The name Edhi is omnipresent in Karachi with his eponymous ambulances parked every few kilometres in this bustling metropolis but the man himself is elusive. While the ambulances may just be a call away, it takes several calls over seven days to reach the person whom all of Pakistan reveres – Abdul Sattar Edhi. “Edhi saab, has left for a far-flung village in Balochistan half-an-hour ago. There has been a disease outbreak with some deaths reported. Call later,” says the operator from an Edhi centre. Another try, three days later, gets a response that they had lost touch with Edhi. Next day, thinking that the renowned social worker was probably trying to avoid an Indian reporter, I rope in a local to get an appointment. Even this ploy fails as he gets a worrying answer: Edhi saab was untraceable and the coast guard had been roped in to look for him. On my final day in Karachi, I make a last ditch effort. This time, I was directed to another office.
And a call later, Edhi is on the line, “Aap aafice mein aa jayen, main yahin hoon.” I scramble to his small nondescript office in the crowded Boulton Market, a part of the Mithadar area in Karachi, police escort in tow, knowing fully well that a single call from any emergency anywhere in Karachi can take away my subject for good. “I am a sahafi (journalist) from India. I have an appointment with Edhi Sahab,” I tell the receptionist-cum-office girl. She points to the frail bearded old man sitting alone on a worn out sofa next to her table, wearing a well worn brown Pathani suit and a pair of black plastic slippers. It is humbling to watch the man who single-handedly changed the concept of social service in Pakistan, and in doing so, touched millions of lives, sit alone in his office without any pretensions, recouping from his arduous journey from Balochistan.
Greetings over, out of curiosity I ask him the reason for his disappearance through the past week. “I was in Garanth village in Balochistan. It’s a very backward area and people still live in medieval conditions. I had heard that there was a disease afflicting both humans and cattle. It was an 11-hour back-breaking journey on motorcycles and camels. I had to go,” he says.
AN EDHI-FICE OF COMPASSION-TOO MANY GOOD MEN: Edhi had put together a team of 11 doctors and taken medicines and supplies to the far-flung Balochistan village where a disease outbreak has resulted in eight human and some 150 camel deaths. A 15-member coast team had found Edhi after a seven-hour search in the inhospitable terrain.
An octogenarian, Edhi still does not think twice before jumping into an ambulance or a helicopter to personally supervise relief in case of any accident or calamity. And many folks find it shocking that he still washes rotting dead bodies found in the alleys and gutters of Karachi. “Inko nasha hai,” explains Bilquis Edhi, his wife and partner, who runs her own Bilquis Edhi Foundation that works for the welfare of women. The fire in the belly is evident from an incident in 1992 which could have stopped anyone in his tracks. For in that year, when he was flying to Rawalpindi where a train accident had taken place killing and injuring hundreds, he was informed of his beloved grandson’s untimely demise.
Yet, he egged on with the mission at hand, instructing his wife to take charge of his grandchild’s last rites.
What started out in 1951 in a small room in Mithadar, with a capital of just Rs 2,300, has over the years transformed into Pakistan’s biggest and most respected welfare operation. Today, the Edhi Foundation and Edhi Trust run a whole gamut of welfare services for the poor and the downtrodden across Pakistan. Services ranging from ambulance services to burial of the dead to maternity to shelter for homeless and abandoned children, are rendered through a network of welfare centres, hospitals, laboratories and clinics, mostly free of charge.
“My services run from Siachen to Nagar Parkar,” says Edhi. On any given day, 2,000 Edhi ambulances run on the streets of Pakistan, 8,000 employees provide a plethora of welfare services, and 26,000 homeless reside in the Edhi centres totting up expenses of more than Rs 0.5 million daily.
Edhi has also crossed boundaries: Abdul Sattar Edhi International Foundation provides regular services, like burial, in New York, and will start hostels and medical services in London and many more countries. Another ambitious project Edhi has undertaken is the Edhi 50 Kilometre Project, wherein 500 centres will be constructed on all highways and major link roads of Pakistan. For a man who now uses a chopper, air ambulances and Chinese boats for relief work, the journey started with an old Hillman van five decades ago.
So how did a refugee from Bantwa, a village near Kathiawar in Gujarat, build such a formidable social service organisation? His family, father Abdul Shakoor Edhi, mother Ghurba and two siblings migrated from Bantwa to Karachi fearing Hindu vendetta after Partition in September, 1947. A young Edhi soon dropped out of school and started selling paan, but in 1948, he began working with Bantwa Memon Dispensary, a charity set up by the Memon seths. But soon, the sectarian view of the business elite, with whom he had a lifelong disagreement, frustrated Edhi, and he ended up riling them in a public function. In 1951, he started on his own buying an eight sq ft shop in Mithadar. His dispensary (The Memon Voluntary Corps, later Madinah Voluntary Corps) treated patients from all walks of life, distributed cheap medicine, and did not charge a penny. “I believe in humanitarianism, I always have, I always will. Caste, creed, religion was immaterial to me,” he says. Edhi worked around the clock even sleeping on a cement bench outside the dispensary to take care of patients who came in at night.
Starting out, it was a struggle to get funds owing to the massive opposition from the influential Memon seths. That was then. Today, Edhi just has to stand at any nook or footpath in Pakistan begging for donations and its mayhem. Police need to be called in many times for crowd management as people throng to donate money. “Even today, if I stand in a footpath in Lahore, I collect Rs seven or eight crores in four or five hours,” says Edhi.
