SOLDIER SAVIOUR

Mukesh Anand, 68 Social worker, New Delhi

Soon after the Kargil war in 1999, Mukesh Anand, an automotive parts dealer from Jabalpur active in social work, was called to Delhi by a general. The army, wrestling with the resettlement of over 600 Kargil war wounded, mainly amputees, had reached out to NGOs to assist their rehabilitation. Anand relocated to Delhi, handed his business over to his younger brother and today runs one-man NGO “Mission Vijay” that helps resettle retired soldiers.

His first beneficiary was Sepoy Om Prakash, whose right leg was blown off by a Pakistani antipersonnel mine during the fierce fighting in Turtuk in the Kargil war. The soldier from the 3rd Battalion of the Rajput Regiment tied a tourniquet on his wounded limb with his rifle cleaning cord and crawled for several kilometres to get medical help. Discharged from the army in 2000 with a Jaipur foot and retirement benefits, the disabled soldier was looking at an uneventful life in his village Pali in Ghaziabad, Haryana. Till Anand got him a small soft drinks distribution agency. The shop also stocked engine oil. After a slow start, villagers soon started heading to the shop run by the district’s only ‘ghayal sipahi’ (wounded soldier). Eighteen years later, Om Prakash has added four dumper trucks to his retail business, plans on opening a petrol pump and dreams of his son becoming an army officer. “The idea is to teach soldiers to start small businesses by investing some part of their savings and then gradually scale up,” says Anand, son of an army colonel.

Anand uses nothing more than his network of contacts in the private sector to help resettle disabled soldiers and war widows in their native towns and villages. So, Pushpam Jha, who lost her husband Major Vineet Jha to cancer in 2004, is now a Hero MotoCorp sub-dealer in Bhagalpur. Havildar Ranbir Singh is now a dealer for lubricants and spare parts and jeeps in Mainpuri, UP. Subedar Major Sahadevan is now a Hero MotoCorp subdealer in Palakkad, Kerala and Naik Rajkumar, a tyre dealer in Mahendragarh, Rajasthan.

Anand’s dream now is to open skill development centres across the country.