Auto driver who’s superhero

Supports Ailing Destitutes In His Home For Hope
By Pooja Virendra Kumar/TNN

Bangalore: When he sees ailing destitutes on the streets, he just doesn’t walk past them. He brings them home, cares for them and tries to give them a new life.

T Raja is an autorickshaw driver and earns a paltry Rs 200 a day. He has a wife and three children to support. Yet, he clothes, feeds, and educates 152 people on that income!

Auto Raja (as he is fondly known as) supports destitute people at his ‘Home for hope’ at Doddaguppi village. A happy-golucky person, what inspired him to be a good Samaritan? One cold night, he saw a naked 70-year-man at Tannery Road, PNT colony, shivering and dying from a disease. He wanted to help but did not have the resources to do so.

Beset by guilt, Auto Raja returned to that place a week later. But the old man was not there. Upon inquiry, he learnt from the police that the old man died that very night. From then on, Auto Raja vowed never to abandon a destitute person.

Shortly after, he found a 65-year-old woman with wounds on her back, bleeding, rotting and infested with worms, left on the street to die. He took her home with him.

“All I could afford was a makeshift home for her in an old rusty jeep lying abandoned near my house,’’ said Auto Raja. He cleaned her wounds, fed her and gave her medication.

There has been no looking back since. He rented a place for Rs 1,000 and put all the destitutes there. Shakti, a nine-month-old baby with cancer, was abandoned near a corporation toilet in Majestic. She was brought to Auto Raja’s Home for hope. Now, she has been operated upon and is a happy child.

Auto Raja found Lakshmi, a 16-year-old rape victim, four-months pregnant at the basement of a building in Viveknagar. Today, she and her newborn are doing well at the Home. From morning coffee to dinner, from clothes to medicine, even marriages among inmates is taken care of by Auto Raja, who along with his family, takes care of these destitutes.

“While some of the children are sent to school, others are engaged in maintaining the vegetable garden for the Home. However, most of the inmates are dying and need utmost attention and health care,’’ said Auto Raja.

So, how does he support all of them? “From donations. Be it rice, oil, old clothes or money. “The government has appreciated my work but has not offered support of any kind,’’ he added.

[news clip and photo taken from The Times of India, Bangalore edn dated 11 July, 2006.]