2015.[2][3]

AIM for Seva

AIM for Seva (All India Movement for Seva), founded in 2000 by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, provides free student homes (chatralayams) that let children from remote villages access quality education. Headquartered in Chennai, it runs hostels, schools and healthcare projects across India, reaching thousands of first-generation learners.

AIM for Seva reports the following, on its own site: