Bangalore
Karnataka12.99° N · 77.65° EIt began here, in the slums of Ganganagar and Baiyappanahalli. A whole generation has grown up alongside us.
Our story
Medicine alone could not heal a community.
Over time, we learned to listen before deciding what people needed.
Sometimes the answer was medicine. Sometimes it was a school uniform. Sometimes it was clean water, a sewing machine, a wheelchair, food for a family, or simply standing beside someone during a hard season.
One need often led us to another.
- Healthcare led us into homes.
- Homes led us to children.
- Children led us to education.
- Villages led us to water, farming and livelihoods.
- And years of taking healthcare to people eventually helped lead us toward building a multispecialty hospital.
- 2000
Dr. Panneer Selvam and Mrs. Yoga Latha began something that didn't yet have a name. Panneer Selvam was a pathologist who had spent years with medical teams in places most people never see, from the hills of Darjeeling to the lanes of Dharavi. Latha had worked beside him, caring for patients who could not pay. Together they kept meeting the same people: those who were sick from things that could be treated, and had nowhere to go.
- The first years
So they started walking into Bangalore's slums and the dry villages beyond the city, and what they found changed how they understood healing. You can bring a child's fever down and send her home, but if home has no food, no clean water and no school, she will be back. They began with what was in front of them: a meal for a hungry child, a blanket for an old woman sleeping beside the railway tracks, medicine carried to villages that had none.
- 2004
The Trust opened its doors in Ganganagar.
- 2005
The work was registered as the Karunya Community Development Ministries Trust. By then it had been a trust in everything but name for five years.
- Today
From that small start, the work has grown across three states, from city slums to villages at the edge of the Deccan, and it has grown into a hospital.
A place for everyone
Karuna means Compassion. Its root, kara, means to do. We never felt pity for the people we met. We felt they were our own, and when they are your own, you get up and help.
In one lane you can find a hungry child, a mother with no income, a grandmother abandoned by her family, and a man who hasn't left his room in years. Help one and walk past the rest, and the lane stays broken.
So we serve them all at once: children, women, widows, elders, farmers, and people living with disability, of every faith and language. All these years have taught us one thing above all:
Help a person well, and they will go on to help others.
