For 21 years now, Manav Seva Sannidhi has been providing hope to the physically challenged from all over India. Marwar travelled to a camp in Valsad to meet the founder Abhilasha Singhvi, a woman who is easily one of the most influential persons in Gujarat. We also learnt a few lessons along the way.

Text: Rachna Shetty & Reshma Jain
Photographs: Ankita Sharma

Sympathy is perhaps the cheapest gift the world can bestow on the afflicted. For 40 years, sympathy was all that Paliben got. And then, at the age of 44, she looked the world in the eye.

Having been stricken by polio in both legs at the age of four, Paliben could only crawl. After she had her limbs fitted at the first Manav Seva Sannidhi camp at Atul, Gujarat, Abhilasha Singhvi noticed that the lady would not sit down, either for her meals or when asked to rest. Paliben told her, “For 40 years, I have been on the ground. You don’t know what it feels like to see a person eye to eye. The world looks different from here. I don’t want to sit down.”

Singhvi is still amazed at the statement. For her, it’s just one of the many memories that form part of the Manav Seva Sannidhi’s history, where people without legs are fitted with prosthetic limbs and then taught how to walk. When she started out 21 years, ago, she only had the desire to hold this camp. And yet, it was at that camp that she knew with certainty that this was her calling.


The latest camp is being held over five days in Valsad, at Shri Party Plot, a popular location for NRI marriages. It’s a bright morning and people are already walking in. Singhvi is busy teaching a young boy, fitted with a limb that day, to walk. She doesn’t sound too different from the army commanders who conduct drills at academies and yet she has a deep and extraordinary understanding of their need for equality.

“It isn’t just about the physical pain. It’s about the mental and emotional scars that rejection leaves one with. It’s about something as simple as dignity. And that pain was something that I could identify very strongly with, having gone through an emotional vacuum and being absolutely unable to help myself. I couldn’t speak about it to anyone and I just felt I needed to get it out of my system.”