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The Story of MSS:
 [ Maharogi Sewa Samiti is born: ]
Baba Amte was on his way back home. A huddled figure lay on the roadside. At first it seemed like a bundle of rags. But then he noticed some movement. Baba looked closer and recoiled instantly. Lying before him was a man in the last stages of leprosy. The dying man had no fingers. Maggots crawled over his naked body. Horrified by this sight and terrified of infection, Baba ran home.
But he could not run away from the self-loathing that began to haunt him. How could he have left a lonely, forsaken man to lie there in the rain? So he forced himself to return and feed the man. He also put up a bamboo shed to protect him against the rain. That man, Tulshiram, died in Baba's care and irrevocably changed young Amte's life.
Baba had always thought of himself as being fearless and daring. The encounter with TuIshiram shattered this self-image. The very sight of Tulshiram filled him with an irrepressible dread. Even as he cared for the dying man this fear would not leave him:
"I have never been frightened of anything. Because I fought British tommies to save the honor of an Indian lady, Gandhiji called me 'abhay sadhak', a fearless seeker of truth. When the sweepers of Warora challenged me to clean gutters, I did so. But that same person who fought goondas and British bandits quivered in fright when he saw the living corpse of TuIshiram, no fingers, no clothes, with maggots all over."
And Baba was absolutely certain that: 'Where there is fear, there is no love. Where there is no love there is no God.' So what should he do? For the next six months Baba lived with the unrelenting agony of this crisis. There seemed to be only one answer, one lone way of overcoming this problem. He must live and work with leprosy patients: That is why I took up leprosy work. Not to help anyone, but to overcome that fear in my life. That it worked out good for others was a by-product. But the fact is I did it to overcome fear.
And what of Sadhna, his wife? They had discussed the possibility many times. But eventually it was Baba's decision to make. Sandhnatai said to him: 'You must follow the dictate of your heart. I shall find my happiness in following you.' Decades later she would tell a large public gathering, that had there been a women's liberation movement in her time Anandwan might never have happened!
Thus Baba, and Sadhna, set out on the path that is now history. He began by reading intensively about leprosy and offering his services at the Warora leprosy clinic. Soon, he was running his own clinic. In 1949, he went to the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine to learn more about leprosy. By the time Baba returned home the discovery of diamino-diphenyl-sulphone had made leprosy curable.
With this wonder drug in hand, Baba began treating leprosy patients in sixty villages around Warora. Soon there were eleven weekly clinics within a radius of about fifty kilometers from Warora, with a total of about 4,000 patients.
In 1951, Baba asked the government for some land and was granted 50 acres of rock-strewn scrub, 3 kilometers from Warora, overgrown with brush, inhabited by tigers, scorpions, snakes and other wild animals. In Baba's words: "Perhaps it was symptomatic that there was nothing but a tangle of boulders, roots and creepers. Outcast land for outcast people. This was our lot from now on."
In June 1951, with a lame cow and a dog, and fourteen rupees (around $2 in those days), accompanied by his wife, Sadhanatai and two infant sons, Vikas and Prakash, and a handful of patients, Baba Amte moved, leaving behind his family inheritance and a lucrative law practice. They called this place Anandwan the Forest of Joy. Baba worked and the leprosy patients worked shoulder to shoulder with him. Self-trained and self-taught, they converted rocky barren land into lush green fields - As he puts it, "You dare call them dis-abled", "They are the able-disabled".
Leprosy not only harms the body but also inflicts deep wounds on the mind. Traditionally, leprosy patients are excluded from society and even from their own family. With their face disfigured, crippled hands and feet, they are shunned by all. Even if the disease is arrested, and they are no longer infectious, it makes little difference. The stigma and the fear of society make it impossible for them to live as productive members.
One thing that was clear to Amte: If he wanted to restore the awareness of their human dignity in his leprosy patients he could not work for them, he had to work with them. They had to be treated as responsible subjects who know and act, not as objects who are known and acted upon. Baba Amte was convinced that the fear of leprosy was far worse than the disease itself and that this fear must be addressed if any meaningful rehabilitation was to be achieved. What the patients needed more than anything else was hope, dignity and self-respect. Baba believed that only work could build a whole human being and so followed the concept - "Charity Destroys; Work Builds."
It is this quality that distinguishes MSS from many other institutions. MSS not only cares for the patients' physical needs, but tries to make them self-reliant individuals and productive members of their community. Baba was able to see the whole individual and not just the disease or disability.
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[ Challenges of the early years: ]
They first built two shelters, thatched roofs on bamboo poles with no walls, which left them defenseless against wild animals at night. The four dogs they brought with them for their protection were carried off, one by one by panthers. Next, they started digging a well. They possessed four shovels, two hoes, three pick axes, and two crowbars. It was not so much a question of digging as cutting through rock. Amte described vividly the sinking of the well:
"After about six weeks when we were about 34 feet down, the rock was becoming a little moist. It was in May; the temperature ran to 47 degrees Celsius in the shade. Inside the hole it was fearfully hot. Then a bee followed by a butterfly came to the moisture. Two days later when we arrived in the morning we found a frog happily sitting in the puddle of water between the stones. Three days later water came through in abundance. We worshipped the water with white flowers and milk. Then for the rest of the day we sat by our well just staring delightedly at the water. Now we had reason to be hopeful into the future."
Life in the early days was very hard. They were extremely short of money. They had no milk, curds, and vegetables only once a week. Amte was so desperate that he went to a rich man's house to ask for help. The servants said that the man was not at home, though Amte knew he was in. He left almost in tears and decided he would never again ask for money. Somehow they survived. The lonely lame cow they was replaced in time by two others from the local old age home for retired cows. So they started growing not only vegetables but also prepared fields for growing millets, bajri and jowar (grains). Within three years, the Amte family and a community of sixty patients had dug six wells and cleared enough land to have a substantial harvest of grains and vegetables. But this produce could not find a market in Warora. People feared contamination from food grown by 'lepers'.
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 [ Anandwan Gains Acceptance: ]
It took a contingent of fifty young volunteers of the Service Civil International to solve this problem. These young people, from thirty-six different countries, spent three months at Anandwan building a clinic and two spacious hospital wards. Their action broke the barriers with the Warora community. Seeing the foreigners toiling away among the leprosy patients even local people felt moved to make some contribution and many provided food for the volunteers. Once residents of Warora began to come inside Anandwan, and see the sparklingly clean environs, the fear of contamination also receded. Eventually, Anandwan became a busy place attracting hoards of visitors from near, and far.
Gradually, the scale and facilities of Anandwan grew. Once the leprosy-affected people were fit enough to leave the hospital they ceased to be 'patients'. They became working members of the community, busy in the fields or workshops where a variety of products were being manufactured. This made Anandwan a virtually self-sufficient 'village'. Eventually, it needed to buy only salt, sugar and petrol from the outside. Everything else was locally produced at Anandwan. Most of the erstwhile patients, having learnt a skill, returned to the world outside, self-reliant and capable of earning their own living.
Baba Amte not only aimed at rebuilding the personality of the patients with leprosy but also the attitude of society toward them. When China invaded India in 1962, Anandwan staged a play and raised Rs.2000 for the National Defense Fund. The patients built two universities for the people of Warora district from their own income and sweat labor. Being an out-of-the-way place, Warora had no university. Starting a college would meet a real need of the people and would fulfill the aspirations of the gifted rural boys and girls who longed for an education. Students studying at Anandwan were bound to lose their fear of coming close to leprosy patients. The patients not only erected the buildings but also made all the furniture and did all the fittings themselves. This shattered the stereotype of people with disabilities being always on the receiving end of charity!
One day an infant girl, abandoned by her mother, was found at Warora railway station and was brought to Anandwan. When it became known that Baba Amte does not refuse shelter to anyone in need, other orphan children followed. There were also a number of children of leprosy patients who could not remain with their parents for fear of infection. The need for an orphanage arose. Baba Amte appealed to schoolchildren in Maharashtra for help. The school children of the state of Maharashtra enthusiastically responded and collected Rs. 2,50,000. This home, called Gokul was born.
Anandwan became a flourishing institution. Patients flocked from all over India. Word spread through the grapevine and people with leprosy from West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu flocked to it. The state government gave Amte another 200 acres. In 1954, Amte bought six cows and the following year, a proper dairy was started with 25 heads of cattle. Whereas to this point, they had concentrated nearly exclusively on agriculture, the time had come to branch out into tailoring, weaving, printing, metal work, leather work and other trades.
Baba Amte not only wants his patients to become self-supporting, he wants them to be cultured people. In 1961, he started a three-day event called Mitra Mela (a get-together of friends), a festival to which the public is invited. It is a feast of music, dance and drama. Famous artists are invited to perform; and on one occasion, P.L. Deshpande, the renowned Marathi writer noted when he saw a performance by leprosy patients: "Usually people avoid looking at leprosy patients. Here Baba is putting them on stage for all to see."
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[ Baba dreams up Somnath ]
When Baba was in bed with spondilitis, he began by focusing his attention on a plan for a Workers' University. He envisioned students studying for a degree and simultaneously undergoing training to learn a practical skill. Each student would be given two acres of land to cultivate and experiment with and would be entitled to the yield of this land after paying for room and board. This productive work of the students would make the university self-supporting.
This plan gained support from the Planning Commission and thus 2,000 acres of barren land at Somnath, about a hundred kilometers south of Anandwan, was given to Baba for starting this work. In this case, however, there was vigorous opposition by the local people. Eventually, much of the land had to be relinquished and the plan for a Workers' University was abandoned. The remaining land at Somnath was developed as a center for annual youth camps. The first of these camps was held in 1967, with about 1400 boys and girls from different parts of India. Since there were no buildings there at that time the participants slept out in the open. Barrels of drinking water were brought over a distance of about two kilometers on a bullock-cart.
These young people were required to spend much of the day in manual labor-working in the fields, digging percolation dams, making bunds, clearing wasteland for cultivation and so on. The evenings were devoted to group discussions led by well-known personalities. Secularism, national integration, socialism, democracy and students' problems were some of the issues taken up. And there was time for songs/ dances, plays, poems and games. Over the years, the Somnath camps became a major social institution of Maharashtra, inspiring thousands of young people and imbuing them with a creative restlessness. It became the starting point for a wide range of social and political activists who went on to identify with different political activists ideological streams from the Gandhian to the Marxist. When Baba reached his 'late youth', many of these activists, then middle-aged themselves, would enliven his world by sharing their endeavors in different fields.
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 [ MSS reaches out to Gond tribals: ]
Hemalkasa was the place that truly shaped the politics of Baba's 'late youth'. It was also his most daring act of valor, defying his physical pain. In 1973, barely a year after he had undergone back surgery, Baba pitched a tent at Hemalkasa, a place deep in the forests about 350 kilometers south of Nagpur. From his earliest days, Baba Amte was attracted by the Gonds and other primitive people whom he met on his hunting expeditions deep in the primeval forests.
He liked being among the adivasis [indigenous tribal people]. Their innocence and cheer delighted him. But, at the same time their poverty and lack of access to healthcare, food, and education greatly troubled him. For thirty years he had dreamt of ways to help the adivasis to benefit from modern civilization without becoming estranged from the beauty and strengths of their own culture. Traveling from village to village he began to work for improving health among the Madia Gonds.
"That microscopic look at village life taught me to hear the heart-beat of reality. To me, the common man's society is a mask-less society. He does not carry that thick mask which the professional people, the upper classes, whereas they might look nice and beautiful. Very often they do not dare to say what they really think and feel."
In 1974, Baba and Tai's younger son, Prakash, graduated from medical college and came to work in Hemalkasa. Soon Prakash and his wife Mandakini, a fellow-student, decided to settle there permanently. Like the senior Amtes', this couple faced many years of struggle with severe hardships, shortages of food, medicine and susceptibility to many diseases.
Gradually, the hardships decreased and a community of workers came together based on a shared bond with the local tribal people, the wild animals and the abundant fauna and flora. This community includes Renuka, whom Baba and Tai had adopted as an infant, and her husband Vilas Manohar.
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