ABOUT US
Anahat Foundation is a registered non-profit organisation in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Our work is focused on improving access to primary and preventive healthcare for the urban poor. We believe that healthcare should be accessible to all citizens, and that the health ecosystem has to be anchored by a robust primary health delivery system. Unfortunately, successive state and national governments have not focused on this tier of health services – the already weak public primary care system struggled to respond during the Covid-19 pandemic, with millions falling through the cracks.
Bangalore city has a population of 13 million, of which 40% or 5 million live in slums. The city is divided into 198 wards, and has 147 Primary Health Centres (PHCs) to serve the basic health needs of its citizens. Each PHC serves around 87,000 people, whereas the government recommendation is that one PHC should serve 30,000 people. Through our work, we believe that the ideal number should be 10,000 people per PHC.
Bangalore city has a population of 13 million, of which 40% or 5 million live in slums. The city is divided into 198 wards, and has 147 Primary Health Centres (PHCs) to serve the basic health needs of its citizens. Each PHC serves around 87,000 people, whereas the government recommendation is that one PHC should serve 30,000 people. Through our work, we believe that the ideal number should be 10,000 people per PHC.
We offer free and high quality healthcare to the poorest communities in Bangalore through community medical camps and the Anahat Clinic. In our community medical camps across 40 communities, we found that 70% of people living in slums do not access free government services even if they are aware of them. Their overwhelming preference is to wait till they have enough money to go to a private provider. This often results in basic health problems that can be easily managed with the proper guidance, being ignored. The Anahat Clinic in central Bangalore is our hub where patients come from all over the city, to avail of free clinical consultations, medicines and diagnostic tests.
People
Rani Desai
Co-founder, CEO and
Managing Trustee
Priya Desai
Co-founder and
Director - Preventive Health
Dr. Ananya S
Medical Officer
Nisma Hamda
Program Officer - Preventive Health
Raju K
Logistics Coordinator
Deepa
Staff Nurse
Anthony Prakash
Data Entry Operator
Kalavathi
Housekeeping
Board of Trustees
Brigadier Mac Devaiah
Brigadier Mac Devaiah is a veteran of the Indian army, who joined the corporate world after retiring. He has spent the last decade of his career working with companies to build strong relationships with government, and brings this experience to Anahat to build sustainable partnerships to scale this model of healthcare delivery.
Chetan S M
Chetan is a founder and Director of Axxonet, a company that works in the field of Homeland Security, Forensics, and Medical Devices. He has helped mould Axxonet into a premier research organisation in the areas of cognitive and neuro research, and he opened the Axxonet Brain Research Lab. He is an Executive Council member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society of India. Chetan brings his expertise in mobile technology development which will help Anahat to scale programs rapidly.
Board of Advisors
Dr. Ashwin Mahesh
Dr. Ashwin Mahesh is a social technologist and urbanist based in Bangalore, India. He trained to be a climate scientist and an astronomer and studied polar clouds and star formation for many years before switching to urban development issues. He has founded a number of initiatives spanning a spectrum of interest – the social technology lab, Mapunity, the development magazine, India Together, the electric vehicles-based transportation service, Lithium, and the How Institute, a think-tank for public problem-solving. He has been an advisor to many initiatives of state and national governments. He was awarded the Ashoka Fellowship for social entrepreneurs in 2009.
Preeti Reddy
Chairwoman, Kantar Insights, South Asia,
Erstwhile CEO, IMRB/Kantar
Preeti was CEO with P&L responsibility of IMRB/Kantar till 2021 and is now Chairwoman, South Asia of Kantar – the global consumer insights and consulting company. As country manager of one of Kantar’s ‘Big Six’ markets, Preeti was part of the global leadership team and an important contributor to Kantar’s growth. During her tenure as IMRB CEO, in 2015 she was selected to run WPP’s research agencies in India (IMRB, TNS and Millward Brown). She successfully led the merger of these companies into a single entity, delivered double digit revenue growth year-on-year with 20%+ EBITDA margins and built Kantar into South Asia’s largest research agency. She steered the organisation towards an end-to-end digital transformation and strengthened India’s position as a global centre of excellence for analytics and research outsourcing.
Preeti is widely recognised as a thought leader and has been at the forefront of the development of the consumer insights industry in India. She is on the advisory boards of the Delhi Skill Building and Entrepreneurship University (DSEU), LeadUp (an HR start-up) and on the Governing Council of the Centre for Marketing in Emerging Economies (CMEE) at IIM Lucknow. She is also the Chairperson for the western region for the CII-Indian Women Network. Since 2015, she has been chosen from over 500 women professionals as one of Impact’s ’50 Most Influential Women Professionals in Indian Media, Marketing and Advertising’ for five consecutive years. As Chairwoman, she is spearheading Kantar’s Social Charter in South Asia through its DEI, Sustainability and CSR initiatives.
Preeti has a BA (Hons) degree in Economics from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University and is an MBA from XLRI, Jamshedpur. Prior to joining Kantar, she was CEO of LMRB (Sri Lanka) and has worked in advertising, consulting and consumer insights on agency and client side, including with VST Industries and Tata Burroughs (now TCS).
Dr. S Abraham
Dr. S Abraham, MD specialises in public health and currently heads the Community and Family Medicine Department at St. Martha’s Hospital in Bangalore. He has 3 decades of experience handling communicable diseases like tuberculosis, HIV and leprosy and non-communicable diseases like diabetes, hypertension, cataract and cancer. Dr. Abraham has treated the most marginalised communities through his career, at schools, anganwadis, creches, urban slums, remand homes, prisons, old age homes, homes for the disabled and women’s shelters. Dr. Abraham has worked in Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore and was earlier the Medical Superintendent at the Leprosy Mission Hospital in Delhi. He has conducted training programmes across the country and has published 15 papers in international journals. He strongly believes in inclusion in public health.
Vinay Ramesh
Vinay co-founded and led Analytics Quotient (AQ), a global Analytics organization that had 700+ people in 4 different countries. He played several roles including running Sales, driving Customer relationships, managing the Finance function and eventually that of the CEO. After the sale of AQ to Kantar, Vinay ran the Analytics business for Kantar in North America as well as running the Analytics delivery COE in Bangalore for 2 years.
Vinay is passionate about helping NGOs deliver effective social interventions at scale. At the peak of the delta wave in 2021, Vinay found himself in India and started volunteering out of a sense of helplessness. He became a core member of one of the largest volunteer driven relief efforts in India raising millions of dollars helping provide oxygen relief across more than 80 districts in India. In the process, he also discovered a passion for social impact. As an entrepreneur and business leader, he was focused on delivering fast yet profitable growth along with great customer satisfaction and the best employee experience. He is now leveraging his experience and learnings in the social sector in India. He works pro-bono with a few small to medium sized NGOs in India to enable them to continue to deliver deep impact and do it at scale. When not working in the social sector, Vinay is an avid sports fan, fitness fanatic, angel investor, devoted reader, plant hoarder and a science nerd.