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Outside a home, a hearse van was waiting, and inside lay the body of a husband. His wife and children were in disagreement. The children argued that the funeral rites should be completed. Then the wife spoke: her husband had taken a pledge to donate his body, and she would not let anyone stand in its way. The committee's joint secretary, Dr. Vishal Chaddha, who went to the house, recalls how silence fell. It is a memory shared by many families linked to the Dadhichi Samiti.
How it began
The Dadhichi Dehdaan / Angdaan Samiti was formed on 11 October 1997, inspired by the sage Maharshi Dadhichi, who gave his bones for a noble cause. The first body-donation pledge was filled by the Sangh pracharak, the late Nanaji Deshmukh. The idea of dehdaan came to Shri Alok ji, the Samiti's founder and patron and working president of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, when he saw a skeleton at the Government Medical College in Amritsar. He learned that Professor Dr. Hukam Singh Virk, a former head of Anatomy, had donated his body so that students could keep learning from it.
The impact
- The Samiti works in about 9 districts, including Delhi NCR and Bulandshahr.
- About 300 volunteers carry the work forward.
- In the last 13 years, nearly 1,300 people live on through the organs they donated after death.
- That includes 375 whole-body donations and more than 925 eye donations.
- More than 18,000 pledge forms have been filled by its volunteers.
- Inspired by its work, 46 other independent committees now work on this cause across the country.
These numbers are from the Samiti's own account. Each represents a family that made a hard decision at a hard moment, and chose to give.
This story is adapted from the Parivartan Yatra series on Sewagatha. Read the original: sewagatha.org.