Vaishali Pai

Founder

Vaishali Pai is the founder of Tamahar Trust [1], an Indian non-profit working on disability, healthcare and women & children from Bengaluru.

Vaishali Pai is an Indian occupational therapist who founded Tamahar Trust in Bengaluru in 2009. Tamahar, a name drawn from a Sanskrit phrase meaning remover of darkness, is a centre for children with developmental disabilities arising from brain injury, including cerebral palsy, autism, Down's syndrome, intellectual impairment, epileptic disorders and rare genetic conditions. She is its founder-director.

Career

Pai has worked as an occupational therapist for more than thirty years and has specialist training in early intervention and family services from California State University, Los Angeles. She combines occupational therapy with neuro-linguistic programming in her practice and works as a trainer of professionals in the disability sector.

Tamahar records that the idea for the centre came from her observation, early in her career, of carers travelling long distances by public transport to take children with special needs to separate therapy appointments. She set out to create a centre using a trans-disciplinary approach, bringing the therapies together in one place and training carers to act as their children's principal therapists. The trust was founded in 2009 on the principle of individualised development plans based on each child's developmental rather than chronological age.

Tamahar runs children's programmes, family services, human resource development and outreach work, and supports children irrespective of their families' economic circumstances.[2][3][4]

Tamahar Trust

Tamahar Trust was founded in 2009 by occupational therapist Dr Vaishali Pai, after she saw caregivers travelling long distances on public transport to take children with special needs to scattered therapy sessions. Based in Malleshwaram, Bengaluru, it brings all therapies under one roof in a trans-disciplinary centre and trains caregivers to become the primary therapists for their own children, building individualised plans around each child's developmental rather than chronological age, regardless of the family's socio-economic background.

Tamahar Trust reports the following, on its own site: