The Forest of Joy - Anandwan:

In 1951, the government gave Baba some barren land for his leprosy project. The land was rocky, covered with scrubs and infested with scorpions and snakes. The nearest well was two kilometers away. Baba said, "I looked at it with profound emotion and perhaps a tinge of dismay. It was no more than just an unused quarry. It was like looking into my own future, a new volume of my life."

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, 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". 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."

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.

Life in the early days was very hard. They were extremely short of money. Somehow they survived. 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'. 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 working at Anandwan. 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.

Gradually, the scale and facilities of Anandwan grew. Once the leprosy-affected persons 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.

Some years later, they used the surplus generated by their agricultural production, to set up a college in Warora. Eventually they added at Anandwan a College of Agriculture, a primary school for blind children, a school for deaf and dumb children and an orphanage. These multi-dimensional efforts won Anandwan a string of national and international awards which brought it both fame and funds.

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