Back then, as operations expanded with the addition of maternity unit and money became an issue, he came up with a novel idea: ask people to donate animal hides, which they discarded, especially after Eid. With time, public also responded watching selfless service being rendered by the young Edhi and his team and traditional Islamic donations like Zakat, Sadka and Khairat, also started pouring in.
However, the turning incident in Edhi’s life was his mother’s death. That very day, he dedicated his life to serve mankind. In his view, charity by the rich was not quite welfare. “Social work was just a word, nobody wanted to dirty their hands,” he says. In his autobiography, A Mirror to The Blind, which he narrated to Tehmina Durrani, he says, “I decided to change the pattern of social welfare and remove the contradictions that confused and diluted its concept. Not for the atonement of sins, nor in an attempt to reach heaven, but as an essential and practical obligation towards mankind, as the responsibility of one who has become aware of its needs.”
Edhi strongly believed that social welfare for the poor had to be assimilated with the poor. Welfare had to be for the people, by people and from the people and his job was to help people do that.
It was in 1957, when a Hong Kong flu outbreak killed hundreds, that Edhi really came to be accepted by the masses. Having rented 13 tents and set up free camps with the help of volunteers and medical students all over Karachi, he stocked them up with immunisation injections and medicines providing hundreds of patients shelter and treatment. “It was then that people realised what I was doing. I received Rs 98,000 as donations,” he says. And with the extra money (including a donation of Rs 20,000 from a Memon seth), he bought his first ambulance, an old Hillman van, and scrawled “The Poor Man’s Van” on it. The rest, as they say, is history.
Edhi has a unique philosophy of a social crusader that dictates the way he works. Though motivated by a desire to help humanity, Edhi also sees his work as a drive against the influence of sarmaye dars (capitalists) on society. It is his inherent belief that the capitalists are the source of most of the ills that plague contemporary communities. “My parents taught me, “Sadak pe khada ho ke chanda maang lena, [but] don’t take chanda from sarmaye dars. Ye insaniyat nahi maante,” he says, adding, “Gandhi always used to say, make your own cloth using the looms, don’t run after industrialists. The fight is between the rich and poor.”
Every social change agent like Edhi has some unique convincing skills, a slightly zany style of functioning and his own little quirks. He has always believed in the DIY (do it yourself) philosophy and in leading by example. This has given him a rock solid credibility among the Pakistani masses. When he started out in Mithadar, he not only swept his dispensary but also cleaned the filthy streets around it every day. He describes in his autobiography how his colleagues were disgusted with the stench, lice, sores and diseases of the homeless. “I took on the task, cleaned them, bathed their worm-infested sores and treated their diseases. This ritual had to be administered on a daily basis.”
Even now, he is always on the move, attending to the sick who visit his centres and traveling to wherever tragedy strikes. And the social service is now a family business with wife Bilquis, daughters Kubra and Ilmas, and sons Kutub and Faisal working at the various Edhi trusts.
Years of working among the masses of Karachi have honed his judgement and gut feel of what works and what does not. These street smarts have held him in good stead while building the organisation to support his activities. When questions were raised about accountability of funds, he hit upon a novel idea: take personal responsibility. The dispensary and the van sported just one name – Edhi. He announced that all money was remitted to him, not any organisation or any group. If a donor was in doubt, he would be refunded, and moreover, Edhi chose not to make himself answerable to donors. He would unilaterally decide the method of its dispensation. In one fell swoop, the questioning voices were silenced.
And yet, he says, donations now amount to Rs 200 crores a year. To which one can add Rs 35 crores of personal award money that is deposited in banks for charitable causes and some family expenses. “I have enough money to carry on the welfare without any help now. The work can be paid for just by the interest payments. I don’t want the cycle to break so we still accept donations. But I don’t accept donations from capitalists, zamindars, or any global bodies like World Bank or UNICEF, despite their offers. My nation gives me money,” he says.
With such responsibility being thrust on him by millions of trusting Pakistani donors, Edhi keeps a tight leash, seeking information compulsively and getting into the smallest details to check for frivolous expenditure or pilferage. He has developed a simple but simple but effective method of checks and balances. “All centres are linked to a bank. You drop a cheque at any of the centres and they will give you a form that has to be posted to the Karachi office with the details of donation. We crosscheck and verify all donations. Even for our ambulances, we keep a tight leash on the mileage,” he says.
Even ambulance customers are given two receipts. The customers’ first receipt is recorded in the register, the second arrives by post. “I am a sucker for systems and processes,” he says.
Despite his soft side, Edhi has strong views, whether on politics or education. He has openly denounced the tribal councils that often exchange brides as payment for crimes or settling fights. Back in 1962, he even dabbled in politics by becoming a member of parliament at young age of 29 after being elected unopposed but soon realised that changing the system from within was a sheer waste of time.
These days he is, much to the chagrin of many, promoting military rule. “I have advocated military rule for six months. The army should take unaccounted money from capitalists and deposit it with the national treasury. If they don’t, I will start a tehreek (movement) and remove them,” says Edhi. Even with such a constructive progressive mind, Edhi has his own idiosyncrasies. For instance, he is not a great believer in education. According to Edhi Logic, since education does not teach people humanity, it is not of much use. “Educated people are becoming slaves of sarmaya dars who give them jobs,” he says.
Having such a well oiled set up in Pakistan, why does he not turn to the next door neighbour India that could do with some of his good welfare work? “India is the only country that stopped me from helping the poor. I wanted to go and help during the Kutch earthquake. The Indian government didn’t allow me,” he rues. But now, he says, it is too late. He will have to start from the scratch. It is India’s loss, Mr Edhi, completely India’s loss.
