A life dedicated to the needy

Secunderabad: The saying ‘life is all about sharing and spreading smiles’ may sound little rhetorical and philosophical to most of you, but for Ch Gautam Kumar, it has become the sole objective of his life. From being a successful employee, Gautam Kumar has now dedicated his life to the cause of society.

Born and brought up in Tirupati and residing in Secunderabad since 2012, Gautam Kumar left his lucrative job and began searching for inner happiness and his search ended in 2014 when he founded a Children’s Home called ‘Serve Needy’. Gautam Kumar told The Hans India, “Whenever I went out on the streets, I realised that the main problems which our country is facing are in the categories of old people, orphaned children, widowed ladies, mentally ill people, disabled and transgenders. If India has to progress, it has to rise above these problems.”

“Serve Needy is like an ocean of pure water where we ensure whoever comes thirsty gets sufficient water to quench their thirst. We have been trying to include youngsters into our team so that we can actually make a difference at a large scale,” he added with a sparkle of joy and enthusiasm in his eyes.

“I was 26 years when I started Serve Needy. Initially when we started this, we started rescuing children from slums and surrounding areas who had single parents, neglected, sexually abused, orphans and trafficked children. We are still working on that project, where we go around in the adjoining slum areas and rescue these kids by convincing their parents and basti leaders and bring these kids into our Children’s Home”, said Gautam Kumar.

Serve Needy was started with 12 kids and currently they have 29 children. Every child has a sponsor, most of whom are NRIs and Facebook also donates to Serve Needy. Apart from Children’s Home, Serve Needy runs many Social Welfare programmes like ‘Annadatha’ which was started in the first half 2015 under which the volunteers of Serve Needy feed 500 members daily.

Under this scheme, they also go around collecting extra food from function halls and homes and also distributes the same to the people to reduce wastage of food. ‘Save a life’ was launched in 2015 and under this project, the volunteers of Serve Needy collaborate with the government departments and find out data for children and people who are supposed to be rescued.

If a person does not have a family, they get them admitted in their respective NGO’s according to their category. And last is the ‘Free Last Rites’ project which was started in 2014. Under this project, the volunteers collect the unclaimed dead bodies from twin cities and perform their last rites.

By Neelam Shaw